Clear job deadline, multiple change - Classic
When a project comes into the Client Portal, all of the job 'deadlines' are populated. Since it comes in as a quote, these deadlines are not even valid. But these are also showing up in the vendor portal as pending jobs, which is misleading to vendors. Currently, the only way to clear these dates is by manually updating each and every job, within the workflow. When you have 19 languages and many jobs (since it has to go to DTP as well), this can take hours.
Is there a way to do a multiple change to 'clear' the deadline? If so, please advise how you can do this, as we can only 'add' a deadline in multiple change, not clear it.
Another option would be to have
1) the deadlines NOT auto-populate, especially since you can not directly add a project (you must add a quote),
or
2) have an option to populate the deadlines - yes or no. I hope someone has a suggestion!
Best, Mindy
Customer support service by UserEcho
Why are the jobs showing up in the Vendor Portal at the quote stage as pending?
Do you have them assigned to people from the very start?
Yes. We add the linguists to the jobs, when the project is quoted, so we are quicker getting the projects out to linguists for translation. The majority of our quotes turn into orders, so this saves us time when the client provides their approval.
When you have 19 - 45 languages per project, it's much faster to use the time while you are waiting on the client, compared to when the client gives approval to start.
I understand the reason now, but whether the deadline is blank, or just a preliminary one, it doesn't matter for the vendor, because it is simply not confirmed. Jobs may start early or late and so the dates get corrected all the time for other reasons.
Unfortunately, we can't make XTRF stop assigning dates to jobs sent from Client Portal, but if you ask me, I'd say your vendors should simply be aware of pending jobs' dates may change.
Forgive me, but that is really your answer? It takes WAY too many clicks to reschedule these jobs, to get ACCURATE data. I'm asking you, 1) if a project comes thru as a quote, which auto-populates those deadlines (in EVERY job), but it takes the client a couple days to approve the quote a) the dates will not recalculate from the actual 'order' date and b) there is no way to clear the dates via a multiple change? In essence, you are telling me to advise my vendors, the XTRF data is false, but XTRF doesn't care, you're supposed to know that the dates will change. Apparently, our goal in working with our vendors, advising them when something is coming, is extremely unusual in the localization industry.
When you convert a quote into a project, you get the option to change start date & deadline, including for tasks, and automatically recalculate the job dates. If your workflow definitions contains weights for each job, shouldn't that do the trick to create realistic job dates?