Color Coding Dispatches

Have you ever wanted to have all your Service Agreement dispatches stand out when looking at your dispatch board? Do you want to see all of your high priority calls show up red on your dispatch board? Would you like to have all your commercial customers show up in a shade of gray? All of this is possible in ESC.

One of the cool features in ESC is the ability to color code your dispatches.  This is done by setting a color to each of your dispatch priorities.  You can change these colors or even setup completely new priorities that you will be able to select using a drop down list every time you create a dispatch or even enter a customer.

To do this you will need to choose the Dispatch pull-down menu and then choose Enter Priorities.  This will show you a list of your current priorities, with the ability to edit and create new.  When editing, or creating a new priority, you have a pull down menu to choose from a long list of different colors and shades.

Once you have set up your color coded priorities you can now use them in various ways.  As I previously mentioned, you can set all your commercial customers to a light gray color.  This can be done by creating a new priority for commercial customers with the color set to light gray. Then, on the Customer Info screen you can recall a commercial customer and make this their default priority. Once you do that any dispatches you create for that customer will inherit the default priority and will automatically show up as a light gray dispatch.

You can apply this same concept to your Service Agreements as well. Try setting them to a lovely shade of green (like money) so you can quickly see that while they need to be done this month, it might not need to happen today. You can change the default priority for dispatches created by the Service Agreement module by going to Company → System Setup → Agreements. Please note that this setting will take precedence over a customer’s default priority – so if you create a service agreement dispatch for the commercial customer we used above, the resulting dispatch will be green, not gray.

This feature has also been implemented on all the mobile phone clients so that your technicians can see that a high-priority red call needs to be done before a green service agreement call.

I set up red, white and blue priorities in my sample company and my board ended up looking like this.

Ok, so it didn’t just happen this way but you get the idea. I hope you enjoy this great feature.

Written by Randy Cole
Featured in August 2011 Newsletter