We picked up a new contractor at the start of the year, and one of the big things they didn’t like about their existing mobile solution was that searching for materials forced the engineers to type exactly the right search term into their entry screen – and we realised that we had a similar problem and had never noticed. So this release adds more flexibility to all the search forms on the mobile app to support composite searches – you’ll need a new build to get this functionality, and we normally don’t bulk update all engineers unless you have a need…so let us know if you want this feature.
We’ve also progressed some longer term features, and are on the cusp of announcing a new engineer messaging feature that still needs some tweaks. A similar long-term development project has been arbitrary “job warnings” that behave like “asset register warnings” when allocating jobs – this has now reach MVP and allows users to define any set of additional information to gather relating to a job that can then be used to trigger the warning on issuing jobs like you already have for “needs extra RAMS”, or “attend in pairs” etc. There’s some setup needed to give full access to this, so please get in touch if you think this would be useful, we’ll be contacting the contractor who specifically asked for this to let them know, and Chris will probably be doing the YouTube video soon.
New Features
- Mobile app: split search terms by words and search for results containing each term to allow for a flexible materials/parts search. Also applied to “find survey”, “find SOR”, and filtering places to go. Chris has done a training video… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MU0dg6AJFzQ
- Ability for manual job entry to capture additional job details that affect allocation like site details
- Improved the clarity of “appointments” on the mobile app to make it even more obvious to engineers
- Added min/max parts estimate to the SOR/BOQ Sales Line setup report
- Quotes: added a system wide option to define validity of quotes
- Quotes: improvements to PDF layout margins
- Quotes: added client logo to PDF
- Quotes: suppressed internal codes from the PDF
- Added costcode/account manager to survey question report as both a column and filter
- Change the sales invoice credit process to automatically include the original invoice reference in the narrative explaining the credit note to save the user from having to enter it themselves
- Added Nominal code to the Invoices and Applications report
- Simplified bulk Merchant/Supplier price upload process to all normal users to import regular spreadsheet updates from suppliers
Changes For A Single Contractor
- Added ticket number to the automatic email generated from the issue to subcontractor process
- Added customer’s reference number to highly customised sales invoice that previously only displayed the internal ticket reference
- Personalised the email content for one customer’s purchase orders
- Added 1st line of the address to the filename for one format of LGSR
- Changes to which dates are displayed on one format of LGSR
Platform Improvements
- Changes to purchase order layout (only applicable to a single contractor) to reposition and reformat the Supplier Account Number
- Added a unique support specific user to live systems to enable the Epix support team to make setup data changes easier to audit. This replace unique Epix super users, unifies the reporting, and ties back more correctly into our internal support systems
- Tested all setup screens to confirm they work with upcoming platform upgrades
- Tested all mobile app / backoffice APIs to confirm they work with upcoming platform upgrades
- Applied Epix’s 2022 logo changes to the mobile app icons
- Changes to the CD platform to streamline P1 support / fix / release process
- Changes to the internal reporting on Sub-Contractor portal usage to allow for more streamlined and transparent billing
Bug Fixes
- Changes to the holiday approval report to handle legacy holidays that don’t need approval
- Fixed SQL error saving new call centre faults and actions relating to a rarely used legacy system option
- Fixed adding new menu items to an already logged in user
- Stopped apprentices from appearing as working, where a visit has been completed by the main operative
