It’s that time of year again when we announce a major release to our mobile workforce management software, Unity. This one is for our customers — and we’re really excited to announce some brand new features, enhancements, and performance tweaks to the software. Unity 5.7 will be rolling out across our customers over the coming weeks, but here’s a sneak peak of the top new features that are coming.
Job Enhancements
Redesigned Job Pages
The Job Page has been completely redesigned to make it quicker and easier to view information about a job. The different areas of a job have been split into tabs across the top. The Page loads much faster, loading the areas you need, on demand.
The Job Creation steps have also been redesigned making it quicker, easier and more intuitive to add new jobs into the system. Advanced Previews of Job Locations with maps and integrated Rubix fields make job creation even more of a breeze.
New Job Status — Pause
The Web App now supports the handheld Unity software’s ability to Pause jobs. You can filter for paused jobs in the main Jobs List and job time calculation now automatically discounts time when a job is paused as working time.
Clone Job feature
Ever had a need to completely copy a job into a new job? Now you can with the simple “Clone” feature — you’ll find it on the redesigned Job page at the top.
Revoke a job from handheld
This one has been in the pipeline for a while! To date, once a job has been marked as dispatched, you can’t change it and if you need to take it back, the mobile worker needs to reject it from their Unity App. All this has changed with the Revoke feature. Simply hit the Revoke button from a job’s screen and the job will be automatically pulled from the user’s App. You’ll get notification that it has been pulled too — useful if a user is currently offline and you want to make sure it was revoked later.
*Your users will need a Google Play account to support this feature as it relies on Google’s APNS system.
Reporting and Management Enhancements
Table support in Job Detailed Insight
This is a hugely useful enhancement for anyone using the Table field in a workflow. Tables are great for capturing extra rows of information for one single job — but how do you report on that data? We’ve enhanced the Job Detailed Insight to make this slick and easy. This Insight now supports the ability for you to extract the rows from one or more tables on a job. The report changes to show one row for each row in the table and you can specify the columns to bring out from the table in your Insight. Contact our Help team for more information.
Huge improvement performances for Job Insights and Timesheet Insights
The Job Insights are highly powerful — giving you incredibly flexible ways to filter, report and extract data from Unity. We’ve made some enhancements to the way data is stored, indexed and retrieved — the upshot is that these Insights now run up to 10x more quickly.
New Widget builder for dashboards
When we first released our Dashboards feature, we were really pleased with just how powerful they could be. Because we built our Dashboard technology and widgets on the Insights system, it meant that anything that could be reported on historically, could be viewed in realtime via a Dashboard. We’ve made significant improvements to the way Widgets are added. Instead of having to manually complete the columns and functions needed to extract data, we’ve made this process entirely intuitive and wizard based, with our new Widget builder. The Widget Builder is accessible from the Insight that you want the Widget based on:
The new Widget Builder allows you to dynamically add the columns you’re interested in — including any maths functions — showing a preview of the Widget as you go. This means you can quickly and easily build powerful widgets, knowing exactly what they will look like.
Permissions
We’ve extended our entire user authorisation system to support an enhanced set of permissions you can assign to users. The existing permissions will stay exactly the same, however you can now create Permission sets that override the defaults to give enhanced access to certain users — or revoke access from others. It’s as simple as ticking the right permissions on or off!
Asset Management
Removal of Inventory and changing to Asset Management
This release of the Web App removes the original ‘Inventory’ features and completes the integration of Unity with Keep, our Asset Management system for mobile workforces.
Asset Management features
We’ve completely enhanced the Asset Management ability of Unity by integrating it with Keep — our Asset Management software. Unity now benefits from Asset templates, mobile updating of assets in the field, case management and more.
Assets Importer
To support Keep, you can now bulk import thousands of Assets instantly via CSV using our Bulk Importer.
Primary Assets for jobs
When creating a job, you can now specify a primary asset that details the job is for a specific Asset. This allows for advanced workflow functions like viewing cases for an asset, synchronising an asset’s fields with workflow fields and more.
Workflow Enhancements
Ability to duplicate workflow steps to other workflows
You can now duplicate a workflow step to a completely different workflow — useful if you’re repeating steps from a master workflow!
Lots of additional formulas and functions
We’ve been busy adding a huge number of additional functions to our formulas. Workflows our customers are creating are now becoming more and more like line of business applications with custom logic, validation and specific functionality.
Numeric text/capitals options for fields in workflows
Specify input masks for fields to force data entry in capitals or numeric.
Duplicate field in workflow
As well as duplicating steps to workflows, you can now duplicate a field inside a workflow — useful if you’re copying a formula!
The Next Generation of Work Management Software
We are committed to building the next generation of software to help businesses run their teams and operations more smoothly. This Summer ’16 release exemplifies our passion for investing in our technology, helping equip our customers with the most advanced toolset available today. Stay tuned for the rest of the year as we have some exciting developments in the pipeline!
– The Insiris Engineering Team
