Blog PlanningPME

PlanningPME is particularly well-adapted for maintenance management

You can easily assign the right technicians to do the right job like installation, preventive or corrective maintenance, training at the right time. Have access to a good overview of all your planning of your technicians on your different regions.

Some of the benefits:

• Reduce time doing your planning: PlanningPME will enable you to manage your preventive maintenance easily via recurrents tasks and reminders.

• Eliminate paperwork: PlanningPME allow your engineers to visualise the schedule from anywhere via the web. They are informed on real time of the last updated records on clients, jobs to perform, equipments to work on.

• Improve inventory management: PlanningPME keep track of all the maintenance jobs done and you can find easily past and future assets. Also, follow all the operations done on all equipments, clients on a large time scale.

Our manual and individual functions cards are now updated with the last updates of version 4.0.3. Wether you need to manage your employees, clients or projects, all you need to know is now available.

 You can have access to all our documentation here: http://www.planningpme.com/documentation.htm

If ever you do not feel like reading all 300 pages of our user guide, you can read only specific topics. You will find below a brief description of each card:

Card 1: Resources Management

You can create as many human and material resources as you want. For each resource, you can specify a different profile, a contract and assign them skills. Also, learn how to optimise the schedule thanks to the resource of the type "To Plan".

Card 2: Tasks management

Learn how to create tasks for one or several resources. You can also customise the fields and colors displayed on the screen, lock your tasks, have a tracking for each task and know who created it and modified it.

Card 3: Options that you can activate within the tasks window

More options are also available while creating a task. You can activate the tasks dependencies, activate clients management. You can also have the percentage of assignment displayed or also a reminder.

Card 4: Skills management

You can add your own skills and assign them to resouces. Then, you find search for skilled resources to complete a job.

Card 5: Clients management

Import your list of clients and assign a client to a job. Have also access to the client view and diplay tasks for specific clients.

Card 6: Vacations and unavailabilities

Track days off of your employees and visualize at a glance who is not in the office. Manage also public holidays.

Card 7: All filters available

Lots of filters can be used in order to display only precise information: display only resources that complete one particular job, change the view and display your appointments on a map, visualise all your clients, projects.

 Read more about our functions cards 8 to 16 on our next post.
 

As always, from our clients requests, new features are developed in order PlanningPME to suit your requirements better.

Save time with all those new features: 

	Agenda View: New views like in Outlook calendar.
	Display of the planning improved New icons, new drop down list to change the view
	Filter of the planning by resource: A new filter allows you to filter the planning per resource
	Number of visible lines on the planning board From the menu Depuis le menu Tools -> Options -> View, select the number of lines you want to display on the screen. This setting is now customised per user.
	List View: New view with the listing of all your tasks on the period of time displayed.

 Evolutions PlanningPME: www.planningpme.com/evolutionsppme.htm

 And also...

PlanningPME Web Access was also improved with our new feature Mobile Phone: http://www.planningpme.com/mobile-phone.htm 

PlanningPME is constantly improved thanks to our clients suggestions.

As time tracking is really important for any company and in order to suit all kind of business, a new function has been added: You can now count extra hours when your employees work over the week end or on public holidays.

First activate the option from the menu Tools -> Options -> User:

Illustration of this function via an example:

If the option is not activated, the software do not count time even if Paul work on Saturday:

If the option is activated, the software will count 8 hour on saturday.

So, wether you want to count hours during special days as week-end and public holidays, you can adpat the software and have correct time reports.

For business as hospitals, industries, this function can be useful.

Read this post in order to know more about workload management.

You can now visualize your interventions and appointments on a map!

From data filled in each client card in PlanningPME, visualize your interventions on a Map.
To see your appointments on a map, go to the menu View -> View –> Map View or select the icon on the icons bar as shown below:

On the tool tip, the information shown are the ones you selected from Data -> Description  -> Tooltip.

Then, you will see your tasks on the map:

To go back to the resource view, just click on one of the icon of the resource view.

Want to know more about PlanningPME releases?

Have a look at the evolutions of PlanningPME, version 4.0.3.

