OnForce v4.1
July 24th, 2007 by danaOnForce is excited to announce the launch of version 4.1 of our platform. This release includes significant updates for work order management and introduces a new and vastly improved version of our OnForce APIs.
h2. New Tools for Bulk Management of Work Orders
Management of multiple work orders is now even easier through the use of new bulk work order management tools. Buyers can now make changes to multiple work orders simultaneously by clicking the select boxes for those work orders on the Active Work Orders page, and choosing an action at the bottom of the work order list.
Deleting, voiding, adding notes, setting sub-status, and closing multiple work orders at one time can all be accomplished on the appropriate work order tab.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/bulk-tools.png!
Adding a note to multiple work orders is as easy as adding a note to a single work order. Simply select one or more work orders and fill out the note.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/bulk-add-note.png!
h2. Buyer Web Services v2
Buyers have long been able to integrate their internal applications with OnForce for some time using our Buyer APIs. Now, with the release of our new generation of APIs — Buyer Web Services v2 — buyers have unprecedented control over all aspects of their work orders. Buyer Web Services v2 offers support for the entire work order life-cycle, from creation to routing to closing and rating. And our new APIs give buyers full access to our new work orders and task descriptions introduced with OnForce v4.0.
Whether a buyer wants to completely integrate their internal tools into OnForce, or just wants to build a small application to handle specialized routing, its easy with our new APIs. More information can be found at our “developer site”:1.
Setting up an account to use Web Services is as easy as configuring one or more Access Keys in a Buyer Command Center. All current and new buyers have free access to configure and use Web Services. Stay tuned for more information about third party applications that can plug into OnForce Buyer Command Centers.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/api1.png!
For developers and system administrators, we provide a log view of all usage of each Access Key to enable you to debug and verify the security of your Keys and applications.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/api2.png!
h2. Work Order Expiration Email Notices
We’ve added a new email notice that is sent out to a buyer when a work order expires.
h2. Work Order Clarifications
Clarification answers now include the name of the user who submitted the answer. This name is visible only within a buyer company’s account.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/clarification.png!
h2. Active Work Orders Page
The Conditional Offers tab has moved under the Routed tab, to more accurately reflect the work orders’ actual status.
h2. Work Order Routing Page
Providers that are added to a routing list manually are now called out separately from other selected providers when routing or re-routing a work order.
!http://blog.onforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/manual-routing.png!
[1]http://www.onforce.com/developer
July 26th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I like the new additions but would also welcome - in a coming update - the ability for a provider to cancel out of a conditional workorder for unforseen reasons (ie: a closer workorder became available, sickness, etc.) I believe this will be a good feature to add.
July 27th, 2007 at 2:32 am
can we bring back sub-status on the active work orders page? And, sortable colums would be nice.
July 27th, 2007 at 9:32 am
When will the provider be able to specify geographic preferences by county/town, rather than ‘as the crow flies?’ The current system results in getting work orders for Connecticut that a provider located on Long Island cannot service. And I’m sure the reverse occurs for providers in CT, as well as in many other locations throughout the country.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:51 am
Due to internet latency could all job timers be set to 90 seconds from dispatch instead of when provider logs in? This really hurts providers with no highspeed internet available due to living in a rural area.
July 31st, 2007 at 5:47 am
Technicians that are in high demand and are forced to use the WAP interface during their workday are still not able to provide conditionals via the WAP interface. It is in the buyers best interest that ALL technicians have the ability to place a conditional offer.
I also agree that the ability to cancel conditionals would be beneficial. Currently it is up to the buyer to decide to reject (cancel) our offers; why should we not be able to do the same?
July 31st, 2007 at 6:34 pm
One field should be added to conditional offers and that is to add extra money for work orders that are way out of a providers work area. Example would be if a job is 45 miles one way beyond the providers work area we should be able to increase the spend limit to reflect the extra distance and gas. I don’t find any way to increase the spend limit for this at all, I could put it under another classification, but it just does not feel right since we only have so much time to put in the conditional offers. It would just be a lot better for both the Providers and the Buyers.
