Features and improvements

Asset Manager. Meet the full pack of location filters on the new assets list! Watch for the Locations dropdown on the filters panel — this is where you can filter assets by location ID, name, region, district, city, state or province, and country. Give it a go!

Checklists. Multiple enhancements to checklists are going live: the ability to create checklists for specific locations, mark checklist questions for invoice validation, and more! Your providers can answer questions when checking out of a work order via ServiceChannel Provider. All the questions and responses appear on the WO details page in Service Automation and ServiceChannel Mobile. Wait, there’s more — you can build a report in Analytics for all responses to checklist questions. Contact ServiceChannel to learn how to enable these new features.

Compliance Manager. Your provider isn’t compliant with your requirements, is temporarily out of business, or has a low performance score? You can prevent dispatching new work orders to such providers by flagging them as “Do Not Dispatch” in Compliance Manager. Once flagged, providers won’t receive new service requests from you. For more details, read Managing “Do Not Dispatch” Providers.

Dashboard. The keyword search is available in Dashboard 2.0! While creating a work order, type a word in the Keyword Search field to view all the “area / problem type / asset / problem” combinations that match the keyword. Pick the required combination, and see that the Area, Problem Type, Asset, and Problem fields get automatically filled out. To try this feature out, select the Enable Issue List Selection via Keyword Search (Dashboard) checkbox on the Request tab of your dashboard settings.

General. Security comes first! Set up your password aging policy on the Password Aging tab of the Security admin section in Service Automation. You can specify how many days an employee can use a password before being able to change it, after how many days the password must be changed, and how many unique passwords should be associated with an account before an employee can reuse an old password.

General. Two more languages in your pocket: Russian and Hungarian. You can set either of them as your default language in our ServiceChannel web app.

General. Updates for those who have the single sign-on (SSO) setup with ServiceChannel. When you click a link in an email while being logged out, you land on the ServiceChannel login page where you should click a button displaying your company name to get to the site from which you normally access ServiceChannel. If you are logged in, the link forwards you to the corresponding page in the app. Please note that how you log in to ServiceChannel depends on your SSO configuration. If your SSO setup allows this, you can log in to the app from the standard login page using your SSO ID.

Invoices. The Excel report on auto-approved invoices now contains the provider name in addition to the provider ID. Watch for the ProviderName column — the last but not the least column in the report. P.S. The report is sent to the email address specified in Admin > Invoices > Auto Approval > Send Auto-Approve Report To.

Invoices. The standard invoice report now contains the asset tag ID information, allowing you to check what asset is associated with the invoiced work order. You can download this Excel report from the invoices list.

Invoices. The WO assignee name now appears on invoices. Both on the invoice details page and the invoice list view, you can see the name of an employee who is assigned to the related work order. Also, you can quickly find invoices with WOs assigned to you by selecting the WO assigned to me checkbox on the filters panel.

Locations & Provider Assignments. On the location details page, you are free to enter the location open and closed dates manually instead of selecting them from the date picker. Here is the format to use: MM/DD/YYYY.

Projects. It gives us a hit of dopamine to announce our new Projects module designed to help you scope, create, and manage complex work plans. You can associate multiple work orders with a project and create a budget for it. As an admin, you can configure project types, categories, approval levels, and more in the Projects section of the Admin module. Drop your ServiceChannel representative a line to learn how to activate this module.

Proposals. Next time providers create a proposal linked to a work order, we add the WO description to the proposal form for faster reference. This description also appears on the proposals list. The other good news is that it gets updated right at the moment when you change it on the associated WO.

SC Mobile. Custom feedback questions can now be answered in our ServiceChannel Mobile app too. Should you have them configured for Service Automation or Dashboard, they will appear in SC Mobile as well — on the Review tab of the WO details screen.

Site Planning Manager. Fresh from the oven: new rating systems for assessing the condition of checklist items — “Weighted” and “Percentage”. The first method implies rating items as Great, Good, or Fail, while the second one allows providing a percentage-based rating. The existing “Numeric” rating system has been enhanced: you can rate items on a scale of 0–10 instead of the usual 0–5. For each of these methods, you should also define the Pass Threshold criterion — the minimum rating value sufficient to pass the audit. Learn more in Building a Site Audit in an Excel Template.

