Many lawn and garden businesses assign repeating visits to the same "team" or "crew" each time so they can provide consistent service and build a sense of ownership among staff. SortScape helps support this practice with its "Crews" feature.
The "Crews" feature allows you to automatically assign visits to a crew so that you spend less time arranging your schedule each day. If there are any visits due for a crew on a given day, SortScape will automatically create a job run for that crew and add those visits to the job run.
Below is an example of job runs for 3 different Crews.
Naming your crews
Typically, a crew represents a group of one or more employees. In the example above, the crews are named by number (e.g. Crew #1, Crew #2, etc) but every business has different naming conventions so feel free to use whatever names make sense to you and your staff.
Here are some some examples of different naming strategies that have proven effective for our customers:
Existing Names: If the crew already has a name, then use that. For example, "Team Blue", "Team Red".
Type of Work: You can also name them by the type of work they do. For instance, "Lawns 1", "Lawns 2", "Gardening".
Employee Names: Naming a crew by the name of a single employee who is doing the job run, such as "Michael", "Steve", "Daniel".
Vehicle Identifier: You can also use the name or number plate of a vehicle.
It is generally not recommended to name crews by location or service type. To group visits by location or service type, you can use visit tags.
Adding a new crew
You can create new crews when creating a new job run. This allows you to easily assign a crew to a job run at the same time you're setting up the job run.
Assigning a crew to visits
When adding or editing a visit, you can specify the crew for that visit so that it's automatically assigned to that crew on the schedule. If it's a repeating visit, all future visits will get assigned to that crew as well.
You can also update the crew for a visit through drag-and-drop. If you drag a repeating visit to a different crew on the schedule, SortScape will display a prompt at the bottom of the screen asking if you want to "apply to all future visits."
If you click this button, all future visits for that series will then get assigned to the new crew as well.
Renaming a crew
If you need to rename a crew, you can do so by simply clicking the action ("...") drop-down for the job run and then editing the crew. This flexibility allows you to adjust your crew names as your operational needs evolve.
Managing existing crews
On the visit settings screen, you can
rename a crew
change the colour for a crew
assign employees to a crew
You can also see which crews are still in use, delete them if they are obsolete, or merge them if there are duplicates. Regularly reviewing and updating your crew list will ensure that your crew assignments remain relevant and effective.
Adding employees to crews
You can add employees to crews so that the employees automatically get scheduled with the crews.
To add employees to a crew, you can edit the crew either via the "..." drop down on the job run or via the visit settings.
When you add employees to a crew, they will be instantly scheduled on that crew's future job runs.
If the user had set themselves as unavailable in the roster on a given day (for example, if they are on annual leave, sick, etc), then they wouldn't get automatically scheduled for those days.
If you remove a user from a crew, then they will be instantly removed from that crew's future job runs.
Migrating to crews
Older subscriptions of SortScape might not have the crew feature enabled yet. To have it enabled for you, please contact SortScape support.
Once enabled, follow these steps to migrate your existing job runs over to crews:
Create crews as it suits your business, following the naming advice above
Once the crews are created, you can create job runs for each crew on the day.
Move the visits from the "No Crew" job runs over to the job runs with a crew and remember to click the "Apply to all future visits in this series" button at the bottom of the screen.
Once you've done this for all repeating visits, SortScape will automatically create the right job runs in the future, and there shouldn't be any more "No Crew" job runs.