Setting Up Job Control

Follow the steps below to setup your job control system. Before starting, review Using Job Control for pre-sales.

Establish the project milestones.

These represent logical stages of a project and often relate to progress claims. Milestones have no action or duration of their own

Establish the Orders.

These are the cost centres you have already set up. You may want to set up additional ones. Use these where you have to produce purchase orders (and pay for) goods or services from external partners.

Establish Action Owners.

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

Establish the Actions.

An action is merely a task to be done by someone (the action owner)

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

"Make the Widget"

"Tell Widget maker to make widget"

"Check widget is made"

Each item can have an attached communique: either a Document or Email

Determine what Documents and emails you want to produce in the course of each job and assign each one to an Action.

Each one requires a layout. 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 clients'name and address) with the allowable fields from the inbuilt drop-down.

Some actions can be suppressed under certain specified conditions ( for instance if a particular activity is NOT behind schedule). Establish those actions and what the underlying suppression logic is.

Fear not, template creation and running will soon pinpoint new actions and these can be added at any stage.

Creating templates

The next step is to create templates. This is simply developing the relationship between  the activities (milestones, orders and actions)

Each activity relates to other activities:

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:

Establish the documents you want to produce.

Assemble all documents you are likely to require should be created. 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.

Create and assign an action to each one of these documents.

Establish 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.

Create and assign an action to each one of these documents.

Establish the SMS messages you want to send.

All SMS messages 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. As all SMS messages have a limit of 160 characters, the must be kept brief.

Create and assign an action to each one of these SMS documents.

Working Calendar

Must be set up, nominating an overall range and any holidays or non-workdays