help Asset Tasks Help

[Jeremy]

A requirement for adding tasks to assets has arisen and I am a little unsure of the best route.

So some of our assets are our teaching rooms, the teams perform room checks on these which includes checklist items and there is also some text input. I have tried to create an Activity Template but this does not seem to have the text inputs that we need (see below). We have 384 rooms so far in our system and wondered if you need to set these up individually or if there is a way to provide this automatically? We want to schedule these for every month and the team that will be assigned changes dependant on the building, ideally we want these to go to an analyst but these change per room/building.

I was wondering if anyone has done anything like this before and would be willing to point me in the right direction...

[Miro]

hi @Jeremy, 

Correct me if I'm wrong but what you basically wanted to is to be able to define task template with extra fields against specific asset?

[Jeremy]

@Miro yes extra fields would be great to add free text boxes, date pickers etc (like pcf fields), but it is also about how you attach these to the assets. Is this done individually are can you add tasks to assets in bulk?

[Jeremy]

@Miro has the idea of other fields in tasks been considered by Hornbill?

[Steven Boardman]

@Jeremy no immediate solution here i'm afraid.

We are actively working on lifecycle processes for assets, these will allow a process to be run on creation of assets and for the tasks to be scheduled through the phases of an asset lifecycle (classroom checks), and as these are process based tasks they would allow for the use of custom questions on the task and on the task outcomes, which in turn could be used in the lifecycle process as output params, for example auto scheduling the next task.   

We'll obviously provide more info on this, as the development progresses.   

I am not sure it will provide a solution for the bulk adding of tasks to asset's i'm afraid. 

[Frank Reay]

@Steven Boardman I really like the idea of the Lifecycle Processes as we are currently designing how we want to use Asset Management in HB (we are in discussions with Samrai). The Lifecycle is exactly one of the principles we have been considering. I know it is very difficult for you to say but what sort of timescale are we looking at for this - 2020 or 2021?

[Gerry]

@Jeremy

@Frank Reay

With regards to lifecycles, I think there has been some internal communications issue, I will need to follow up with @Steven Boardman to see where his above statement originated but in the meantime I wanted to clarify the story around whet we are calling lifecycles. 

During 2019 we built an application called GRC (Governance/Risk/Compliance) which as you can probably tell from its name is a very process-centric application, primarily to support risk and audit management.  In our development and subsequent implementation of this GRC solution we tried to implement automated lifecycle management around documents and other elements by plugging in our BPM engine, in effect creating a different type of process which we called a Lifecycle process, and in all practical terms this did not work very well, in fact it lead to a lot of confusion and I had concluded that actually it was not a very good fit. Around this time we also plugged that in to Document Manager to get a feel for how it might also work for that, again, it sort of worked but in a very unsatisfactory way.  So back to GRC, what was required was a complete re-think and actually we have now had to develop a whole new layer and separate engine for dealing with "Lifecycles" and these make use of the "Lifecycle Workflows" that we had already built, making the overall system for Lifecycle management quite a lot more sophisticated and complicated.   This is still very much work in progress and I have no doubt much will change over the coming months, so I am afraid I am unable to give you a timeline on when this will be done, but its also important to note that right now the Lifeccycle Engine is only being built to support GRC at this time, and both Lifecycle and GRC application are currently targeted at the Enterprise edition of the Hornbill Platform only.

For now I would suggest not building lifecycles into any short term plans you may have

Thanks,

Gerry
 

[Frank Reay]

@Gerry Thanks for the info and noted.

One of my main requirements in Asset Management (as this is where we get the real value from the tool) is for the system to automatically raise an Activity or prefereably a Request for an asset when it is approaching a key date (eg end of hardware life/support contract) from a date held within the asset itself. I am not sure whether we can effectively do that from within HB or if we need an external tool to monitor these asset dates in HB and raise a Service Request at say 2 months before the date.

[Jeremy]

1 hour ago, Frank Reay said:

we need an external tool to monitor these asset

@Gerry thanks for the update, I think that we are going to have to go down the route that @Frank Reay suggests and have something external monitor these to raise the associated request or task.

[Gerry]

@Frank Reay @Jeremy

Thanks for the clarification.  The requirement makes sense to me, and from what you are saying that is exactly the sort of thing that the lifecycle engine is designed to tackle.  However, there is no reason why a simpler requirement like you are describing could not be met using the schuedledJob API built into the platform, this would need us to expand the functionality asset management to make this simple.  So for clarification, if you have a field in the Asset called, lets say next review date, a scheduled job could be created that when fired, raises a task or request? Is that all you would need?

https://api.hornbill.com/time/?op=scheduledJobCreate

@James Ainsworth this would be one for the Asset Manager backlog I think

Gerry

[Jeremy]

@Gerry for us, we would need to go a slightly different route as we want to able to complete tasks like the start of this thread, but with extra text boxes so would have to generate a request with a human task so that we can add fields for the analysts to complete. We liked the task route as it prevented us from having to raise around 360 requests each month but it seems that this is the only way.

[Gerry]

@Jeremy

Thanks for the update, so can you expand on that? The analyst would complete the task which has some addtional fields to collect some data? Where would this collected data be stored/what would it be used for?

Thanks,

Gerry

[Frank Reay]

@Gerry

On the face of it that looks ideal for us so yes please. I have a meeting this afternoon with Samrai so will mention it to him.

 

[Jeremy]

@Gerry so in our system we have all of our assets (in this specific case these are our teaching rooms) once a month we do room checks which currently the analysts either raise requests saying that they have completed one or just fill in a spreadsheet with the details laid out above but with the additional text e.g. lamp hours left, any comments/issues found, but this is varies between teams etc.

We want to move this into Service Manager so that the teams can do this via a mobile device and complete the fields/checklist, there are around 360 rooms and 20 (ish) analysts that are responsible for certain rooms so the task/request would need to be assigned to the correct person to be able to do their checks dependant on room.

We would then like to report on the data, to find the rooms that need the lamps replacing, or any room that had issues raised against it. 

I hope this explaination helps.....

[Gerry]

@Jeremy

Yes that does make sense.  So the tasks route does make sense for this I think, but we would still need to deal with the data collected and get it into a reportable form from what you are saying, I think we have enough to at least look at what we might be able to do, but I would suggest this is definitely an asset manager application requirement. 

@James Ainsworth can you add this to the list of requirements to look at and consider for inclusion. 

Gerry

[James Ainsworth]

I'll add a change into our backlog so that we can continue to look and plan the requirement around this.

Regards,

James