Tier 3 — Quoting & Jobs

Auto-Scheduler & Schedule Health

Auto Schedule assigns a batch of unassigned jobs to crews in one pass, and shows you the plan before it commits anything. Alongside it, a schedule health banner flags jobs running late and offers a way to recover the day.

Applies to: all plans. Previewing a schedule needs erp:operations:schedule:view. Applying one, and applying a healing action, need erp:operations:schedule:manage. No feature flag gates either.

Prerequisites: at least one unassigned job, and either an active crew or an employee to schedule against. See Job Scheduling & Calendar, Managing Crews and Skills & Certifications.

Run Auto Schedule

The Auto Schedule button sits in the page header of Jobs & Crews > Calendar & Schedule. It is also on the month view, which you reach with the Month toggle on that page. The button is disabled while there are no unassigned jobs, and its tooltip says so.

Selecting it opens a three-step wizard: Select Jobs, Configure, Preview.

Step 1 — Select Jobs

  1. Tick the jobs to schedule, or use Select All. Each row shows a priority dot, the job title, the customer and the site address.
  2. Select Next: Configure. The button stays disabled until at least one job is ticked.

Step 2 — Configure

Three constraints are on by default. Turning one off lets the solver break that rule to place more work.

  • Match Required Skills — only assign jobs to crews with the required certifications.
  • Minimize Travel Time — optimise routes to reduce travel between jobs.
  • Respect Working Hours — only schedule within the crew's regular hours.

Advanced Options holds one more setting: Crew Affinity Weight, a 0–100% slider that favours crews who have worked for that customer before. It starts at 30%.

Select Simulate to solve. Nothing is written to the calendar yet.

Step 3 — Preview

The preview opens with three figures: Jobs Assigned, Unassigned and Avg Travel. Below them sits Warnings & Issues, then Proposed Assignments — a day-by-day timeline of every placement, with each crew's name and the travel minutes to that job. Times are shown in your business timezone, named on the timeline.

Read the warnings before you commit. Each names the job it belongs to. The solver reports:

  • No crew has the required skills, or enough proficiency.
  • A crew member is on approved leave covering the job.
  • A required asset is in maintenance, disposed, or written off.
  • The deadline has already passed, or the job finishes after it.
  • The job would extend past the crew's working-hours window.
  • Travel time is excessive, meaning over two hours.
  • The crew is already booked at the proposed time.

Select Apply Schedule to commit. When the solver placed only some of the jobs, the button reads Apply n of m instead and commits that subset. It commits exactly the plan on screen; if the underlying data has moved on, AxiomBlue asks you to preview again rather than writing a different answer.

When travel shows a dash

The scheduler measures travel from a crew's home base to the job site. It needs coordinates at both ends: a resolvable home base address for the crew or employee, and a site address on the job that geocodes.

Where neither end resolves, Avg Travel shows — rather than 0m. The preview then explains that travel could not be measured, and points you at adding a business or employee address under Settings. Individual assignments with no measurable trip carry no travel figure at all.

Older addresses may still have no coordinates. Addresses saved before geocoding was added were never backfilled. The scheduler geocodes a job site on the fly when it can, but a crew home base that never resolved keeps reading as unmeasured. Treat a travel figure of — as missing address data, not as a zero-travel day, and check the addresses on the crew and the job.

Scheduling without crews

If your business has no crews configured, the solver falls back to scheduling against individual employees. The preview says so in a banner across the top. Set up crews when you want the scheduler to treat a team as one unit — see Managing Crews.

Schedule health and deviations

The month view carries a health banner above the grid. With nothing wrong it reads Schedule is Healthy and 0 Issues. Once jobs run late it becomes Minor Schedule Adjustments, Schedule Delays Detected or Critical Schedule Issues, with a count of jobs behind schedule and of downstream jobs affected.

Deviation tracking covers one thing only: jobs running behind their scheduled time. It does not track budget overruns, crew overallocation or skills mismatches.

Selecting the banner opens the Schedule Deviations panel. Each card shows a severity badge, how many minutes late the job is, the job title, the crew, and the count of downstream jobs affected.

Apply a healing action

  1. Expand a deviation card with the chevron to reveal Healing Options.
  2. Compare the suggestions — Reschedule Forward pushes the rest of the day back, Reassign to Another Crew moves the job. Each states its impact in added delay, jobs affected, and the crew it would move to.
  3. Select Apply Healing Action.
  4. In Confirm Healing Action, leave Notify affected customers ticked to send the updates, or clear it to move the work quietly.
  5. Select Confirm & Apply.

What you should see

After applying a schedule, the calendar refreshes with the newly assigned jobs on their crews' rows, and the unassigned list shrinks by the number you committed. After a healing action, the affected jobs move and the deviation count drops.

Tip: the solver is only as good as the data behind it. Skills on employees, addresses on crews and jobs, and shift times on employees each remove a class of warning from the preview.