SchedulingI had the pleasure of chatting with Trevor Dunsford, a software developer from Canadian based Bison Transport last week.  The topic of our discussion was a software application they had written to extend TMW Systems TMWSuite application to allow advanced appointment scheduling.

TMW’s Order Entry application leaves a little to be desired when it comes to the ability to optimize the appointment scheduling process.  The scheduling abilities in Order Entry are confusing and not intuitive.  It also doesn’t take into account any sort of ability to administer appointment workflow when multiple people are responsible for setting appointments.  Bison realized this gap and took matters into their own hands by developing a slick add on application they call the Appointment Queue (AQ) .  Trevor has written a nice blog entry detailing the application.

You can kind of get an idea of how the application works by reading through his blog entry, but after having seen it in action first hand with a demo he did for myself and our VP of operations, a simple screenshot doesn’t do it justice.   They have packed it full of a number of different features and best of all it is laid out in an intuitive fashion that is easy to understand.

Bison Appointment QueueThe application is workflow driven, so you can setup one or more custom queues for customer service reps to work from. We want to be able to get creative on how we divide scheduling assignments up in addition to still leveraging the order information stored within TMW, which is exactly what this tool does.

Reps work from their specified queue(s) and set appointments making updates in the tool which feed back to TMW.  One really nice feature of the application is that it is setup to document the interactions that occur during the scheduling process, including exceptions such as not being able to get in touch with the appropriate party to make an appointment. It also shows statistics about receiving windows and feeds in notes and other data from TMW making it a truly integrated solution.

Bison is currently exploring avenues of making this application available to other TMWSuite users, so if you’re interested, it’s probably worth exploring some more.  It didn’t take me to long to figure out that Bison is a technology savvy trucking company with some bright IT talent!

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