When planning rotas, it’s common practice to group nearby visits into what are known as runs. This approach enhances efficiency by minimising travel time between appointments. Assigning the same worker to a run ensures continuity and allows visits to be scheduled in close succession.
Enable runs
Firstly, you need to enable the runs functionality. This can only be done by the support team, so please raise a case and ask for it to be enabled.
Configure runs
Once the runs have been enabled, you can configure them following these steps.
Click Planning, then click Visits.
Click Planning, then under actions, click the run icon.
Click the plus icon, then enter the description and select the branch and area.
Click the save icon.
Employee | If enabled, you can pay a fixed amount of mileage if the employee is allocated to this Run. |
Service location | If enabled, you can charge a fixed amount of mileage if the service user is allocated to this Run. |
Run functionality in timeline
The timeline incorporated the run functionality in a few ways.
Filtering the timeline
Rather than just service users and employees within the timeline, Runs can be seen as well. In the top left-hand corner, in the By field, it is possible to display Workers and Runs or Service Users and Runs.
When filtering by service user run or employee run, you can then also filter by branch and area if you only need to look at a specific section.
Filtered by service user and runs
When filtering by service users and Runs, service user visits can be assigned to a run by dragging and dropping it, or right-clicking and rolling over allocate. This allows things to quickly and easily be changed if cancelled visits or Worker absence lead to a re-working of the Runs on a particular date.
Filtered by employee and runs
When filtering by employee and runs, visits on the runs can be allocated to an employee by dragging and dropping it or right clicking and rolling over allocate. But rather than doing this visit by visit, the nature of Runs means that it is likely that all visits would be allocated to the same employee.
You can do this by following these steps.
Right-click on the visit, then click Other.
Then hover over Select, then click Row.
This then allows the whole Run to be allocated in one go.
📌Note: When filtering by employee and runs, the Name drop down list below displays the names of the runs.
View runs in the timeline
You can view which run the visit is assigned to by hovering over the visit on the timeline. This then shows a pop out box with all of the visit details.
Permanent Runs
When a visit is generated from a Service Requirement and assigned to a Run, future generations will automatically place it on the same Run. However, there’s currently no visibility into these permanent Run assignments.
If a Run is disrupted (e.g. due to Worker absence), visits should be reassigned directly to the Worker, not to another Run, otherwise, they’ll be incorrectly allocated in future generations.
📌Note: Each visit must be manually assigned to a Run the first time. For example, if visits are generated for Monday to Sunday, each must be placed on a Run individually, as they may differ by day. Once assigned, future generations will handle this automatically.