July 31st, 2007 at 6:38 pm
One more thing, the wap verification should be totally done away with. Again being on a cell phone and trying to catch a work order on the road is hard enough let alone trying to spell out piano, or pluto or some other off the wall word just to view a work order and accept it IF you get in there to view it before someone that is sitting on the computer all day long gets it. Just be smart, I can understand that the access verification is a good thing for the web, but its not practical and not needed for the wap. How many people will let a cell phone out of their sight? Then not to mention just to log in on the web site you have to have user name and passwords. I think the security access for the WAP is just a waste of time and programming expense that should be put to good work some where else.
August 3rd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I certainly understand the need to keep OnForce current and growing, but that said, I look forward to the day when an update is applied and works! Well, at least doesn’t jam us providers. Just last night (8.02.07) I received a work order. Routed to 4 techs. The lovely 90 second timer certainly did it’s job this time. Never showed up on the workorder. Well, maybe not never, how does checking under 2 providers accounts (myself and my company owner tried multiple times)on multiple computers (yes, I troubleshot everything at my end before placing blame!) finally, after 7 refreshes I finally got the timer to appear. Low and behold, the work order showed I was tech #16 to view the order! After 90 seconds I still couldn’t accept, reject or make offer. Then I was told it was accepted by another technician when I logged in today. The best part of this upgade is the picture I now have of this work order’s status! I didn’t feel so bad about missing this workorder after seeing those notes. The WO showed that it was and this is a quote, “This work order was accepted by another technician @ 12/31/69 7:00pm EST” As I am still working on my newest batch file, (timetravel4.1.bat) I would have been unable to provide services for this buyer. As I am quite confident many, many of the buyers would appreciate techs capable of repairing their networks 3 days before they crash, I am still hard at work on my keyboard! Anyone else interested in collaborating on a new venture? Maybe OnForce could start a new line of services. “OrsonForce”? “OnWells”?
I second Rick Nickel’s comments about WAP! Until providers have access to all the features of the website available through WAP, OnForce is NOT PROVIDING a truly “level field”.
All that said, keep up the good work OF. Maybe a bit more debugging time before launches? Maybe a 24 hour provider support number? OF is certainly big enough now to provide us providers with a few more resources and certainly a toll free number. We’ve done our part as providers to offset the costs of a toll free number at the very least.
August 4th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
It would really be nice for those of us that have our own companies to put place holders on our OnForce office calendar. That way we don’t have to check 2 (or more) planners before accepting a work order. I totally agree that being able to rescind a conditional offer would be great. Sometimes I put in a conditional offer and then accept a different order that makes my conditional offer imposable. I haven’t gotten burned yet but I’m positive it’s just a matter of time.
August 10th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I disagree with Bruce L about the timer. I think the way it is helps providers to read the WOs thoroughly before taking them, which helps both the buyers and providers on the platform.
I do agree with the others, that provider cancellation of conditional offers is a needed feature for very valid reasons. In addition, conditional offers on the wap.onforce.com would be very beneficial for users of the WAP site.
Btw, you Onforce guys do a great job at consistently bring improvements to the platform. Thank you for all of your hard work.
August 11th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
It would be nice to have an estimated figure for all your uncompleted work orders. Of course it would be less the 10% OnForce fee, or dynamic so you could make it with the fee, without the fee, plus your current balance, by itself, and like a ytd type box. That would be pretty nifty.
August 13th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
As well as geographic preferences, it would be nice to have the ability to set varied rates based on geographic locations and distances traveled (mileage rate addendums) – driving times are huge time/productivity wasters and the Buyers don’t account for this when they submit offers to further away techs - otherwise we’d see $120 workorders 60 miles away instead of $60.
Example: Job Rate $60
Distance to job: 60 miles – 120 miles RT
Time traveled to job: 1 hr 15 mins – 2 hrs 30 mins RT
Time to complete job: 1 hr
Currently:
$60 – $6 (10% OnForce cut) = $54
$54 - $12 (4 gals of fuel) = $38
$38 ÷ 3.5 hours = $10.86 per hour
Proposed:
$120 (mileage rate and drive time covered) - $12 (10% OnForce cut) = $108
$108 - $12 (4 gals of fuel) = $96
$96 ÷ 3.5 hours = $27.43 per hour
Of course, I would not take a job 60 miles away for $60 but I might just consider it for the $120
August 14th, 2007 at 3:07 am
My comments on including conditionals in the WAP interface has been interpreted by some as a service provider benefit. Although it would allow providers to submit conditional offers while they are in the field, the main benefit is actually for the Service Buyers.
