Stay informed about what’s happening in your plan: Event Messaging 1/2

With this release we decided to lay the groundwork for something really exciting: we want you to be always up-to-date in your schedule and we want you to get a chance to be aware what's happening on your shopfloor. We achieved this by giving you an automatic schedule that incorporates your actual shopfloor input.

And now we want to take this even a step further: additionally we want you to be able to get informed directly if certain “events” happen over the time; e.g. if a high priority job gets delayed. In other words: we want you to have the ability to set up alerts, e.g. if something takes longer than expected. And we want all that to be able to get you notified the way you want to be notified.

To reach those goals but still deliver on constant updates to the system, we split the development work into two releases. The hereby published one introduces the new API endpoints we needed for the goal to provide the new just plan it app that will be called “Event Messenger”. This way the tech savvy of our customers can build something themselves and get early access. The next release will then build on this foundation and make the goals we set out on, easily accessible to all. In a nutshell: with Event Messaging 1/2 we extended the jpi API to track events that now can be used by all folks with development skills. With the upcoming release (Event Messaging 2/2) we will provide the functionality to define events etc. via a dialogue for all just plan it customes and their users.
But for now lets see what we delivered this with the current release:

Event Messaging: “Events”

Following our policy which revolves around opening just-plan-it up, unlocking data, and removing boundaries, we have expanded our API by adding a new endpoint to give the users more insights and an eagle view on what is happening in the scheduler.

We have added the ‘Events’ endpoints to the API, which will provide a whole tracking dataset to know what is happening and when in just-plan-it, in other words, a user can check specific types of updates and changes that have been applied on scheduler objects.

If you have not visited our API yet you can look at https://api.just-plan-it.com

And you can simply read the last API blog here.

Please note that this endpoint is available immediately and free of charge for Full or Enterprise subscribers, but access can be added at additional cost to any account.

What is tracked and how long is it accessible

In this first release we track the following list of Events for Jobs and Tasks:

An Event will be tracked on every scheduling run that causes a change. These Events will be available for the next 7 days, after which they will be removed from our databases.

You can access those Events from the new Events endpoint in our API, by providing a DateTime value to the request. This will get all Events that happened for your account after the given DateTime and you will get a list of Event objects, that let you know which event happened when and what the values were before and after the change.

If you only want the data for a specific EventType, you can simply provide that type in your API call and you will directly get a prefiltered list of only the data you want to know.

If you have thoughts on what else we should track don’t hesitate to let us know, as we envision this endpoint to be your way to keep yourselves and your customers up-to-date on what's happening on your shopfloor and alert you to important changes as you can use this to build applications that post messages to your messenger of choice or notify you per email.

If you need help building those tools, also don’t hesitate to ask us, as we will be happy to talk about providing you with such a companion app.

Upgrades all around

We also did smaller updates to existing functionalities:

1. We rebranded the “Capacity level” on resources to “Productivity” and with the change in name came the option for you to set the values with up to 2 decimal places.
   This gives you the option to fine-tune your scheduling: for example, if you have two versions of a machine that can do the same tasks, but one is an older model and a bit slower than your new one, simply set the Productivity for the old one to 0.8. This will cause all tasks scheduled to that machine to run 20% slower than on your new one. You can change the Productivity in the same place as you could the Capacity Level, in the Resource Details Dialog:
   

    

2. In the last release, we added hyperlinks to the templates, jobs, and tasks, which were accessible to planners in the MainClient and operators in our operator client. Your feedback showed us that we should expand the accessibility here and we did. Now operators and viewers who use the MainClient can also access the hyperlink via context menus.
   
   
3. Speaking of operators, another feedback we got was, that your operators on the shopfloor often are in charge of multiple areas and need to update multiple tasks in the OperatorClient. For them, we added a new button to the set data page that sets the shopfloor data and brings them back to the tasklist immediately instead of staying on the SetData page.

   

4. Speaking of setting shopfloor data: a planer can now start a task as planned only with a right mouse click with the new item “Start as Planned” added in the context menu. This is functionally the same as going to the Execute Tab or opening the OperatorClient and selecting “Start as Planned”. This means that this still needs to be approved, but helps you clean up missing data a lot faster.

This and a couple of bugfixes concludes this release. We are always happy to hear from you and listen to your exciting ideas on how to improve just plan it, so don’t hold back.

Until then,
Happy Scheduling!

Book a meeting with a scheduling specialist

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