Controlling Planner Status, Visibility, and Capacity

Use booking status deliberately

Every scheduled item can carry a booking status.

Use Do not move sparingly. It blocks movement previews so planners have to make a deliberate decision before changing a locked visit.

Put planning demand into buckets

Planning buckets hold work that needs a lane but not necessarily an engineer yet.

1. Use bucket lanes for planning groups such as reactive work, access-dependent work, or work waiting for a specialist team.
2. Keep unscheduled, unbucketed work in backlog.
3. Drag bucketed work onto an engineer lane when it is ready for direct assignment.
4. Archive buckets only after active references have been cleared or moved.

Bucketed work appears in PPM Forecast as bucketed demand, which helps separate capacity pressure from named-engineer assignment.

Control engineer visibility

1. Open a job in quick view or bulk update.
2. Set Visible from when engineers should not see the job before a specific time.
3. Set Visible until when the job should stop being visible after a specific time.
4. Save the planner change.

The visibility window must be valid. Visible until cannot be before Visible from.

Engineer visibility is separate from deployment. A job still needs the usual deployment readiness before it becomes trusted field work.

Record customer appointment notifications

1. Open a scheduled item in quick view.
2. Confirm the job has an exact scheduled date.
3. Set booking status to Date offered or Confirmed.
4. Confirm the customer email.
5. Choose appointment confirmed, appointment changed, or appointment reminder.
6. Select Notify customer.
7. Review notification history in the quick-view panel.

Customer notifications are recorded only for exact-dated work with a customer email and an offered or confirmed booking status. Target-month work is not a customer appointment.

Preview bulk changes before applying

1. Select one or more scheduler jobs.
2. Open Bulk Edit.
3. Turn on only the fields you intend to change.
4. Select Preview Changes.
5. Review valid, warned, and blocked counts.
6. Read blocked-job reasons and warnings.
7. Review route suggestions when the selected work overlaps route clusters.
8. Apply only when there are no blocked jobs.

Bulk preview blocks deployed jobs, locked Do not move movement, and deployment blockers. It also warns when the updated plan still carries non-blocking warnings.

Use PPM Forecast before the pressure becomes urgent

1. Open PPM Forecast.
2. Review the 12-month planning window.
3. Check forecast jobs, estimated hours, unassigned work, and utilisation.
4. Use the monthly table to open the matching Scheduling date range.
5. Use service-line, region, and site load lists to spot concentrated pressure.

PPM Forecast reads inspections, work orders, and planner tasks by booked date or target month. It works best when planners use target months for known future demand instead of forcing every job onto an arbitrary date.

Troubleshooting

Reference surfaces

1. Use Scheduling for route-level quick view, bulk update, visibility, buckets, and notifications.
2. Use PPM Forecast for capacity forecast detail.
3. Use Bulk Operations and Deployment for deployment-specific behavior.