Maintenance: Configuring & using service groups

Service Groups allow you to have finer control when creating Maintenance Contracts, in that you can group the Equipment on the Contract for servicing and specify the schedule and price by the group, rather than individually. In order to use Service Groups by default on the system, this facility must be activated by selecting the appropriate setting. This is done by accessing the System Settings area of the system by clicking on System ¦ Settings:

Then select the Maintenance Contracts – Use Service Groups setting:

If the Service Group flag is turned on, then an extra field is available when the equipment is added called ‘Service Group’. When the lines are added, the system will create a Group (Group 1) and assign as many items from the contract as possible to that group.

Using Service Groups on a Maintenance Contract:

  • On a new Maintenance contract go to the Contract tab, here tick the Service Groups option, if not already set as mentioned above:

  • On the Equipment Tab, add the equipment as required.

NB: It is possible to have a mixture of equipment located at different sites, within the same group.

  • To then create a service group, click on the Service Groups  button shown at the bottom of the screen. The system will then display the Maintenance Contract Group Servicing screen:

  • In this screen, you can specify the service schedule as normal.
  • You can also add Groups (They will be auto-named e.g. Group 2, Group 3 etc, but can be renamed as you wish.
  • You can then amend the Groups on the individual lines so that items that can you want to appear on the same jobs are grouped together.

NB: As long as the equipment have the same service type set up, you can then select it for the group and select a Next Due date etc. This will then pull all of the equipment through to one job, when the Update Service Jobs process is run.

  • Service Price: You can enter a price for the whole group OR, using the […] button you can enter individual prices per item which will be added up to get a group price. The tick box here indicated that “a per” item price has been entered. This can be unticked of you want to override it with a group price.
  • Target Hrs: This is the amount of labour hours this group should take to be completed.
  • The Active tick box on the right, is used to suspend any of the service lines you have created as you can’t delete from this form.

If you are adding equipment to an existing contract, then you will be given a choice of which Group to add it to (from a list of Groups already in existence on that Contract):

Checks are made to ensure that the group items are allocated too are allowed (i.e. the Service Type is available on the Equipment record) for all items in the group.

When you open the Service Schedule screen the Group defaults to the selected group, but can be changed as necessary.

NB: You can’t use Meter based servicing intervals on contracts using Service Groups. The whole idea of a Service Group is to keep the items together in terms of NDD so Meter based would throw it all out straight away.

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