Weather. The weather is getting better! If you use our weather overlay in the map view, you can specify weather types for your work orders. You can do so upon creating and editing a WO across the ServiceChannel platform, including the mobile apps. The work orders tied to specific weather types can be found just in a few clicks — thanks to the Weather Type filter on the WOs list.

Work Orders. As you filter work orders by date (call date, scheduled date, etc.), you can now use a new time period option. It allows you to see WOs with the specified date for the past # days or weeks, where “#” is the number of days or weeks that you enter.

Work Orders. Check the redesigned pop-up window for reassigning WOs. It appears when you click the arrow icon next to the Reassign button on the WOs list or the WO details page. Hope you’ll like it!

Work Orders. During the creation of a linked work order (both classic and dashboard), you can select attachments you’d like to transfer from the original WO to your new service request.

Work Orders. For linked work orders that have attachments transferred from original service requests, you can delete any attachments now — invoice-related files are no exception anymore. On the linked WO details page, hit the trash icon next to an unwanted file, and confirm your action.

Work Orders. Haven’t had a chance to try and link existing work orders yet? Give it a whirl! In the overlay for editing a WO, you can specify what service requests should be linked. All linked requests appear on the Linked Work Orders tab of the WO details page. Not only you can do this job, but your FTM internal providers as well via the SC Provider mobile app. To grant this ability to your providers, talk to your ServiceChannel representative.

Work Orders. If you flag a work order for a follow-up when adding a WO note, we send an email alert once the follow-up date is reached. All recipients whose emails you specify upon adding such a note will receive a follow-up alert. We will also post a WO note once the alert email is sent.

Work Orders. In the map view, you can now create work orders for multiple locations in bulk. Select the required locations, and click Batch Work Order in the location panel, fill out the required info, and there you go! Let us know if you want to start using this feature.

Work Orders. Selecting recipients to be notified of a new WO note becomes quicker. In the overlay for adding a note, you can pick multiple email addresses from the redesigned addressees list — without having to hold Ctrl on Windows or Command ⌘ on macOS. Reach out to ServiceChannel to start using the feature.

Work Orders. Tired of setting the required filter from the ground up every time you are on the WOs list? Chin up! You can make one of your saved filters default now. Contact ServiceChannel to get this feature enabled.

Work Orders. Starting today, providers can manually assign “Open” work orders in any extended status to their technicians via the Work Order Assignment section of Provider Automation. Before, the manual assignment wouldn’t work for “Open” service requests that had an extended status.

Work Orders. The news many of you have been waiting for: we’ve expanded the purchase order (PO) number limit to 50 characters!

Work Orders. To easily track and manage related work orders, you can add labels to them. Labels may come in handy for situations that affect multiple WOs across your locations. When you edit a WO, select a label or create a new one in the Label field. Once added, the label appears on the WO as well as on the related proposal and invoice. Besides, you can assign a label to a Planned Maintenance (PM) service so that all WOs get auto-generated with that label.

Bug fixes

Admin. After filtering contractors in Admin > Providers, you couldn’t remove the applied filter. Clicking the cross icon next to the applied filter resulted in nothing.

ALP. The My Invoices metric on the Actionable Landing Page showed a wrong number of invoices and their total amount at your level. This happened to those of you who were engaged in the multi-level invoice (MLI) approval process.

Compliance Manager. Sending notifications to providers failed when you did it from the Certificates of Insurance Detail View tab. Email alerts never reached those contractors who didn’t upload insurance certificates. You can send email notifications without issues now.

Dashboard. As an admin, you couldn’t edit your existing overrides on the Override tab of your dashboard settings. The only option you had was to add a new override. Editing is possible now! Once you’ve made the required changes, hit Edit.

Dashboard. At the last step of creating a work order, when you decided to change the originally suggested provider and picked another company, the email address of the new provider didn’t appear on the page. Off with this issue!

Invoices. Those of you who have the multi-level invoice (MLI) approval process setup couldn’t view MLI rules and levels in the MLI Configuration section of the Admin module. Upon accessing the section, you got an error message.

Work Orders. Searching for work orders by PO number didn’t work right if the number contained spaces. For example, if you entered 123 PO number 1, the system would think these were four different PO numbers separated with a space. We treat such numbers as a whole now.

Work Orders. The choice is yours: whether or not to select the follow-up flag when adding a WO note. No longer does the flag get activated by a phantom or by the app itself.

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