Planning rules and Competences: the right person for the right job

Planning rules and Competences let you write down once how your days should run: who gets the ladder jobs, which orders belong in the morning, and which jobs need a certification. After that, route planning follows them every time the week is planned, so the right person gets the right job without you having to remember.

The trap in route planning is that the best route on paper is no use if it sends someone without a ladder to a job at height. So Clientflow's planning knows the requirements before it lays out the route.

Why equipment and skills belong in the plan

Most of what a planner knows is not in the calendar. It lives in the head of the person who has planned the week for years. That one colleague has the lift. Only two of you are allowed to do electrical work. One van always carries the ladder.

While that knowledge lives in one head, your plan is fragile. When the planner is off sick, or a new hire joins, jobs start landing in the wrong places. My advice is to move that knowledge into the system while things are calm, not after a job has gone wrong.

A job can require two kinds of thing. In Clientflow both are called Competences: Equipment is something you have to bring, like a ladder or a lift. Skill is something you must be able to do or be allowed to do, like a certification.

Competences: how to tell the system what a job needs

A Competence has to sit in two places: on whatever requires it, and on whoever has it. Setting it up takes four short steps:

1. Create them under Settings → Competences. Give each a name, a type (Equipment or Skill) and a colour.
2. Open a service under Settings → Services & prices and pick the Competences the service requires.
3. Open a worker under Settings → Workers and add the Competences they hold. If it is a certificate that needs renewing, set a date in Valid until.
4. Give the cars their equipment under Settings → Fleet, on the Vehicles tab. The car needs an Assigned Worker and Status Active, otherwise it passes nothing on.

The car is the clever part. If the ladder lives on the car, you do not have to give it to every worker: whoever drives the car that day has it too. If a worker drives a different car for one day, the office picks Today's car, and that car's equipment applies for the day.

Planning checks the Competence on the day of the visit itself. A certificate that expires on the 15th counts for a visit on the 14th, but not for one on the 16th. It is exactly the kind of detail you would otherwise only discover after a job was planned wrong.

Planning rules: Must and Prefer

Competences answer who can. Planning rules answer how you would like it done. A rule has two parts: When (which orders it applies to) and Then (what planning does with them). Clientflow writes each rule as a sentence you can read aloud. A Must rule says, for example, that orders with Interior window cleaning must be planned in the morning, and a Prefer rule begins with "It is preferred that".

You can control time windows, weekdays and workers, among other things. You can also use Competences in two ways: as a condition ("orders that require Lift") and as an effect ("Must have competence" or "Must not have competence"). When two rules say different things about the same order, the one higher in the list wins. Under Test an order you can pick a real order and see which rules apply and which give way.

Every rule has a Strength, and it is one of the choices I think is most worth a moment's thought:

• Must is always followed.
• Prefer is followed when it can be, and gives way otherwise.

My recommendation is to keep Must for the things that cannot go wrong, like a certification or a requirement the customer has set. Use Prefer for wishes that are nice to meet but should not cost you a whole day's route. The only effect that cannot be a preference is "Do not plan automatically", which is always Must.

One thing to know: you can still move an order in the calendar even if it breaks a rule. If it breaks a Must rule you get a yellow warning, but the order moves. If it breaks a Prefer rule there is no warning.

Split orders: Keep parts together

You can split a big job into several parts with Split order, for example a 24-hour job in three parts. On Professional and Enterprise, planning keeps the parts as close together as possible from the start, without you choosing anything. On Starter it places each part on its own.

Under Settings → Planning, in the Split orders block, Keep parts together decides how close the parts should be: Off, Same day, Consecutive days or As close as possible. The last one is what you get if you have not chosen otherwise, and the strength is then Prefer. If you choose Off, planning places the parts independently. You can switch Strength to Must, just like on a rule. With Must, planning would rather leave the parts unplanned than spread them out. With Prefer, it keeps them together when it can.

Locked parts stay where they are. So do parts the customer has already been told about. Planning gathers the other parts around them.

When no one can take the order

A plan that promises everything ends up in the right place cannot be kept, because sometimes there is no one who can. So it is worth knowing what actually happens when an order requires a Competence:

Planning never throws an order away because of a Competence. But in the last row the order sits with someone who cannot do it, and spotting that is your job. That is why the warning is on the card. Look for it once the week is planned.

Two things also outrank a Competence: an order you have locked to a particular worker, and the order's own worker requirements. And Automatically adjust the rest of the day, the live replanning that rescues a day already under way, looks at neither Competences nor rules.

Short days: no break

Planning can place a break in the middle of the day. That makes sense on a long day, but on a day with two hours of work it is just a break that wrecks the route.

Under Settings → Planning you will find the field No break on days under (hours). If a day's shift or planned work is shorter than that number, no break is planned. With 0 it is off. Work counts driving, jobs, fixed tasks and meetings. Pay does not change. If the route cannot be rearranged without the break while every order's time window still holds, planning keeps the day as it was, break included.

Remember that the live replanning that fixes the day as it goes does not decide this again: it keeps what the day was last planned with.

What does it need from your plan?

Planning rules, Competences in planning and Keep parts together come with Professional and Enterprise. On Starter you can open the pages, but they are greyed out, with a button that leads to your subscription.

The car register and Today's car are on every plan. GPS tracking of the cars is part of Enterprise.

If you move to a smaller plan, your rules and Competences stay put and you can still see them. But planning does not use them on the smaller plan. Upgrade again and they work as before.

If you want every step spelled out, you will find them in the help center: Competences and Planning rules.