DigiQuatics Updates July / Aug 2018
We hope you all had a fabulous summer season! We definitely did over here at DigiQuatics. We had unprecedented usage in the DigiQuatics platform and had some great opportunities for some tweaks and improvements app-wide. Here's what we were up to in July and August.
The reason we don't have as long of a "list" of updates is because we spent the majority of our time working on finishing the new Auto-Schedule feature in Staff Scheduling and also a completely brand new module called Custom Forms. We also got some great feedback from the users about getting blasted with notifications, particularly around sub requests, so we made some changes to improve the user experience in that regard.
Auto-Schedule
The moment you've been waiting for! DigiQuatics now has an Auto-Schedule algorithm to build your schedule for you based on defined parameters with your employees! Simply created your Unassigned shifts, enter (or have your employee enter) their Employee Availability, any Time Off Request, max & desired hours per week per employee, and watch the magic work!
The current options you have to enable when Auto-Scheduling are to:
Assume available unless marked unavailable. This means if an employee has not entered anything for their availability, they can be scheduled.
Employees with pending time off request are eligible. This means an employee can be scheduled unless their time off request has already been approved by an admin.
Employees with secondary location access are eligible. This allows you to have more employees to be considered for shifts. For example, an employee has primary access to Blackrock Rec Center and secondary access to Carmody Rec Center, when auto-scheduling for Carmody, enabling this will allow them to be scheduled here.
Only scheduled up to employee's desired hours. For example, an employee has desired hours of 20 and max of 40. This will stop giving them shifts at 20 hours, while un-checking this box will allow them to be auto-scheduled up to the max of 40 hours.
We are continuing to add some additional options. For example, filling shifts by position priority. This would fill all your Head Guard shifts first, then the Lifeguard shifts, and so on...
If you'd like to access the beta stage for auto-scheduling, drop us a quick line so we can enable it for your account!
Custom Forms
We are so stoked to announce once of the biggest modules as of late in DigiQuatics: Custom Forms! Basically now any forms or reports that you have been filling out on paper you can now replicate digitally in DigiQuatics.
You have complete flexibility to add as many forms as you would like, access them by location, and even set user permissions (any employee vs admin only) on the forms as well! For each form you'll be able to add unlimited fields with varying types including: text (short), text area (long), numbers, date, date time, time, checkbox, radio button, dropdown select, and more! We thought ahead and included some built-in selects for locations, positions, and employees so you don't need to create a custom select with all those options, they will populate automatically. For example, a location select can be used for the person filling out the form to select which facility they are completing an incident report.
Some common forms you might consider using are:
Water rescues
Accidental fecal release (AFR)
Incident reports
Accident reports
Shift reports
Employee disciplinary action form
Preventative maintenance
Summer return letters
Custom Forms will be a paid upgrade module after beta testing, but to check it out and see if it is a good fit for you, please chat with us via Intercom so we can enable access for your account!
Open Sub Request Summary SMS
In response to some great feedback from admins and employees alike, we found that the biggest area of complaint with notifications was getting too many Open Sub Request notifications. We wanted to overall reduce the number of messages sent, while maintaining communication pathways when it was needed most.
The solution is now that every day at 9am, ONE text message will be sent to each employee listing all of the Open Sub Requests that have been requested in the last 24 hours. They are all grouped together now, so if 9 subs have been requested between 9am yesterday and 9am today, the message will list the 9 shifts that the recipient is capable of accepting on the Open Sub Requests page.
The one caveat to this is for a shift that is starting before 9am tomorrow. For example, it's 12pm now and I request a "last-minute" sub for my shift starting tonight at 5pm. If DigiQuatics waited until 9am tomorrow to notify my co-workers, no one would ever know I needed the shift covered until it was too late. Therefore, if a sub request is "last-minute" we send a one-off SMS / text message notification immediately to all eligible employees in order to increase the likelihood of your shift getting covered in time!
Other Miscellaneous Fixes / Updates
Open Shifts pages pagination (load more) bug fixed
Added Processed By information to Processed Open Shifts for record-keeping purposes
Set up DigiQuatics Status Page. To check out the current status of all DigiQuatics servers and associated services visit status.digiquatics.com. If anything goes down, be sure to check here for additional ways to contact the team and be updated about restorations on twitter @digiquatics.
Automatically clock out staff after specified time (e.g. 10:00pm)
Added Position "codes" to employee positions which can be used for allocation / budget purposes when tracking time clocks
Fixed viewing of group lessons for non-admins
Further refinements to auto schedule algorithm
Added ability to export Patron Counts for all locations on one report
Fixed view of patron counts graphs when no data was present
Automatically handle special characters not allowed in exported files. For example, Excel sheet with "/" in the file name are now emitted.
Editing of desired hours for employee on the schedule page no longer requires a page refresh to see the update
Added ability to mark all unassigned shifts as open shifts in bulk
Edit patron counts page was including previously archived patron count zones
Fixed importing employee ID's with leading zeros (e.g. 0012345)
Added ability to send messages via Messaging module to location groups (e.g. districts or regions of locations)
Look forward to what's coming up in the next few weeks! We hope you've found these new updates helpful as you continue to dive into your new season. If you like the mini screen recordings above, let us know below in the comments!