Meetings

Purpose

This article is here to provide you with help to understand how to use the Meeting functionality within DRS.

Meetings can be used to schedule DRS created Jobs within your Workers diaries that will attract Travel Time calculations, giving you an opportunity to add tasks such as Toolbox Talks and Supplier runs without impacting the quality of your scheduling solution.

Depending on your Mobile and Housing/Works Management integration, these tasks can also be integrated to your Mobile Working solution, giving your workers the opportunity to update their diaries in real time.

How do Meetings work.

Meetings can be created within DRS to add new Jobs within worker diaries. When they are added, they appear in the worker's route as time and worker locked jobs. The worker's route will include travel time to and from the meeting and DRS will use this travel time to Optimise the remainder of the days diary.

Meetings can be scheduled to single or multiple Workers at once, ensuring your Workers know where they need to be and when they need to be there. You can use Meetings for anything, 1 to 1's, Team Meetings, Toolbox Talks, Supplier Runs, Van Stock Checks and more.

Within meetings, workers are referred to as attendees.

Meetings Configuration

Meetings require specific configuration before you can use them to schedule Jobs within your diary. Please refer to Meetings Configuration before engaging with this process for the first time.

Using Meetings To Improve Your Schedule

Using the following steps, you can learn how to use Meetings to improve your scheduling for non-appointed works within your diaries.

How to create a new meeting room

Within the Meeting Configurations, your administration team will be taken through the steps to create Meeting Locations. If you need to create additional Meeting Locations, these can be created if you have the correct Profile permissions.

You can see all created Meeting Locations by selecting the Meetings menu from the Left Hand Menu. Configured Meeting Locations will be displayed in the Meeting Rooms panel.

If the required Meeting Location isn't included, click on the Add button.

Give the meeting room a ID and Name, enter the address, including valid Post Code, and click Validate.

Once the location has validated successfully,

Click Save.

The Meeting Location will appear in the meeting room view.

Creating a New Meeting

Creating a new Meeting can be done by clicking on the Meeting option in the Left Hand Menu and scrolling down to the Meetings view.

Once there, click Add.

Search for and select your required meeting room.

Select your required Meeting Template

Complete the Mandatory fields configured in your system, including a Unique Meeting Name.

Set the target date so it's after the date of the meeting and click Save.

Once your Initial Meeting configuration is saved, you will be offered the opportunity to add your attendees.

Click Add Attendee to begin.

Search for your needed workers and check the appropriate boxes. Once done, click Select.

Your attendees will be added to the allocated list on the Meeting. Set a Date and Time for your meeting.

From here, you can check the availability of the attendees by clicking Update Attendees Diary. This will display the required workers availability for you to review.

Update any required Job Data for your scheduling or attendees, ensuring you complete any Mandatory fields.

Schedule Your Meeting

Once you have completed your setup, it's time to schedule your meeting. From the top menu, click the Schedule button.

If your workers and diaries allow for the meeting to be scheduled in, the jobs will appear within the attendees diaries. If not, you may see a similar error to this one;

In this case, the selected attendees are not allocated the correct Sectors to be allocated this meeting automatically.

Other typical reasons for a failure are:

1. The meeting cannot fit into the attendee's diary on that day. In which case you will need to create space in their diary then try again.
2. In the case of the Worker not being within the allocated Sector, you can either use sector variability to temporarily assign the attendee to the appropriate sector, or click Yes in the force column to ignore the attendee's sectors and force the meeting into their diary.

The configuration issue can be resolved, or, the Meetings can be forced into the attendees diaries by setting the Force value, to ON.

Once done, click Schedule once more. The meetings will be scheduled within the required attendees diaries.

Change an Existing Meeting

Meetings can be managed from the Meetings menu in the Left Hand Menu. By reviewing the Meting list from the Meeting list, you can find the meeting you have created select it and click edit, to make amendments.

From here, as with creating a meeting, you can:

1. Change the meeting name
2. Change the meeting start and end date and time
3. Remove attendees from the meeting, via the dustbin icon
4. Add attendees to the meeting, via the Add attendees button

Once your changes are complete, click schedule. The meeting appointments will be updated within the Diary.

Delete an Existing Meeting

Meetings can be deleted by selecting the meeting from the Meeting list and selecting Delete. Your profile will require the appropriate permissions to do this.

To commit the delete, select Yes.

NOTE: As with deleting other objects, Deleting a meeting will remove all appointments from your workers diaries and this cannot be reverted.