Initial Setup

Follow the steps below to setup your job control system.

Basic Setup

In the Working Calendar

Set the overall date range and any weekends, holidays or non-workdays

In the Activities module:

Setup a series of Milestones. As the name implies, these are time points in your jobs or projects.

As a minimum, you should have

In the Standard Template module

               Create a new Template

       Open the Activities module:

Select all the milestones you want in the template

Drag & drop them onto the blank template

Select blocks of orders and drag & drop them onto the template milestones they follow

Edit the target days for each activity and edit dependencies using navigation arrow or drag and drop

       Give your template a title, and save it

In the Job Schedule screen, for each job (or groups of selected jobs)

Set the Start Date

Load a Template

Rebuild your schedule dates

you are now up and running

Extending you system

Expand your range of Templates

Each job can have one or more templates loaded to create a single schedule for that job.

For instance a single job could have  the following templates loaded:

If, for instance, many of your jobs included swimming pools, you might find it easier to  create templates:

Create  Actions.

An action is merely a task to be done by someone (the action owner). Usually they have no direct financial impact on the job. They do not generate direct costs or income

Many of these are self evident, some not so. For instance

"Make the Widget"

"Tell Widget maker to make widget"

"Check widget is made"

These actions should be added to templates and schedules the same way orders were added

Establish Action By names.

Each action is assigned to an owner. The owner may be

Setup User definable Dates

User definable Dates allow linking of activity start dates to UDF dates which are then available for Claim Schedules and custom reports

Setup the documents you want to produce.

Assemble all documents you are likely to require. These can be created with any word processor, or with Databuild's in-built word processor. These documents contain merging fields which can be selected from the drop-downs in the layout editor.  If you already have word processing documents, simply save these files in rich text format (.RTF). If you edit these files using the Layout Editor, you will be able to replace any variables (such as client's name and address) with the allowable fields from the inbuilt drop-down

These documents should be attached as a communique to an existing action ( or create new actions just to handle the documents).

Setup the Emails you want to send.

All emails you are likely to require should be created. These can be created with any word processor or text editor, or with Databuild's in-built word processor. These documents contain merging fields which can be selected from the drop-downs in the layout editor. Any action can be assigned to email one of these documents as an attachment, or to include the modified document text as the Email message. In this case, you should avoid complex formatting as some recipients may not be able to receive them.