Hi all, 

I wanted to kick off a discussion about inspection scheduling and how you manage any amendments to your active schedules within your organisation.  In particular, I was wondering how you handle your inspections when a team member with scheduled inspections is off sick or on annual leave; I am keen to see how other people are using scheduling when this happens. 

Our scenario is this: We have a few inspection schedules (for vehicles, assets etc) that ideally we want to continue whilst a person is off work.  To give you an example, we had an employee off sick for 3 weeks and during this time they missed all their inspections, which ideally still need to continue during their absence. 

By the time they come back to work, these inspections are overdue and the next round of the same inspection is now due anyway!  My ideal solution to this would be to be able to reassign their inspections, say to myself, for the period whilst they are off, in order to maintain the inspections and inspection history/frequency, and then be able to switch this back to them when they come back to work. 

I’m trying to work around this, but we’re currently struggling a little with the current functionality of the system, mainly with the following:

• any changes we make to the current/active inspection schedule will only kick in from the next scheduled inspection.  For inspections which are monthly, this is not practical, as it means we then skip a whole month, and the person may be back from annual/sick leave by then! 
• The suggested S/C workaround was to set our inspections to a group of users so the inspections would be visible to any of the users in the group to complete, and so someone else can pick it up, however we’ve found that unless we assign a template to a specific user, then it doesn’t get done! Everyone thinks someone else will do it!  So we would like to be able to continue with assigning inspections to a particular user, just with the ability to change who this is in real time.

Ideally we would like the ability to:

• be able to delegate a current/active inspection to another user temporarily, and then be able to change this back when they return
• be able to do this without the need to pause existing schedules and setting up new ones as I would like to be able to pull up the schedule for the main assigned user and see one entire inspection history, rather than this be spread across multiple inspection schedules/users.
• be able to commence any changes from the current/ active inspection rather than the next scheduled inspection.  As we do not know when someone is going to go off or come back from sick leave, we can’t set up schedules ahead of time to counter this. 

Hope that makes sense!  I would really like to get your input on how you work around this issue and scope out whether it might be a potential idea for the product development team

Thanks in advance :)

Emma