Contracts and maintenance
A service contract says what you commit to do for a customer, and how often. Cereezer creates the maintenance visits from it by itself, and watches your response commitments.
The contract
Field › Contracts: a contract belongs to a customer and carries:
- a title ("Preventive maintenance — extinguishers") and a period — start and end;
- what it covers, as free text: what a contract covers is negotiated in sentences;
- optionally a response time (within how many hours someone must have left) and a resolution time (within how many hours the work order must be completed). Empty means no time commitment;
- its lines, one per recurring visit.
Its states: Draft while it is being prepared, Active once activated ("Activate"), Expired by itself the day after its end date (it creates no more visits), Terminated if you end it earlier ("Terminate" stops the creation of visits). An active or expired contract can be renewed.
The lines: what comes back, and when
Each line says:
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Site | where the visit takes place |
| Asset type | what it covers; empty, it covers the whole site |
| Frequency | monthly, quarterly, half-yearly or yearly |
| Generated work order type | the type the visits will carry — it gives them their colour on the dispatch board |
| Next due date | the date of the first visit to create; it then moves forward by one frequency each time |
The visits that create themselves
Every night, Cereezer creates the visits of active contracts that fall within the next sixty days: Scheduled work orders, dated, waiting in the dispatch board's "Unassigned" queue. All that is left is to assign them (see Work orders). A visit is never created twice, even if the nightly task runs again.
Time commitments
When a work order's site is covered by a contract that promises response times, the work order carries its response and resolution deadlines. The clock starts from the scheduled date when there is one (otherwise from creation): a visit prepared two months ahead is not late on the day it is created. The deadlines are set once and for all: renegotiating the contract next year does not rewrite the commitments already made.
Every hour, Cereezer checks for missed deadlines; managers receive a "Service level breached" notification.
The contract's end
Sixty days before a contract ends, managers receive a "Contract ending" notification. "Renew" prepares the next contract: same customer, same coverage, same response times, and a one-year period starting the day after the previous one ends.