Plunet 9, the most recent major version of its leading business management system, provides a completely revised security concept for password management, increased stability, and a safe connection to additional services through API authentication. Our latest AutomationManager update in version 9.1 inspired our colleague Lina to write about her new favorite feature, which provides even more project automation as an additional step towards enhanced project management: starting the job request and assignment.
How does it help in daily work?
By adding the new process job “Start assignment round”, we introduced additional possibilities to speed up entire projects, especially the assignment process. The new process job enables the user to set up automatic checks, such as checking if a due date is missing or resources are selected in the round. These checks are very easy to set up when using workflow templates. In the past, the project manager needed to check all of the jobs manually to ensure that the mandatory information was entered into each job. By including the new process job, this step can now be automated, saving the user a lot of time and frustration.
The main advantage is that the assignment rounds of all jobs in a project can now start automatically. Even rounds that use different assignment methods can start collectively and the defined actions will be executed. This means just one click by the project manager (or even no clicks if you are using the whole AutomationManager workflow) can trigger multiple events at the same time. And even though the system handles everything, the user still has complete control over each step.
Why is this my favorite feature?
Automatically starting assignment rounds also opens up a whole new world of possibilities in regard to checking the suitability of the selected resources for each job. For example, when using Plunet’s QualityManager module, the system ensures that ISO 17100 standards are met in both the job sequence and the resources assigned to a project. For instance, a translation job followed by a proofreading job must not be assigned to the same resource. Going forward, this can be checked even before the actual assignment, during resource selection and setup of the assignment rounds. With one job handling all assignment rounds, it would be possible to add such restrictions to the workflow. This is just one of many possibilities enabled by the new feature. Restricting the possible combination of resources assigned to different jobs in a project and optimizing it towards a certain goal is a topic one could write a thesis about 😉.
About Lina
Lina is a Product Owner based in Plunet’s office in Berlin. She started at Plunet as a working student in Quality Assurance and recently graduated from university with a Master’s Degree in Media and Computing. With her background in both technical and creative fields, she can understand a product’s technical requirements while also considering user experience and design. Lina likes to spend her spare time doing fun outdoor activities such as hiking, biking, or simply walking her dogs.
