Hey all! Wow the last few months were busy for us. You too? We’ve got a lot of new stuff to share with everyone. Everything listed below has already shipped and is available in Binocs.
Here’s what’s new
Partial competences + start and end dates for competences
There are cases where you’ll want to constrain certain competences:
- Sometimes a team member can’t perform all activities of a service
- Sometimes a team member is still in training and will have the competence on a certain date in the future
- Sometimes a competence has an expiration date
From now on you can configure these constraints in Binocs. You can read how to do this here
Because of the partial competences, certain activities can become bottlenecks and you’ll want to pinpoint them. Therefore, the analyze workload report is made more detailed to the activity level. You can see how much workload is planned per activity.
Now full support for team member assignments
You can assign team members to demand lines since long, but in the past this was not fully explorable in the workload analysis. In this update we’ve further optimized the algorithm for team member assignments. For unassigned demand nothing changes, which means that the optimizer will assume the compentence pool in the team.
As certain team members can become bottlenecks when you assign work and you’ll want to pinpoint them, the analyze workload report now contains a team member field. This field contains the name of the assigned team member for assigned demand or value “unassigned” for unassigned demand.
Moreover, you can also display workload for a specific team member.
Improvements in the demand analyzer and… historical demand
Users like the functionality to store their own report configurations on the analyze workload report, but this functionality wasn’t available yet for the analyze demand report. Not anymore! From now on you can store your own demand analyzer configurations.
Previously the analyze demand report only contained the actual situation of demand. It was not possible to analyze demand from the past (the moment you ran an analysis). From now on, a demand snapshot is taken at the moment you run an analysis which can be consulted via the analyze demand report at any time.
And by the way: we enhanced the speed of the analyze demand report drastically, which will make your analyses even more convenient.
Hours and days are leveled between requested start and finish for “expertise” services
A lot of Binocs users find it more logical to level expertise hours and days between requested start and finish, so we implemented it this way. When 16 hours are requested between 25th of april and the 6th of may (2 weeks), 8 hours will be planned per week (in the past the 16 hours were planned as fast as possible). Same story for days, e.g. 10 days requested with 4 weeks between requested start and finish results in 2,5 days planned per week.
Copy urls
When you want to discuss with someone online about a certain service, a specific demand line, a certain workload analyzer configuration, … you can just go to the item you want to talk about in Binocs (e.g. to the detail screen of the service), copy the url from your browser and paste it in a mail or message system. The receiver clicks the url and will see exactly the same screen situation.
User removal
We hope you didn’t need the user removal functionality yet, but we discovered a bug. Users that already ran analyses and created scenarios couldn’t be deleted. This is now fixed.
API improvements
We enhanced the APIs to extract output data and to search in demand. That way using Binocs data in other systems to analyze and compare is made even easier.
May’s just around the corner. More updates to share in about a month! Thanks again for using Binocs!