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HR

A schedule that only shows the work is a schedule that lies. If a resourceResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board. is on leave, in training, or out sick, those hours are gone whether or not the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline. knows it, and a planner who books against them is setting up a conflict. This module keeps that knowledge in sync: employee absences flow both ways between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central HR and Dime.Scheduler, so the people who plan the work and the people who own the HR records are always looking at the same availability. This page walks you through the setup and the three ways planners can register an absence.

Setup​

You configure the module in the Fast track wizardFastTrack wizardThe setup wizard inside Business Central or NAV that connects it to Dime.Scheduler and switches on the modules to plan from. It writes the source app and creates the source types for each enabled module..

Configuring HR absences in Fast track wizard

Turn the module on by selecting Enable Absences planning. Everything below only applies once it is enabled.

From there, a handful of settings decide how an absence looks and behaves once it lands on the planning board:

  • Job No. for Absences anchors the absences. An absence has no header the way a sales or assembly order does, so the wizard creates a default jobJobA high-level container, comparable to a project, that bundles related tasks together with common information such as customer, billing, and address. to hold them. Enter a descriptive code here; planners then use it to sort, group, and filter tasksTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource. in the open and planned Tasks grid in Dime.Scheduler.

  • Create Tasks from Cause of Absence generates the schedulable tasks in Dime.Scheduler from the values in the cause of absence table, so the reasons defined in BC become the things a planner can drag.

  • Show Cause of Absence as controls whether the reason for an absence is visible at a glance on a planned task, rather than something the planner has to open the task to discover:

    • Blank: no visual indicator used
    • CategoryCategoryA visual indicator (a color) applied to appointments to classify or label them.: the color of the planned taskPlanned taskAn appointment together with the resources assigned to it - the full picture of what will be done, by whom, and when. shows the cause of absence
    • Time markerTime markerA visual indicator on an appointment, separate from its category, used to flag a status or condition at a point in time.: the time marker of the planned task shows the cause of absence

    The video below demonstrates this functionality. It uses service orders, but the behavior is the same for this module:

  • Create Appointment as decides the shape of the planned task when a user sends an absence from BC or creates one through the action shortcutAction URIA dynamic link, populated with fields from a task, job or appointment, that opens an external system in one click.. Choose Working Time to give the absence a start and end time as specified in Starting Time and Ending Time, or Full Day to create it as a 24h planned task, in which case the Starting Time and Ending Time fields are not used.

  • Create New Absence Action exposes the action shortcut so planners can create a new absence from inside Dime.Scheduler. Enter the caption shown to the user there (see the screenshot below).

Create new absence in Dime.Scheduler

Causes of absence​

The causes of absence are the raw material a planner schedules against, so they have to reach Dime.Scheduler first. To make that possible, the default actions on the causes of absence page have been extended with two items:

  • Send absence (selected range or all)
  • Delete selected item

When you send the causes of absence, Dime.Scheduler creates a special job that holds the selected (current and subsequent) causes of absence, and turns each cause of absence into an individual, infinite task.

Causes of absence

Because these tasks are infinite, they never disappear from the open tasks listOpen taskA task that has not been scheduled yet. It waits in the open task list to be placed on the planning board.. That is deliberate: an "out sick" or "vacation" task is a reusable building block, always there and ready to be dragged whenever a planner needs it.

Causes of absence

Absence registration​

Dime.Scheduler builds on standard Business Central functionality and adds visual scheduling on top of it, and it offers three routes to register an absence so each role can work where it makes sense:

  • Drag and drop, using the absence tasks inside Dime.Scheduler
  • The action shortcut (right-click on the planning board for the selected resource and date) to create an absence in BC
  • Entering an absence in BC and sending it as a planned task to Dime.Scheduler

Creating absences​

Drag and drop​

Drag and drop is the fastest option for planners who prefer to stay in Dime.Scheduler. Because the task always sits in the open tasks list, registering an absence takes just a few clicks: pick the cause of absence, drag the task onto the right timeslot for the right resource, and the absence is registered.

Business Central​

Because the sync runs both ways, the HR side is just as valid a starting point. On the absence registration page in Business Central, create an absence and send it to (or remove it from) Dime.Scheduler. The planner never has to re-enter it; it simply appears on the board.

Send absence