This summer we’ve been beavering away on a number of internal projects that have now reached a point where we are piloting them with selected customers. The first is the long awaited sub-contractor portal. The September webinar covers the basic features and how it will help you improve the flow of information back from your subbies. We’ll keep you up to date with progress, but we believe this will be a great tool to cut down on your own admin time, and to shorten the time from completion to being invoiced by your subbies. We’ve tried to make it as useful for the subbie as possible so they will embrace it as a tool for them too, and equally useful on a desktop browser or mobile browser.
The second project moving into a trial in this release is our new customer support portal. This will tightly integrate our own JIRA issue tracker within MARKUS so you can create issues and view progress on issues you’ve raised. We’ve been working on making our whole support process more transparent and predictable for the last couple of years, and one of the persistent pieces of feedback from you all is that we aren’t very good at telling you when we’ve done something – the support portal won’t magically fix that, but it will be part of the new feedback process so you can see where we are up to in a couple of quick clicks.
The final merge relates to improving our graphs, and making them a much bigger part of MARKUS. Jess first worked on an improved graph package during the final year of her degree, but since then we’ve continued to work on it as a team, and it is now part of core MARKUS. If you have any great ideas for fancy new graphs then let us know!
Meanwhile we have also been working on a whole load of changes that came out of customer meetings – largely the rest of the “New Features” list are all requests we’ve had over the last 6 months when we’ve been to see people.
New Features
- Included split jobs in the “issue more work screen” when allocating a job
- Moved the order reference filter to the top of the find purchase order report, to make it easier for users to search
- Added a multi select to the customer/client filter on the find job report
- Added a multi select to the costcode filter on the invoice batch report
- Added the first visit fix column to the jobs attend by report
- Added important survey question answers to the main jobsheet report so you don’t have to open the sub report to see important answers eg “Door ID” on the fire door post-inspection survey for FRA contractors
- Added the ability to show the sales line table border on communication templates
- Improved our bulk update screen to be able to handle larger quantities of jobs
- Onsite Menu search bar on the mobile app now includes searching the job description
- Update to the mobile app onsite screen to remember the sort order and text filter when you leave the screen
- Trimmed whitespace from pasted text in the login form
- Added ability to control whether client logins can view the visits report on the View Visits page
- New system option to allow onsite site time to start when an operative arrives at a job rather than when they start working
- Added additional information to the contacts section when emailing a purchase order to help identify the right people to sent it to
- Improved the colour contrast when viewing links if the row is highlighted red
- Added live messages to the items requiring action report
Changes For a Single Contractor
Added visit photos to the visit print
- Added the ability to show the nett of an invoice split into categories by a certain percentage to the invoice PDF
- Changes to the Verisae/Tesco job importer to swap the task description around to present the useful information first
- Changes to the Email/Whitbread importer to support FWD: messages
- Changes to the Archibus/UWE export to add “Asset Not Found” notes
- Changes to the Archibus/UWE import to group PPM tasks by PMP_ID
- New process for exporting Archibus/UWE remedial jobs
- Changes to the MIS/Accent export to send engineer en-route diary entries, and to support a new cancellation process with confirmation from client
- Renamed system and updated all URLs to match final company name
- Fix for the overtime conditions on timesheet report
- New gas installation certificate
- New survey cover sheet layout for fire door inspections
- Amendment to Xero purchase invoice export to add columns for TrackingName1 (“Contract”) and TrackingOption1 for the related job
Platform Improvements
- New customer self service portal is ready for pilot use
- New subcontractor portal is ready for pilot use
- Improved the licence module to allow for creation of new licence sub-types
- New graph library merged ready for live use
- Merged the RACSAMs restock mobile app process to AMS and Care builds
Bug Fixes
- Minor tweaks to the MARKUS Applied Intelligence filter for automatically suggesting 3 best engineers to handle edge conditions with no trade on the job
- Fixed the asset summary report not handling the asset livesearch properly
- Fixed the new constraints for multi select live searches stopping normal livesearches from working
- Fixed a bug where the charge address was not set when converting a certificate
- Large overhaul of the first visit fix dashboard widget, and related drill-down reports to improve performance
- Fixed a bug in the maintenance schedule for non-numeric ETTC
- Fixed exporting of survey objects
- Fixed batched survey PDF generation with different merge print options
- Fixed find job matching on assets not using multi-select
- Fixed the supplier price importer to handle empty file names
