Release Notes - 2021. 07. 14.
This release takes the usability of Horizon Planner to the next level by making it very easy to set up a new project - complete with Roles, Assignments, and as you will soon see, Mobilizations. There are also a handful of new features still focusing on closing the feature gap between legacy Horizon Planner and this software.
Major features
Mobilizations
In Horizon Planner an Activity may contain many Assignments with different timing. This concept makes it very easy to model Activities with repeating Assignments, for example when you have to send five employees to a site every single week. Of course there is a connection between the Assignments that happen at the same time here. Planners think about them as a single entity and for good reason. Often they have to be handled together: these Assignments may be delayed, got deleted etc. and the last thing a planner would want is to make those adjustments one-by-one on each of those Assignments.
Introducing Mobilizations into Horizon Planner tackles that problem and makes it very easy to work with a group of Assignments. Essentially a Mobilization is just that, a group of Assignments that happen at the same time for the same Activity. They are represented on the Gantt chart by a line in the row of their Activity.
Users can now create Mobilizations by right-clicking on the chart and selecting “Add Mobilization”. Then they can decide the timing and select how many Assignments should be created for each role - saving a lot of clicking around.
It is possible to choose a new start time for an existing Mobilization; changing the color of all the Assignments in a Mobilization; or deleting all the Assignments in a Mobilization together. We expect that this feature will be a real time saver in daily planning tasks.
Improved Role creator dialog
With an improved Role creator dialog, users will be able to add many simple Roles to an Activity at once. They only need to select the Capabilities to add a Role for each of them. The Roles will have the same name as the Capability and will require only that Capability. It is also possible to select Capability Groups to create Roles that require multiple Capabilities.
This is also the limitation of the new dialog: it is not possible to add a Role that requires multiple Capabilities without having them in a Capability Group first. Allowing that would result in a complicated UI that we would rather avoid here, as our goal with this feature is to simplify a common use-case. For that purpose the good old Role creator is available under “Add Complex Role”.
Invite Resources as Users
In Horizon Planner Users and Resources are very different entities. Users are typically the project planners using the application, sending the Resources to various Assignments in the process. However it is possible to link a User to a Resource allowing the User to access the Dashboard of that Resource. There they can see their upcoming assignments, contact data, etc. The idea behind this is to allow non-privileged users (possibly all employees of a company) to access the system and see their upcoming assignments.
Now it is possible to invite a Resource to be a User of the application and access only this basic functionality. You can find an “Invite User” button on the Info card of a Resource to do that.
Filter for multiple Capabilities
On the Timetables (the chart below the Gantt chart) users can filter the shown Resources by their Capabilities. Now it is possible to filter for multiple Capabilities, not just one - showing the Resources that possess all those Capabilities.
Another related feature is that this filter can now easily be set to match the Capability requirement of a Role. In the “dot menu” of a Role there is a “Show Resources” action that will set this filter (for a single or multiple capabilities, whatever the Role requires).
Notes
In the previous release we made it possible to attach files to Projects, Activities and Resources. But sometimes you just need to take a note quickly and have it in an easily accessible place to look at. Now you can add these notes (without having to attach a text file). Project and Activity notes are shown in a tooltip on the Gantt chart, while Resource notes have their own card on the Resources view.
Accounting for rest time
Employees may have to take a rest after a more demanding task before they can get back to working. This rest time may be due to a company policy, but it could also be law that a planner needs to follow. So Horizon Planner should have some built in mechanism to track this, and now it does. All Assignments have a “busy time window” during which the assigned Resource is considered unavailable. By default it is the same as the time window of the Assignment itself - no additional rest is needed.
At certain, more demanding Activities a planner may specify how the busy time window is calculated. For now the only calculation method is to have it as some percentage of the Assignment duration.
On the image above you can see how the rest period is indicated on our charts (red line). Horizon Planner will also consider Resources unavailable during their rest time, providing the necessary warnings to the planner.
Minor features
- Show colors for Resources/Capabilities etc. in dropdowns.
- Default colors for Project, Activity, Role, Assignment, Holiday.
- Show CO2 emission estimates in AssignmentEditor.
- Layout and styling updates.