Maintenance: Auto-Priority change
A new feature has been added to SIMPLer that allows operator to automatically move a priority up the order of importance, depending on the length of time that the ticket is open / since the last update.
Feature can be activated / set under "Maintenance Issue Settings" page that can be found under "Settings" in SIMPLer.
The "Maintenance Settings" page covers all maintenance related settings that currently exixt in SIMPLer. To enable auto processing of maintenance priorities "Maintenance Priority Re-Calculation" option must be set to "enabled". After that a set of "Priority Auto-Change Rules" need to be defined - these will be used to process maintenance tickets.
Below find description for each attribute of a "Priority Auto-Change Processing Rule":
Rule Priority - this field allows to define order in which priority auto-change rules will be processed as some rules may require to be executed before others are i.e. is can be used to create a rule for 'open' status tickets that is to be processed first and than follow it by 'All' status rule that will process everything else. Note that rules with same priority will be executed in no particular order
Ticket Status - this field is used to define maintenance ticket status (open, closed, work completed, waiting for customer, All) that is to be matched while processing. It allows to narrow down the rules scope to a single status only. Note that 'All' option will match every status
Date for Calculations - there are two options for date a processing rule run it's calculation on:
Date Reported - when this options is used - date the maintenance issue was reported on will be used for calculations. Note that when using it for calculations the 'Days Since' must a calculated carefully i.e. it is advised that each step will have a bigger amount of days required for next priority change i.e. change from priority 5 to priority 4 after 2 days, from priority 4 to priority 3 after 4 days, from priority 3 to priority 2 after 10 days and from priority 2 to priority 1 after 20. Note that otherwise i.e. if the 'Days Since' was same for all steps, a maintenance ticket could land from P5 to P1 overnight
Date Last Modified - when this option is used - date the issue was last modified will be used for calculations. Key thing to note is that every change made will change the 'last modified' date - so even auto-priority change will "reset" the timer.
Days Since - this field is used to define how how many days after the 'Date for Calculations' of a maintenance ticket should a particular processing rule be triggered at
Ticket Priority - this field is used to define maintenance ticket priority that is to be matched while processing.
Priority Change - this field is used to define the change that should be applied to priority if all conditions of a particular processing rule are matched. Note that even if post-processed priority is lower than 1 it will be set to 1 as well as if it will be calculated higher than 5 it will be set to 5 - so there is no risk it will go outside the range
Fall Through - if this setting is enabled - a particular maintenance ticket can only be processed once on a given day - so the first rule that processes it will stop processing of subsequent matching rules for that particular maintenance ticket. Otherwise a ticket can be processed multiple times if conditions will match.
Customer Type - this field allows operator to define a filter to maintenance tickets processed by a rule based on customer type i.e. it allows to define auto-priority change for business customers, while leaving "home" customer maintenance tickets out of the scheme
Description - this is an information only field that can be used to put any comments, descriptions.