The project is financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of the European Union and the Regional Government of Castilla y León through the Institute for Business Competitiveness (Instituto para la Competitividad Empresarial, ICE) of Castilla y León with the objective of encouraging the development of Information and Communications Technology of SMEs.
The main objective of this project, which will be implemented between 1st March 2018 and 28th February 2019, is the developing of three new modules (planner, standard editor, and automatic allocator of resources) for Task4Work, our Field Service Management tool.
To be precise it constitutes the extension of a project which was set up in 2014 and which now counts on the participation of the ERDF with the financing of three new modules, which will promote the application by giving new functions to its clients.
The three parts of the extension of the product for Field Service Management are generated by different problems:
– Automatic planner: this is generated by the need for a process that can allocate tasks in very large amounts (considerable batches of tasks, hence the need for backend), varying the input parameters and achieving optimum allocation for all of them taking into account the existing resources and their different characteristics together with their agendas. In the case of this kind of task (which is generally of maintenance) it is also necessary to repeat this same process at varying intervals; the need for planning this allocation should therefore be covered when this is desired.
– Form editor: it covers the need to be able to create formulae for complying with different tasks (depending on the nature of the company using the tool) and allocating them to tasks in order to complete them. Almost all companies that carry out tasks in the field have different formats for the forms which they are obliged to fill in so that a task can be considered to have been completed; this allows the creation of these forms made to measure and allocating them to the same.
– Automatic allocation of tasks to resources: this originates from the need for being able to allocate certain types of tasks without an intermediate dispatcher, in such a way that recurrent tasks do not require manual intervention and time is thus saved when carrying out the process.