To provide a scheduling tool for tasks that in turn integrates with MS Outlook Calendar, but also with Sage 200 Project Accounting and Sage 200 CRM. The current WTE assumes that all work is carried out against cost buckets of project item(s). In real life there is typically a Project Manager or scheduler person who creates one or more tasks, each of which relate to a cost bucket. For example there may be a cost bucket for Consultancy but within this aretasks of Install Sage 200, Configure Accounting System Manager, Provide Sales Ledger Training etc. The extension would be to provide a resource planner grid of resources versus time (hours or days) and to drag and drop tasks onto this grid. This would be carried out by aforesaid scheduler or PM and would be their mechanism to organise work. This might be an existing product Sage integrates with or one to build from scratch. It is analogous to Preactor&s tool with Works Order planning but for a service industry business. Typically there are complexities around scheduling for specific skill sets and scheduling based on dependencies so there would need to be an ability to filter and sequence tasks. The change to WTE would be to providean ability (andoption)to confirm the completion of tasks as opposed to assign time to cost buckets. The change to Sage 200 reporting would be to use the scheduling data to generate GANTTcharts. Ideally also an MS Project Output. This would make Project Accounting much more meaningful and useful to operations staff whereas it is currently a niche product largely for managing job costs, budgets and billing with some analysis capability. Integration with Sage 200 CRM could and would also work extremely well with a new Project Entity that returns data about the project to non operations people. But for operations people provide integration oftasks (since operations people may carry out a mix of project related and non-project related tasks,but also allow for the storage of communications against company, person and project as well as productivity functionality such as templates, workflow and escalations. I am not aware of another ERP/CRM provider with this capability. In my experience it is a fairly common requirement.
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