Over the past few months we’ve been working on a bunch of great improvements to Binocs. Here’s a list of some of the big stuff that we’ve shipped recently, and live in your very own Binocs account today.
What has happened recently?
On the dashboard we added a What’s happened recently timeline showing a summary of what objects have changed grouped per day. It’s a great way to see what’s fresh and find things that happened recently. Clicking on an item in the timeline will bring you to the change details.
When was the last update of … ?
Knowing if data is up to date in a glance is now a piece of cake. All lists in Binocs (demand channels, service catalog, competences, availabilities …) have an extra column (at the right) showing when the object was last updated. It’s a great way to quickly see if an update may be required.
Similar to the last updated we added a column in the user list showing when a user was last logged in.
By the minute change log of all Binocs objects
You can now see exactly who changed what and when by the minute. That way you have the ultimate visibility on changes which makes managing your data quality much easier.
What changed in my scenario?
Even more, you can check the change log when you’re in a scenario. Binocs will show you the changes done within the scenario.
Equipment
Especially for laboratories keeping into account equipment capacity was a much requested functionality. From now on this is possible in Binocs. You can define instruments, maintain their availability and link instrument needs to service activities. When running an analysis Binocs will also, next to the people capacity, plan the instrument capacity and show you where possible equipment constraints arise.
No worries, if you don’t need the equipment functionality you can make it invisible with a setting in the system parameters.
Showing the reasons why demand is planned late
Binocs is built to show what will not be delivered on time in the future if we don’t act on it. Prior to this update users had to deduct the reasons why something was planned late themselves. Now the workload analyzer contains a field Late reason which shows immediately what the reason is why something is delivered late. No more deducting, Binocs shows you where to look.
Planned, not planned, analyzed and not analyzed
Prior to this product update a demand line either had planned dates or had the value not yet. But not yet could mean a lot of things. To avoid confusion and make it easier to grasp we added extra information. A demand line can now be:
- Planned: in this case the demand line has planned dates
- Not Planned: the demand line was taken into account by the planning algorithm during the analysis, but it was not planned (e.g. the item is in the past)
- Not analyzed: the demand line was not in the scope of the analysis, which means: the planning horizon, the selected teams or the selected demand channels
We added the possibility to filter on these different demand lines in the worklist.
Change status from the demand tree
Team leaders often have to change the status of tens of demand lines in the worklist. Before it was only possible by clicking the demand line and changing the status in the demand line detail at the right. Now you can change the status directly in the list/tree by clicking the status icon. Choose the state from the dropdown and you’re done.
Services without competences assigned
In teams with a lot of services it’s easy to overlook one or two services and forget to set competences. From now on it’s easy to detect these forgotten ones. Go to competences, click the filter field in the right upper corner and an option will appear to list all services without competences. Choose the option and assign the competences you forgot.
The breadcrumbs
In addition to all the major improvements above, we’re shipping smaller updates, fixes, tweaks, and performance improvements often — sometimes daily.
Thanks again for everyone’s feedback. A lot of these improvements start out life as user requests, so please keep that feedback coming.
We’ll be back soon with another batch of improvements. Thanks for being a Binocs customer!