Setting a date after the Requested Date and a Search example
Today a user asked how to make BigWave calculate the schedule date for an activity that occurs after a work order’s Requested Date. To make this happen is fairly trivial, but I thought of an interesting way to check the dates quickly without having to do an export or inspect individual work orders one by one.
To have BigWave calculate a date for an activity that occurs after the work order’s Requested Date (aka the “install date”), simply change the activity’s lead time value to a positive number. As you can see in the example below all activities except for the final one have negative lead times. The final activity has a positive lead time of 14 days.
After making the change to the lead time value recalculate the schedule by going to the project’s Schedule Options area and click the “Click to recalculate the schedule” button.
For this example we choose the first option which is to recalculate only those items without actual dates entered and click next.
Once the process is complete, you may be wondering about an easy way to check the results. We can do this with search.
Go to the search area and create a new search on the activity in question (in this example we search for “Remove Time D”). Hit the Search button once the criteria is added.
This creates a report containing all the “Remove Time D” schedule entries for all work orders in this project. If we click the “Modify Columns” link we can add the Requested Date field from the work order and compare the two side-by-side.
Firstly we click on the column we want to show (Requested Date). Then click the right arrow button to push the column into view. The click the “Move Up” button to where the Requested Date field is at the top of the list.
When you are done it should look something like this. Click the Save button.
As you can see below the Requested Date field is shown in the search results. Sorting by the Requested Date column will show all sites that have a Requested Date together, and you can quickly audit the dates of the “Remove Time D” activity!
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