Busy professionals that are always working in the field on contracts, are most likely in demand because of their abilities and successes. Meanwhile, some of the HTTP interface users are folks that have difficulty maintaining a client base for various reasons. Although many of the HTTP interface users are experienced professionals, some are not.
From the buyers perspective, who do they want to see bids from;
The professional field engineer that stays busy 12 hours every day, and is forced to use the WAP interface.
-or-
The guy sitting at home, with an open schedule.
I believe that allowing conditional offers via the WAP interface will benefit the providers and the buyers, but the buyers will benefit the most because of the inclusion of experts that will be able to finally bid on contracts while on the road.
This is an upgrade that should be high on the priority list.
August 15th, 2007 at 3:03 am
At pharmITech we find that the Onforce platform is generally excellent. I understand that Onforce helps buyers with the shipment of parts to HOLDATLOC Hold At Location selections. An improvement might be to have buyers ship the parts with a return label right to the service provider. pharmITech runs many jobs of this nature and it would save hours
August 15th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Those of us techs that have been with OnForce for a long time would like to have a way to contact the buyers directly some times before we accept a work order.
Lets say there is a work order that only one or two techs are qualified for but the problem is the job is 110 miles away and only a flat rate of 140! Now I would pass that work order up for 2 reasons, first I know the buyer WON’T increase the spend limit due to the mileage issue, and second its not worth the time or effort to drive that far for only 126 after OF’s percentage. But if we could talk to the buyer and try to get them to increase the limit, well that not only would put money in our pockets but OF’s as well.
And if OF thinks us techs would try to get side jobs out of OF’s system, well that is a chance OF takes with every work order put out there. After all it does not take much at all to talk your way in to more work while your checking off site with the IT techs on the phone now does it? To be honest there is no difference in the chances OF would take if they would allow us to contact the buyer before we accept work orders.
And if a tech is a good talker and gets the buyer to increase the spend limit to compensate for the extra, well OF will make even more money. No brainer there.
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:09 am
Flexability:
I sure would like to see more options when posting our hourly rates, and standard pricing on our profiles. Example have hourly rates, minimum billable hours, and maximum distance without extra charge. The reason for these would be that most providers out there also either run some sort of computer company or works for one, and each of those has their own minimum billable hours and maximum milage they will go. Anything beyond that OF COURSE is an extra charge.
I think OnForce should allow us to set our own minimum billable hours, and post a flat rate for extra mileage on our profiles. In my company we bill for 1.5 hours no matter what, and there is only a 30 mile grace. Anything over that 30 miles is 48.5 cents a mile. This is mainly because of the price of gas these days ( which is totally out nuts ) But if the guru’s at OnForce can help us set more standards and minimums for our service techs then we can all make more money and not have to pass up so many work orders.
Why not just make standards
IE: like can bill drive time one way as billable
or 48.5 cents a mile for anything over 50 miles
and minimum billable hours is 1.5
I don’t mind at all taking work orders for an hourly rate at all, but when the job is so easy it only takes 5-15 minutes to complete, well its a waste of time to drive 40 miles one way, spend 15 minutes there and close the work order out and drive back. With the current system if you take a work order for $100 spend limit at $50 an hour and the job only takes you 15 minutes, you will only make $11.25 after OnForce commisions. That is unless you lie and stick around for another 45 minutes talking or messing around to make a full hour or more. In my experience, time is money and the more jobs I can complete in a day the more money I can make. I gues we just need ways to compensate for things like that. If the providers are setting the industry standards, then shouldn’t we be able to set ALL the standards?
August 27th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Even to add a separate field on the work order page just for Mileage and how much they will pay for mileage because gas is not getting cheaper! It is getting more expensive and we have to empty our pockets for gas. It needs to be passed to the client as part of work. I’m sure at your company and all these other companies I work for off y’all system if you have to go somewhere you get mileage included. So if you would add a field to the buyers and they could put whatever they want to pay for mileage like i.e. they decide to put .25 per mile or whatever they want to add or they can do a flat rate for gas i.e. $15.00 FLAT RATE on Mileage. PLEASE I urge you please do this in the next couple of updates!
September 10th, 2007 at 8:59 am
I wanted to take this opportunity to post several things that have been bothering me since I’ve joined the OnForce team. I too like many others seem to have overlapping problems and have my own company and policy standards.
