Release Notes - 2022. 07. 06.
As Horizon Planner is being used in production for more than three months now, the daily life of the development team is getting back to normal. This month we were able to focus entirely on new features, so expect a long list of improvements. Main highlights are a new Dashboard view, CO2 calculation for helicopters, and an assignment summary editor.
Expiring capabilities
In Horizon Planner resources can have a validity time for their capabilities. For example an employee’s driving license may expire, and when that happens, they should not be considered having a driving license anymore. There can be a similar validity for various certificates or internal training as well. Naturally a project planner may need to keep an eye on the capabilities that would expire in the near future to take action in time. This ensures a versatile and well trained workforce that yields better utilization.
To support this goal, Horizon Planner now has a new Dashboard view where expiring capabilities are listed. The list itself is showing all resource capabilities that would expire in a given time frame and can be further filtered by resource name and tags.
Calculating CO2 emission for helicopter travels
The CO2 calculator integrated into Horizon Planner can now estimate CO2 emission for helicopter travels as well. The calculation can not only be done based on the distance traveled, but also the travel time. We anticipate this to be a good convenience feature as the travel time might be more easily accessible for a planner.
Assignment summary template editor
Since May it is possible to have multiple assignment summary templates. Ever since we added new templates for customers upon request, usually within hours. With a new template editor this job will be easier for us then before, plausibly pushing the turnaround time down to minutes. It also allows our customers to create and format the template themselves, having it look just the way they like with less time spent. The template editor can be accessed via the user menu on the top right.
More customization options in assignment summary
Together with the template editor, we added even more options to customize the assignment summary. Among other things now it is possible to include activity tags. They are defined by the tag category and Horizon Planner can fill in the tag value automatically.
Clone mobilizations without resources
So far it has been possible to clone an entire mobilization and schedule it for a different time. This is a great time saver for repeating activities, as you can create next week’s assignments in just a few clicks. However, for this repeating activity you may not want to assign the same resources. So from now on you can choose to keep or omit the associated resources depending on your exact use case.
Move activities between projects
It is now possible to move an activity from one project to another. So whether an activity was accidentally created under the wrong project or there is a major restructuring going on in the company, you can get things under control much more quickly.
More notifications
It is generally a good idea to give some visual feedback to the user when something happened as a result of their action. As create actions may not trigger any changes to the UI (for example due to filter settings), we decided to show a notification whenever a new resource, capability, capability group, project, activity or user is added.
No more automatic Gantt tree filtering
Previously, when a project or activity was created, Horizon Planner automatically changed the Gantt filter to match the exact name of the newly created item. Our intention was to bring it into focus, as that is most likely the important piece of data that the user wanted to work on anyway. A secondary intention was to make sure the created item is never filtered out by the current filter, because that would mean the user has no feedback that the action was successful. An unfortunate side effect of this approach was that this could change a carefully set filter that the user then has to set again.
We decided not to do that anymore and rely on notifications for visual feedback, and trust the user to find what the relevant information is. In case the relevant information would be exactly the newly created item, the previous behavior is still accessible with submit & filter actions.
Show details immediately
On the Resources view you can filter the list for a specific employee by selecting their name in the filter. From now on when you are doing this, the details for that same employee will automatically appear next to the list, saving you that one extra pesky click. The same goes for selecting capabilities and selecting users (on the Admin view).
Other features and bug fixes
As always, we have added several small usability features to various parts of the application:
- name and email address copied from the assignment summary in a more standard format;
- made more form fields required;
- single select entity selectors are much more compact now;
- added a tooltip to copy icons;
- report dialogs stay open after download;
- fixed a bug where mobilization color sometimes didn’t match the color of its assignments;
- show month names next to week numbers if space allows;
- usual styling fixes and improvements.