Updates on a ticketing system

Hello All,

we are setting up a ticketing system to manage a medium (but growing number) of instruments. Unfortenately not all service requests can be handled in one visit. How can the "actions taken" column be updated lets say from zero to several times. In the best case each update corresponds to a service visit date. Any ideas or similar problems with totally different solutions?

Thanks in Advance

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Andrée Starå

Hi,

Would it work if you used hierarchy with parent and children rows?

I hope this helps you!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

McMinski

Hi Andrée,

I like the idea. Could you show me how to setup the form to generate a parent and a child row?

Thanks a lot

J. Craig Williams

Problems you may run into with a using the hierarchy(for a ticketing system that refers multiple times to the same thing):

that the rows do not auto-indent,
formulas added by auto-fill may be broken if the user needs to add a new row,
it is likely not known if the ticket will be a "one visit ticket" or a "several visit ticket", so the formulas need to account for that.
the Form can not be setup to add a Parent Row or Child Row automatically.

(There's more, but those are the main ones)

That said, if Andrée responds with more details, that may be the solution (I am not opposed to it, just wasn't my first design thought)

I've tried to setup ticketing systems in Smartsheet and always need to resort to some outside tool to complement the solution.

Craig

McMinski

Hi Craig,

thanks for your input!

I am already struggling with your first pain ponit

Therefore I am open for ideas that might help us to have a complete solution!

J. Craig Williams

I don't often leap to this suggestion right away, but sometimes ...

This particular use case is so fraught with customer requirements that there is no one-size fits all answer.

I would suggest reaching out to Andrée or my colleague Richard at Smarter Business Processes (www.smarterbusinessprocesses.com)

Both offer 1 hour free consults and either can likely get you going after hearing more of the requirements and your current processes.

(yes, I suck as a businessman).

Personally, I struggle with reaching out to SME's myself. I have paid several and gotten nothing of value and then spent two weeks on a task that if someone would just comprehend my question, the task would have taken 15 minutes (true story andr recent)

Craig

McMinski

Thanks for the invite, Craig!

I have the consider this,and align with the team.

Andrée Starå

Unfortunately, like Craig said it's not possible to do it automatically.

I have a few follow up questions.

How many visits could it take?
How many tickets per month?
Do you have sheets or screenshots that you could share?

Best,

Andrée

Paul Newcome

A very basic thought process would be to simply use the row comments instead of a separate "Actions Taken" column. The row comments would track who logged it along with the date and time stamp of each one. It wouldn't be as plainly visible as having an actual column, but it seems like it would serve the purpose. Either that or looking at the cell history would serve the same purpose.

With the row comments, you can use the option to print only the selected row and add comments. That would give you a hard copy of the life of the ticket and all actions that were taken. I see they have also added the @ feature to the comments to alert someone to your new comment.

McMinski

Hi Andrée,

we will end up with around 30 instruments in the next 3 years.

I hope the ticket number will be low But a realistic guestimate right now would be around 20-25 per month.

Currently we are working on two prototypes. I will make them nice and shiny and share some pics.

Best regards,

McMinski

I see the idea of this, but I think I this way generating a report/dashboard would be much harder.

Seems I have to dig deeper into the possibilities of the comment column. Something to consider! Thanks a lot

Paul Newcome

You're absolutely right. It would make reports much more difficult to pull using the row comments.

Andrée Starå

Feel free to share them even if they're a work in progress. I'll see if I have any tips & tricks.

McMinski

Attached is a screenshot of a current grid for a ticket system.

Connected with this grid are 1 form, to enter a service ticket.

A request to update to select from a list of availabe technicians. When one is selected, the submitter recieves a notification and the technician a request to update. When the technician uses the form to set the status resolved the submitter gets an approval request. One additional information from the update form is the parts used information which the automatically reduces the number of available spares in the table "Parts List". If in the "Parts List" the number for each spare drops below a certain number the admin is notified.

Currently i am working on a way to insert more than one spare part in the update form and a printable version of the service report for the technician after it was approved by the submitter

McMinski

The timestamp is now done automatically.

Dynamic lookup of the available parts is now possible, now I am looking for a way to put in multiple parts in the update form.

Does anybody know a good way to realize this?

Paul Newcome

Update form. As in you are sending out an update request? When I want to join together a list of options into a single cell from a form, I generally create a checkbox column for each option using the option as the column header. I then retype the column headers into row 1. I then use a JOIN(COLLECT( function to pull all of the selected options together while leaving out the unselected. In the example below, the number on the left is the row number. The bold portions are the column headers.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Parts Selected

1 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

2 Y Y Y Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

3 Y Part 2

.............................

The formula to put in the Parts Selected column would be

=JOIN(COLLECT([Part 1]$1:[Part 4]$1, [Part 1]@row:[Part 4]@row, @cell = 1), ", ")

Assuming the Y in the example above denotes a checked box.

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