1) It would be really nice for onForce to allow those who have their own company to take advantage of the platform software without charging the 10% fee for customers we already have established outside of OnForce. Maybe we could pay a minimal monthly fee or something. Where our clients can submit word orders through our website and it goes into OnForce directly. Depending on what types of business infrastructure each individual has this could make things a lot easier in terms of scheduling and allowing us to expand our business without the fear of double scheduling. Which leads me to the next thing.
2) Provider cancellation. We should absolutely be able to cancel for several reasons, my main reason would be the fact that Buyers often times do not fully explain what they want until you look at details that are attached. If I see training and knowledge transfer there and it is only paying me $50.00/hour and I only have a $50.00 spend limit and it will take me 1 hour and then have to train. More than likely I wouldn’t have accepted the job because it takes a long time to train people most often.
3) There has to be some type of compensation for travel time period. It is almost criminal what many of these “BUYERS” are doing to us in the field of expertise. OnForce really needs to protect “small business” owners who find this a a good source of income but waste so much time. Why, because it has been my experience that many of these requests are sub-contracted because of the distance and cost to travel. So a large IT shop just sub-contracts almost everything and charges for travel time to get to the site, etc. With the comment the guy made earlier about contacting the buyer directly, he is so right. One time I told the buyer after she directly assigned me the job, this is quite far and I will have to charge additional for travel time this time. She expressed that the time starts when you leave the office/home and finishes when you arrive back to the office/home. So instead of adding mileage etc, just change the system where we put in when we are onsight to give us an option to put in start time/travel time. This would take care of several problems in my opinion. The abuse of travel times during odd hours when there is a lot of traffic. The 15 minute fix where you travel 40 minutes and only feel you can bill for 15 minutes. The explanation and justifaction of actually billing for the full time.
OnForce simply has to disclaim [To all “BUYERS” the time begins when the provider/technician begins to travel to the job site, not when the he actually arrives on-site. The on-site arrival time is relevant only to make sure you are receiving the best customer service possible and that your time requirements for on-site service is met or exceeded. The time to travel to and from your destination of service is billable time so please take this into consideration when figuring out the amount of hours and hourly rate for your “spend limits”.
So, I think dealing with the travel time issue is really a simple policy change and allows us as providers to feel comfortable charging when we close out the word order where it took 30 minutes to fix a problem and 30 minutes to get there and 30 minutes to get back for a total of 1.5 hours, instead of just 30 minutes. It’s just good business sense all the way around.
However, just as a note, I don’t charge for travel time to my own clients because it is really built into my fee, but my fee is much different than what I can charge for onForce services $50 versus $150, which the later the big companies that sub-contract actually charge their clients as well.
So, hopefully this can be accomplished sooner than later without to much programming changes, just administrative!
September 23rd, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I think the 90 second timer is worthless. What should be in the system, is notification to the buyer which one got there first, then let the buyer determine which provider he wants to send out on his order.
I have a Hughes system in my office, and when you connect on SSL it takes for ever for the page to load. The guy that gets there first can sit there and wait for the next tech to come in, then decide if he wants to hit the accept button before the others timer runs out. This whole situation is frustrating, and a lot of good techs just use other platforms.
I also think that using the WAP platform need to have a conditional acceptance option.
A flaw in the system, is that wap can be accessed via the browser, and a script program can use it to access the site at a very fast speed. If you are on a fast connection, you can beat anyone on the draw by a push of a button. (of course, you cant conditional)
These problems need to be worked out for the providers.
Just my 2 cents worth.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I would like to see the web interface changed a bit. Something like move clarification questions above the timer and the conditional policy below the accept button. I would like to see both the button and the timer at the same time.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:20 am
I would like to see links to the various web locations for downloadable Service Manuals for products in need of repair. Many times I know I could do the job with the proper service manual available rather than attempt to approach the workorder blindly.
Many printers, plasma TV’s, POS systems, etc have these available but the majority are inaccessible to the layperson – (OnForce Providers). Free accessibility would be preferred but I think a small fee would not be out of the question.
Just as techs have Microsoft and Dell training offered as tools by OnForce, I feel the availability of Service Manuals to OnForce Providers will enable techs to accept more workorders they would otherwise turn down.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Ted…
Bravo! Finally a great blog….