Feature Friday- Locations and Sub-Locations

Why You Should Be Using Location Scheduling

Using Locations in InTime enables you to know exactly where all of your employees are at any given time. Say you need 5 bodies at an event, how do you do know if you have enough? The answer is Locations. If you work in private security, locations allow you to see if all of your contracts are fulfilled. If you work in corrections or a jail, your biggest pain point is usually making sure you have enough coverage over all your pods (also called post or station scheduling). In a police department, location based scheduling allows you to identify exceptions to the regular schedule, like open areas for training classes or extra duty and special event assignments.

Version 3.3 will bring a few changes to the Location & Station functionality. There are also a couple of added features which will make managing and organizing your locations more efficient. Please note that these changes will reflect with the upgrade to 3.3.

Stations to Sub-Locations

With the upgrade, InTime has combined locations and stations into one drop-down menu – both in Location Setup as well as in the Work Schedule. This change now allows you to use multi-level sub-locations for more precise scheduling of staff.

Let’s look at the affected change in Location Setup:

Sub-Locations retain the exact same functionality as Stations once did, however they now appear in a tree-like structure that allows you to break down a location to multiple sub-locations. Formerly with the Station setup, you were restricted to a single level.

The new sub-location set-up:

• Criminal Law Courts (Location)
  • Civil Court (Sub-Location)
  • Central Court
  • North Court
  • West Court
    • Building A (Sub-Sub-Location)
    • Building B

Where Civil, Central, North and West Court were formerly found under Station, they are now found under Location. The sub-location will populate under the parent location it belongs to, in this case Criminal Law Courts stands as the parent location.

Now let’s take a look at the affected change in the Work Schedule > Right Assignment Panel:

Where Civil, Central, North and West Court were once found under the Station drop-down, they can now be found under the Location drop-down. 

If you don’t want the sub-locations in view, use your mouse to click on the left arrow found beside the parent location. This action will minimize the folder. The same action can be used to open a folder which, in turn, will allow you to view the applicable sub-locations. 

Location Demand

A long-time feature of InTime is the Customer. If your organization uses this function, please take note of the following!

With the upgrade, locations and sub-locations that have a demand created will display in bold blue. For example:

Location – Effective and Expiry Dates

You now have the ability to set both Effective and Expires dates for all Locations and Sub-Locations. Former to version 3.3, you only had the ability to set a location to Inactive or Active.

If a Location is expired, it can still be found in Location Setup using the Date Filter drop-down. Set this drop-down field to ‘Expired’ and all expired locations will populate:

To un-expire a Location or Sub-location, simply just clear the ‘Expires’ date. Upon clicking refresh, the location will now appear under the list of Current Locations.

If you have any questions about the 3,3 changes highlighted above, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Support team.