Since we launched PlanRight in February, we’ve had over 100 businesses try it out. And if we’ve learned anything about planning, it’s that every business plans differently!
One of our goals with PlanRight is to provide visibility into scheduling without prescribing how businesses should plan.
A lot of people use Excel or a whiteboard so they can see the schedule layout and where the gaps are. Because of this, PlanRight provides an almost blank canvas allowing people to schedule work and staff as they see best.
Customer feedback has led to the development of a couple of new features, with several more in the pipeline.
Working with teams is an obvious way to scale your business and ensure people continue to provide great service while the company grows.
Teams are usually created based on the type of work being done, the geography or the project. And they’re generally made up of multiple roles, so you end up with a matrix of ‘team’ and ‘role’. Planning then needs to take place for the team, or across the roles, or for a location.
The flexibility of PlanRight allows people to create groups (such as ‘Team’, ‘Location’ and ‘Role’) and assign staff to them. It then filters schedules by any combination of these groups.
It helps with questions like:
The existing PlanRight weekly planner allows people to organise daily chunks of work, up to 6 weeks in advance. This is particularly helpful in a scenario like this (see below):
But what if Josh and Lance both need to be available for the customer from 8am to 12pm on Wednesday and Thursday? We can simply click on the daily planner (e.g ‘W10’ shown above) and drill into the hourly planner to schedule the work in more detail.
This will enable a staff member (or team) to see a summary of the work they have on — including the estimated effort and completed effort (based on timesheets). This will give a more linear view of the work for people who find it easier to consume information in a table (rather than a schedule).
Other planned enhancements include:
A big thanks to everyone for their valuable feedback and insights. Keep up the good planning!
Tim Garth from CATS Accountants really struggled with the visual aspect of his job management system.
Ross Benton speaks about how he found PlanRight.
Over the last few years we’ve found ourselves solving the same problem for a variety of customers (accountants, vehicle rentals, port authorities and psychologists). Everyone wants to grow their business, plan better and provide better services. And to do this they all need better visibility of their business information.
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