The Autowork Online garage management solution’s new Work in Progress (WIP) feature allows you to easily view and manage the status of the jobs relevant to you. WIP features a fully customisable interface, featuring job role-specific views.
Current jobs are sorted into a series of columns for specific job statuses, allowing users to see exactly what stage every job is currently at.
Views can be created specifically for particular job roles, allowing for both high-level job overviews, and detailed work breakdowns.
Changing the status of a job is as simple as dragging and dropping it from one column to another.
Today we’re going to be taking a look at Autowork Online’s new Work in Progress tab. Work in Progress allows you to view all the outstanding documents that are relevant to your job role. These are sorted into columns by status, and can be quickly reassigned by dragging them between them.
If you’ve never used Work in Progress before, it’s quite likely that you’ll see the following message pop up. This is just because it is driven by status codes, and the codes have not been correctly configured. If you click the green link, it will take you to the status codes screen where you can resolve this. All that you will need to do is set a Work in Progress category against each status. If you’v never used Autowork Online at all before, you may have a link at the bottom which will allow you to set the default statuses up. In this case, we already have status codes configured, they just don’t have a Work in Progress category set against them.
To assign this, just click the edit button against the code, then select a work in progress category from dropdown menu. When you’ve selected this, and you’re happy with what you’ve entered, click the update button, this will save the changes against that particular code. You’ll need to repeat those steps with all the other codes.
It’s also worth noting that you can change the description or work in progress code against an existing entry. This is done by just clicking edit, and then amending the fields above. When you’re happy with the selection, click update.
You can also delete that status code completely if you’re not going to use it. To do this, simply click the delete button, and then click OK on the prompt. When you’re happy with your settings, go back to the Work in progress tab.
Now I’m going to show you how to set up a job role specific template. These can be selected from the dropdown menu when you’ve created them. Firstly click the template settings button in the upper right, this will give you access to this menu. From here you can click the create new template button, and then enter a name for this template, we’re going to call this one service adviser. When you’re happy with what you’ve entered, click OK. I’m also going to enable the auto refresh option by clicking the option, this means that the screen will automatically refresh itself at roughly one minute intervals. When you’re happy with all the settings in this screen, click close. Now you will see that we can select the new service adviser template from the dropdown menu.
Now we’re going to configure which statuses will show on this screen, so we’ll click the settings button at the right. This screen shows all the status codes that are available. The ones highlighted in blue are already selected, and the ones with a black icon rather than a coloured one are the default ones included with the system. To select a status code, simply click it to highlight it blue, if you want to deselect it, just click it again. Once you are happy with your selections in this screen, simply click close.
This will take you back to the work in progress screen, where as you can see several extra windows have been added. These can be rearranged simply by clicking and dragging, and you can also resize them by clicking and dragging the bottom right hand corner. We’re going to change the arrangement to make it clearer and easier to read. I’ve chosen to rearrange things so that similar states are together. For example, all the on hold status codes, such as awaiting authorisation, quality control and waiting on parts are all organised into one column, so you can tell at a glance exactly why that job is on hold.
Once you are happy with your settings in this screen, click the template settings button again, and then click save. This template’s now been saved so you can select it from the dropdown menu. You can set up as many templates as you like, and like I said earlier, these can be set up for specific job roles, so that person can only see the jobs that are relevant to them.
Take a look at our using work in progress video for more information on actually using work in progress once it’s been set up.
