+5
Vendor availability accuracy
Vendor availability is a useful parameter for PMs when planning projects. Based on the productivity of each vendor and the assigned jobs, the remaining availability for the vendor is displayed as a graph or percentage. Has anyone else come across the following issues and are these bugs or is there a workaround?
- If a job is accepted but does not specify a volume yet (e.g. project announced by customer without volume info), the availability of the vendor for the estimated time period of the job is completely blocked, i.e. the availability is down to 0%. The same is true for editing jobs that are specified/billed by the hour once the job is finished. Rather than completely blocking the vendor availability when the volume of the job is not known yet, the availability should either remain unaffected (until volume is entered for the job) or a more sophisticated indicator for unspecified volumes is used (color, pattern, asterisk, etc.).
- Vacation days entered by vendors block the availability on those days. The current issue is that XTRF does not use calendar days (e.g. June 20) but hourly ranges (e.g. 00:01 to 23:59 of June 20) for this blocking action. Due to different time zones, one vacation day as entered by the vendor now registers as two vacation days in the Home Portal (e.g. June 20 and 21). I believe this is a known issue, as the time zone bug has been on the list for a long time. But since development seems to be driven by voting now, I wanted to get this out to the UE community.
Customer support service by UserEcho
UPDATE:
Bullet 2 definitely relates to the time zone issue described in the original comment. This issue has been known to XTRF for over a year and is still not fixed! Unless we get some voices and activity here, who knows how long it will take to get this fixed. So, let's hear it.
Bullet 1 is still an issue and based on this latest answer from the Product Owner (I guess that's Marek nowadays? Where is Lukasz?), XTRF does not see the problem with this behavior. So, is everyone OK with having a small announced job of e.g. 100 words block your vendor's availability for e.g. 3 complete days?!? If you haven't noticed, that is exactly what happens right now. That makes the Volume field pretty useless for planning purposes.
"Availability by productivity uses only the quantity from the Payable
assigned to that particular Vendor. Not the project Volume. If the
quantity in the payable is 0 and the system is not able to calculate the
percentage the availability by productivity acts as regular
Availability, shows that the Vendor is preoccupied. This is a designed
system feature, not a bug. Availability by productivity should give you
precise data about available Vendor capacity.
Project Volume is, first of all, an estimation that does not have to
reflect actual workload in the project, second of all would give you
false data for projects where more than Vendors are in involved in a
particular process stage (e.g. 3 translators are translating in
parallel).
At some point, we plan to introduce the possibility to use project
Volume for automatic creation of payable. But even then the availability
by productivity will work the same as it does now. It will calculate
using payable quantity."