V2 updates

//This is Andy's request and questions after his first impression of the application. These will be loaded up in the kanban board and worked.

Questions, Comments, Concerns

Overall I think it is a great start to our program. Seems to be easy to use entering and assigning calls. Here are my questions so far.

I need a Phone number and a notes section on the Create Call screen.

-Makes sense, I'll add that

Is it possible to have it automatically put in date and time when a call is created?

-The date is automatically recorded by the server, as well as any updates to the call. I can put that value on the page so its easier to see, no problem

If you can do this can you put a box on the Calls screen that shows either the length of time the call has been holding or at least the time the call was received?

-The easier of the two is to show the time the call was created by the dispatcher so I'll do that as part of the previous question. If we need to we can add something in to show how long it has been since its created time. I can easily get it to show you that time when the page is first loaded, and on any refreshes. But to show a continual time count-up I'd have to make it a bit smarter. Lets see how it works with the easier solution first.

Can you add a "Prepaid" option to the payment type?

-Yep, I'll add it

Can you also add a box for Price Quoted?

-Yep, I'll add it

Can you add a drop down for type of truck required? Have it default to First Available with options to set it to Medium, Wrecker, or Flatbed.

-Yep, I'll add it

Instead of number of calls on the Trucks screen can it be linked so it shows the drop off location of the call they are currently assigned?

-Yep, I'll have to think about the best way to store the data on the backend but its not too difficult of a change.

I assume the status on the truck screen would be linked to the mobile app and show Loaded, En-Route, or Available, am I assuming correctly?

-Yes, unless I forget to implement that :)

And the trucks on the map would be linked to the GPS and show current location?

-I'd have to double check with joe but its my understanding that the tables mounted in the vehicles will send their gps coordinates at an interval that doesn't use too much data. Once every 5 minutes or so. The hard part is making sure the dispatcher web app does a good job at keeping the UI up to date without required the user to refresh the page. Unless Joe has been holding out on me neither has much experience with "Service Workers" so we'll have to do some looking on that one. The minimum is that on page refresh/load, the most recently sent gps coordinates will be used to create a marker on the map.

May be too complicated but a thought, can you make calls in the que show up on the map? If not its not a deal breaker but would make it easy to see what the closest call is to the available truck.

- That would be cool to do. The problem is requiring the dispatcher to either know the GPS coordinates, which I would think would be doubtful. Or possibly hooking into a Google, or some other service, to determien GPS based on a human readable location. No promises on that and it won't be on the list of things to do until we get more of the app going to see if you even gain anything out of it.

Would calls disappear from the Calls screen when the driver marks them completed or would there be a button that I would need to mark them complete to get them off the screen?

- We could do either. I think the first implementation will be removing the calls from the page once the driver marks them as complete.

Would the calls then be lost or could the data be stored and become searchable for future needs?

- That depends on a couple things. Right now we are running on a the free version of Heroku (heroku.com). We are also running on the free version of their Database, which only allows for 10k rows. While that seems like a lot, I suspect if we do any auditing or maintaining of data we will fill it up in a few months. If you wanted to pay a little more (than zero right now) we can pretty easily increase all of this but it will cost more. For now we can hold on to things but we will need to know shortly after you start using it what direction you would like to take.

Instead of customer name showing up on the Calls screen can you have it show the vehicle model? That way we know what kind of truck to send.

-When you say vehicle model I presume you mean the customer vehicle model Which in that case we most certainly can. If you mean something different just let me know and I'll change it.