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The BigWave web interface for entering pricing is an easy way to enter pricing as it occurs.  However, sometimes you may have lots of pricing detail to enter into your work orders and find yourself wanting to use something very fast for data entry (like a spreadsheet).

BigWave gives you the flexibility to enter your pricing both ways!

If you want to use a spreadsheet to enter your pricing data, follow these steps:

1. Download and save to your hard drive a pricing sheet from the import/export center for the project.
2. Open the exported spreadsheet in Excel.
3. Highlight all the exported rows and clear the data.  Leave the column headers however.
4. Enter your pricing detail.  For each row at a minimum you must specify a work order number in column A, a Category, a Quantity, and a Unit Price.
5. When you are finished, simply import the pricing spreadsheet you just created back into your project.

BigWave shines for multi-site projects.  This topic describes the different options available to add sites into your project.

Sites are associated to a project from the master list of site records belonging to the project’s customer.  As various projects are executed on an individual site a project history is built for the site record.

There are three methods you may use to associate your sites.

• ‘Use the master list from the customer’

  Presents a list of available sites and enables you to choose individual sites to associate to the project.

• ‘Manually enter site ID’s’

  Enables you to specify sites to associate by site ID.  These IDs may be copied/pasted into BigWave directly from Excel.

• The third option is available via the Import/Export center ‘Import sites’ option. This advanced option enables you to not only associate sites, but in the same step upload a spreadsheet containing site data including Requested Date, address details, and site level custom fields.

A question came up the other day from a user.  “How can I find work orders that are unassigned?”.  Turns out with the new work order search facility in BigWave, this is very easy to do.

Simply search on the ‘Assigned To’ field for ‘Has no value entered’.  This returns all work orders that are not assigned.  If you choose ‘Has a value entered’ work orders that are assigned will be returned.

The monthly project performance graph shows by month the number of sites that were scheduled in that timeframe vs how many of those have been completed.  Completed is defined by the status set to a ‘Closed’ state.

So, if you have scheduled 3 sites with Scheduled Dates in June, but only 2 have been completed, the graph will show ‘2 of 3′.  It doesn’t matter if the current date is not in June, the chart shows what sites have been scheduled in a month vs completed.

The dates are driven by the project’s scheduled start and end dates.  So adjusting those values will cause more or less rows of months to appear in this report.

When should I use a custom field to track a date vs. tracking the date in the schedule grid?

This is a question that often comes up.  There are typically many dates that need to be tracked in a project.  However, in BigWave, only dates that need to be watched for milestone and tracking purposes should be tracked in your schedule.  A good rule of thumb is if the date is important enough that if “missed”, then you need to know about it, then that is a milestone you will want to track as part of your WBS in the schedule grid.  All of the BigWave reporting/alerting functionality works around dates in the WBS, so any dates captured in a custom field will not be scanned by BigWave for this purpose.

Let’s take an example.  For our project we must deliver documentation for each site worked.  We want to track the fact that documentation was indeed delivered and what the date was for when that occurred.

If we want to put this “Documentation Delivered” date into our project plan, then it would fall somewhere towards the end of the WBS for the site and we could track a schedule date and actual date for this event occurring.  This is workable when we can actually schedule the date for when the documentation will be delivered.

However this example is different.  The site documentation comes from many different sources several of which we don’t have direct control on when we will receive it.  Our job is to compile it all and forward it to the customer.  Since it is difficult to give this event a “scheduled date”, we simply choose to create a custom field that will hold the actual date when the documentation is actually delivered.

Typically it is fairly obvious when a date falls into the schedule, but sometimes a date needs to be tracked and only its value is significant as a data point.  In these cases a custom field is the better choice.

What are the keys to choosing the correct level for my project?

You must tell BigWave what level you need to run your project.  If you have a simple task to accomplish for each site in the project, then the “Work Order” level may be the best choice.  If you have a few important milestones to track for each project then the “Activity” level may be the best choice (as in the example above).  If you have sub-milestones to track for each major milestone, then the “Task” level may be the best choice.  Most projects are run on the “Activity” level.

If you are unsure which level to choose, the best method is to start with the highest level “Work Order” and see if that gives sufficient enough detail to meet the demands of the project.  If more milestones need to be tracked, then move down a level and see if that will fit.  You may change your level as the project is worked, so if you start with “Activity”, and halfway through the project you need to use “Tasks”, then you have the flexibility to change on the fly.