Calendar-based appointment duration recalculation
ResourcesResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board. can be subject to a calendar. Administrators manage the default schedule for resources across the organization, and once it's configured, planners see it in the resource zones area of the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline.:
This information is essential for building a feasible plan and keeping resources healthy and productive. It shows the business hours, holidays and other arrangements (such as night or holiday shifts) that apply to each resource. Administrators can define a schedule for every resource through the calendar setup. Everything in the shaded color marks unavailable time; the white areas are the working hours. This lets the planner read a resource's availability at a glance and adjust the plan accordingly.
Dime.Scheduler can take this a step further and handle it for you. Calendar-based appointment duration recalculation automatically adjusts an appointmentAppointmentA task scheduled to a resource for a specific period - the scheduled instance you see on the planning board.'s duration based on the resources assigned to it and their calendars, so the schedule stays in line with each resource's real availability.
How it works
Dime.Scheduler has a built-in calendar system that can automatically update the total duration of an appointment or just its planning quantity, based on the availability of the resource carrying out the taskTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource..
An administrator chooses from three modes:
- Update the duration of the appointment
- Only update the planning quantity
- Do nothing
The duration of an appointment is the sum of working time and non-working time.
The planning quantity is an expression of the appointment's duration in a unit of measure of choice. Through a conversion metric, time can be converted into some other measure such as capacityCapacityThe amount of working time a resource has available in a given period, used to spot over- and under-planning. or volume. By default, the planning quantity expresses the duration in hours.
Pick a mode and a scenario to see how the algorithm reshapes the appointment around the resource's calendar.
Extend duration
When the calendar mode is set to "Extend Duration", working time is the independent variable. When a task overlaps with non-working time, the algorithm extends the appointment by that non-working time, so the resource still gets enough working time to finish the jobJobA high-level container, comparable to a project, that bundles related tasks together with common information such as customer, billing, and address..
The two examples below show the algorithm in action.
- Example 1: the user drags a 2-hour task onto the planning board (blue). There's one hour of overlap (red). After drop, the algorithm adds 1 hour to the appointment (green). The result is a 3-hour appointment: 2 hours of working time and 1 hour of non-working time. The planning quantity only counts working time, so it stays at 2 hours.
- Example 2: a similar scenario showing how the algorithm keeps adding non-working time until the resource can complete its working time. The task needs 2 hours of work, but with 2 hours of non-working time in the way, it takes the resource 4 hours in total to finish.
The impact can be significant when a task can't be finished before the end of the working day. A two-hour appointment may suddenly stretch across several hours or even days, while the working time stays at two hours.
Update planning quantity
The second mode uses the same algorithm, but it doesn't extend the appointment with non-working time. Instead, it adjusts the planning quantity field to account for the non-working time. Using the same examples:
- Example 1: the user drops an appointment on the planning board. One hour overlaps with a lunch break. The duration isn't extended, but the planning quantity factors in the hour of non-working time and is set to 1 hour.
- Example 2: same situation. The duration isn't extended, resulting in a 2-hour appointment with a planning quantity of 1 hour.
None
When the calendar mode is switched off, the non-working time is always 0 and the working time equals the total duration. Business hours and all other calendar settings are ignored.
Configuration
Because this feature reaches across the whole plan and not everyone needs it, it is entirely optional and configurable. A simple example shows why. Suppose the planner needs to schedule a task that requires ten hours of work. After finding a resource for the job, the planner discovers the resource faces a two-hour drive each way, a four-hour commute. The resource agrees to work two hours of overtime to finish the task rather than return for two more hours the next day. If auto-extend couldn't be turned off, the planner would have no way to override this decision in Dime.Scheduler.
Three levels of configuration give you ample control to fine-tune the auto-extend feature:
Global configuration
└── Planning board
└── Appointment
These three levels cascade. All three must be set correctly for the recalculation algorithm to apply to an appointment. If any higher level blocks the setting, the algorithm won't run.
Global configuration
The administrator decides whether auto-extend applies to everyone. If the administrator disables it, no lower-level setting has any effect. In the application setup, the administrator chooses the adjustment mode:
Two related settings deal with visualization: whether to show the resource calendars, and which color to use for them.
Planning board
The second level lives on the planning board itself. A button does the same thing as the global configuration, but scoped to that component only. This means you can run several planning boards in your profile with different calculation modes. The icon won't appear if global configuration has switched off the calendar mode.
You can toggle this button. When it's red, the auto-calculation feature is ignored on this planning board: creating or updating appointments here won't apply calendars, even when the appointments indicate otherwise. The button's value is stateful.
Appointment
The third level lives on the appointments and tasks themselves. Appointments marked to ignore calendar application show a small orange triangle in the lower-left corner:
There are two ways to change this value: through the appointment's context menu, or through the editor, as shown here:
Conflict resolution
Appointments with more than one resource present a challenge: two different resource schedules can't be reconciled into a single appointment. The planner must therefore decide which resource to use for the automatic recalculation. When creating or updating such an appointment, a resolution window appears, like this one:
There are three outcomes:
- The planner selects the resource to use for the appointment recalculation
- The appointment ignores calendars altogether (no automatic recalculation)
- Cancel the update