Contents

Overview

The QESTField products provide an automated work order notification and confirmation process that greatly improves the efficiency of the daily scheduling tasks by automating away the busy work and allowing the dispatcher to focus on any exceptions or unconfirmed work orders.

Notification and Confirmations

Notifying Technicians

Assigning a work order to a technician or modifying the assignment details of a work order will set the status of that work order to notification pending. So long as at least one work order has a notification pending status and all work orders are saved, the  button will be enabled.

Open

Clicking on the  button will send notifications to the field staff that they need to confirm their schedule. Technicians will be notified via email or push notifications of the need to confirm the assigned work orders. More details on which notification type is used for each scenario are in the relevant section below. For details on confirming work orders in QESTField, see Confirming Work Orders.

The appearance of the notification button and whether or not it is enabled are dependent upon the status of the work orders in the timeline, as explained by the table below.

Appearance	Enabled/Disabled	Scenario

Appearance	Enabled/Disabled	Scenario
Open	Disabled - notifications cannot be sent	No notifications are pending
Open	Disabled - notifications cannot be sent	Notifications are pending but not all work order assignment changes have been saved.
Open	Enabled - notifications can be sent	Notifications are pending and all assignment changes have been saved.

Changing any of the following work details on a work order will require a new notification to be issued for that work order:

• Assigned field staff member

• Project

• Work instructions

• Work date

• Start time

The affected work order as well as the Notify button will indicate that new notifications are pending.

If a staff member cannot receive notifications at all, this will be noted directly underneath their name, as shown for Jill Tech below.

Open

A field staff member will not be able to receive notifications if they:

• Are not able to receive push notifications on the QESTField mobile app, and

• Do not have an email address defined in QESTLab

See the Email vs. Push Notifications section for more details on when push notifications can be sent.

Reviewing Confirmation Status

Work orders can have the following statuses related to notifications.

Status	Appearance

Status	Appearance
Notification Pending	Open
Confirmation Pending	Open
Confirmed	Open

Once notifications have been issued to field staff, the affected work orders will be indicated with a confirmation pending icon on the QESTField Scheduler timeline. Once work has been confirmed by the field staff member, the confirmed work orders will display a confirmed icon in the QESTField Scheduler the next time work order data is refreshed. Work order data will refresh periodically (every five minutes) or can be manually refreshed by clicking the refresh button .

If a work order remains on confirmation pending for an extended period of time, the field staff member should be contacted by other means to determine why the confirmation has not taken place.

Email vs. Push Notification Preference

Field staff will receive push notifications on their device if they:

• Are using the QESTField mobile app, and

• Are logged into the QESTField mobile app on their device, and

• Have not disabled notifications for the QESTField mobile app via their device settings

If push notifications cannot be sent to an individual, QESTField Scheduler will send email notifications to the user instead if they have a valid email assigned to them in QESTLab.

If no email address exists for the user, and they cannot receive push notifications due to one of the above criteria not being met then no notifications will be sent to that user and a warning will be shown underneath the user's name in the timeline.

Reviewing Notification Logs

Records are kept of when notifications for work orders are sent and subsequently confirmed. These audit records can be exposed via a management report in QESTLab to allow review of if and when notifications have been confirmed. An example of a standard management report is shown below.

Most of the columns available in the audit records are self explanatory but there are a number whose purpose is less obvious, explained below. Note that not all of these columns are used in the standard management report but can easily be added.