Add materials to plan

A material is anything you plan that is not a person: a van, a meeting room, a machine. This page is for planners. You need to be a Planning Administrator. Materials share the schedule, the roles and the shift form with employees, so a booking of the van next to the driver's shift is one picture.

Create a material#

1. Open Planning → Configuration → Materials and press New.
2. In Name, type the name, for example Delivery van 1.
3. Check that Type is Material. The list is opened with this type already chosen.
4. In Working Time, choose the working calendar that says when the material is available. The calendar decides its Available hours on the schedule and in the utilisation report. A material with no calendar has no available hours, so any planned hour makes it Overloaded.
5. Choose the Timezone where the material is used.
6. In the Planning group, choose the Planning Roles the material can be planned for, for example a role Delivery vehicle. Choose a Default Planning Role if one fits. A shift for the material then starts with that role.
7. Save.

Plan the material#

Create shifts for it exactly as for a person; see Create a shift. On the schedule a material has a box icon instead of initials, and its workload figure is shown without a colour judgement.

What is different for materials#

• Auto Plan and open shift broadcasts only choose people, never materials.
• A material has no user, so it cannot take, give up or switch shifts, and has no email address: it is never notified.
• The Utilisation report has the filters Employees and Materials to separate them; the capacity figures on the dashboard count people only.
• A shift for a material still has a role, a cost and an allocated time, worked out from the material's calendar.

Next#

• Create a shift
• Reports and dashboards