Force the creation of a task even if the resource is not skilled

You can now force the creation of a task even if the resource is not skilled.
You will have this kind of message: "Do you want to force this task even if the skills are not respected?"

And you will have the two choices:

-> Yes or No

If you select "Yes", the task will be created even if the resource is not skilled.

If you select "No", the task will not be create.

NB: If you are already a client and that you are using the users rights, this feature will not be activated by default so that the users will not have this permission.  To activate it, go to the menu Data -> Group and tick on the box “Force skill”.

Want to know more about PlanningPME releases?

Have a look at the evolutions of PlanningPME, version 4.0.3.

Selection and Creation Mode

These modes have been designed to make tasks management easier.

Creation mode

This mode allows you to create tasks on the schedule drawing a rectangle or double clicking.

Selection Mode

This mode allows you to select several tasks at the same time and to move them on the scale time.

By default, you are in a creation mode. For the selection mode, right click on your mouse and choose "Selection Mode".     
You can select several tasks at the same time drawing a rectangle grouping several tasks or selecting them one by one with the touch CTRL pressed on.
Move you tasks along the scale time, dragging one of the selected tasks.
In this example, 3 tasks were moved to the next day at the same time.

If you made a mistake, you can cancel the last operation pressing the keys CTRL + Z.
You can also delete several tasks proceeding the same way or paste several tasks.

Careful: In the "Task",  "Client" or "Project" view, you can move your tasks along the time axis but not along the y-axis.
To be back to the creation mode, right click on the schedule and choose "Creation Mode".

How to lock task on the planning?

You can lock your tasks by two different ways:

• You can forbid creation and modification of tasks prior to the present day;
• Tasks can be locked one by one.

Forbid creation and modification of tasks prior to the current date
From PlanningPME, go to the menu “Tools” -> “Options…”

 
On the tab « General », the following window appears:

Ticking on this box, past tasks to the current date will not be allowed to be modified.
 
Task locking

You can fix some tasks in order no one to modify them without your agreement.
First of all, to have access to this option, you must enter the schedule with users rights. 

Then, double clicking on the locked task, you will see the name of the user who locked the task. Here, David.

Only the person responsible for the locking or the administrator will be authorized to unlock the task selecting “unlock”.

How to assign a duration to the task in hours or days?

When you affect a length to a task, PlanningPME will calculate cleverly the ending date taking into account your resources slots : slots and non working days. You can also indicate a break.
How to use task time feature?

First of all, create a task on your schedule. The “task” window then appears.

Careful! A task with a duration can only be assigned to one resource.
NB: Ticking on "All day" you can enter a length in days.
Ticking off "All day" you can enter a length in hours.

Let's see this task management feature with a practical example

We are going to assign a 4 days length task to the resource « Pedro ».

PlanningPME is going to take into account non-worked days such as Saturday and Sunday on this example. So, the task will end the 9th of August!

This function is interesting when you know the length of your task but not the ending date.

Assignment of a task status or category

For each single task created on your schedule, you can assign a category.

As an example, you can tell whether a task is important or not, if a booking is confirmed or not...
Then, you can filter the schedule to have tasks of a certain category displayed.

How to create a new category?
From PlanningPME, go to the menu "Data" -> Task category"

The “Task Category” window appears.
To add a status, type a label, then select the text and background colors and press the button  “Add”.
You can also select hatching for the category.

NB: Each task created on the planning will be by default of the first category of the list.  For example, “Not Confirmed” in the example below.

If you have added some hatchings to your category, you will see them directly on the planning:
Here, you have a double information: The yellow color is the color selected for the label “training” and the green horizontal lines represent the category of this task.

How to assign a category to a task?

Just select it from the drop down list chile creating a task:

How to filter the planning underlining the task status?

You have a filter at the right top side of the planning board:

How to have the colors displayed on the schedule with this category?

You can display tasks in function of the color of the category on the screen from the menu "Tools" -> "Options" -> "Task".

The color of the task will then be the color of the category of the task.

Related Posts:

Tasks management within PlanningPME : All the functions available for an easy tasks management within our planning software.