Job Planning & Management Ideas Portal
Tenant met with Vahe during a spark session and the idea of adjusting our Job/Project/Appt Numbers came up as a topic.
After the spark session CSMs were asked to follow up with the tenant for additional details, see below:
Currently all the numbers just look like random numbers so it’s really hard to know anything just by looking at the number. We also just hit the 9 digit mark so they are even longer and harder to remember. If they were all a little different it would make it easier.
So here is one problem/issue/for instance brought up yesterday when I was doing appointment training:
Some installer or tech gives us a “job number.”
So we go to search, type it in and it’s not found. Maybe this is because they gave us the wrong number or maybe they gave us a project number or an estimate number or (now) this could also be an appointment number. So we go into search, change the dropdown to project, search there, change it to appointment, search there etc. Then well maybe they got a couple numbers backwards so we start searching for pieces of the number in these three categories. If all job numbers were J12345 and project numbers were P12345 etc then when we get a number from someone, we know which number it is and can better search for it.
Another idea would be to restart the counter with the year in front each year. J21-0001. Just looking at that we know it’s the first job from this year. WOW so much info just right there in the numbering system!
Yet another idea along the lines of numbering is some relational system between nested objects. So P21-001-002-003 could be the third appointment created for the second job for the first project of year 2021. Then we know which job, project etc that appointment went to and can look it up easily. That is an ugly looking number but you get the idea. Human brains are really good at remembering things they assign value to, so having some sort of reason for the number would help this aspect too. This may not exactly work with projects or jobs either because every job doesn’t have a project but again, you get the idea.
Another, separate idea would maybe be a universal number search. This would not get us the insight we want just by looking at the number, but would solve the above problem. Search a number or part of a number and it gives us every time that comes up whether it’s a job, invoice, estimate, call recording whatever. This would be great to have independent of the above ideas.
I know this is a lot but it seems like we can make these numbers work for us, instead of the other way around.
