Daily Inquiry

The Daily Inquiry in ProTrack Warehouse is a valuable tool for performing validation of work performed; educating employees on engineered standards, ensuring delays are credited to the proper function, and to check employees for performance issues.

The Daily Inquiry screen helps you to see the current performance of an employee. In addition to providing visibility of an employee's workday, this screen provides several additional features for approving, reshuffling, changing, adding or deleting work from the employee's past or present workday.

The following table represents the various statuses an assignment would be seen on the Daily Inquiry.

^{Table 2. Daily Inquiry Abbreviations}

To access the Daily Inquiry screen:

1. Select the Daily Inquiry tab under the Operations menu. The Daily Inquiry screen appears.
   

   
   ^{Fig.2 Daily Inquiry}

Search Employee

To view an employee's details in the Daily Inquiry screen, the employees can be searched for by providing the following search criteria in the Search Daily Inquiry screen:

• Schedule Date – Past date or current date
• First Name
• Last Name
• Facility Name

To search for an employee:

1. Click to search an employee, the Search Daily Inquiry screen appears.
   

   
   ^{Fig.3 Daily Inquiry - Initial Search}

   
   
2. Type or select search criteria as required. Criteria fields are Schedule Date, First Name, Last Name, or Facility.
   

   Tips

   • To list the employees with First Name or Last Name starting with a particular character, type the character and the employees starting with the given character are displayed in the 'Search Results' list.
   • Click and select Schedule Date to list the employees for the selected schedule date. Click Search in the Search Daily Inquiry screen. The records matching the selected criteria are listed in the 'Search Results' section of the Search Daily Inquiry screen.
   
   
3. Click in the Search Daily Inquiry screen. The records matching the selected criteria are listed in the "Search Results" section of the Search Daily Inquiry.
   

   
   ^{Fig.4 Daily Inquiry - Search}

   
   
4. You can also filter your search results by selecting any of the column header links.
   
   
5. Click the selected employee ID link. The weekly view, schedule, and assignment details of employee will be displayed.
   

   
   ^{Fig.5 Daily Inquiry - Detailed View of an Employee's Daily Activity}

   
   At the top of the screen resides a graphical view of the employee's weekly schedule. The current day being viewed is always in the center, with 2 days prior on the left, and 2 days following on the right.

   Tip

   The centered date matches the "Schedule Date" in the center section below.

The yellow and dark blue bars illustrate the employee's schedules on each day. The yellow bar represents the schedule the employee was assigned to work. The blue bar represents the actual schedules the employee worked. Only days containing actual work schedules will have a blue bar. In the screenshot above, you can see that the employee was assigned to a schedule all 5 days (Saturday through Wednesday), but did not work on Sunday.

Also contained within the bars are the Schedule start and end times:

^{Fig.6 Daily Inquiry – Weekly View – Schedule Start and End Times Within the Graphs}

The date currently being viewed has a hyperlink. Clicking on this enables you to edit the Schedule's start and end times manually. This is useful when the employee did not work the schedule to which they were assigned.

Editing Schedule Start or End Times

Configuring employee Schedules in ProTrack Warehouse provides a pretty good approximation of when employees will be working, but aren't perfect because employees may come in early or late, and likewise may leave early or late. In such cases, it's often necessary to adjust the scheduled start and end times, with the employee's actual start and end times. This is accomplished using either a Time and Attendance data feed (see Section 5.2 in the ProTrack Warehouse Configuration Manual), or by editing the times manually.

There are two general types of editing you will do to an employee's work schedule:

• Editing the Start or End times slightly (less than 2 hours) to account for early / late arrivals or departures.
• Editing the Start or End times drastically (typically more than 6 hours) because the employee as not assigned to the correct Schedule in ProTrack Warehouse.

Editing a Schedule's Start or End Time

In the following screenshot, the employee was scheduled to start at 1:00 p.m. but didn't actually start working until 2:00, so it is necessary to adjust the Schedule start time by an hour. To fix this, click on the blue bar representing the current day's work schedule.

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^{Fig.7 Daily Inquiry – Employee Work Schedule Needs to be Adjusted to Start 1 Hour Later}

A popup window appears:

Unable to render embedded object: File (Edit Schedule.jpg) not found.
^{Fig.8 Daily Inquiry - Edit Schedule}

On the left side, enter the new Start Time of 2:00 PM, and click the button. The D.I. refreshes with the new Schedule start time of 2:00 PM.

Unable to render embedded object: File (Updated Schedule.jpg) not found.
^{Fig.9 Daily Inquiry – After Edited Schedule Start Time}

The same process may be applied for editing a Schedule's End Time.

Editing a Schedule's End Time and Transferring Assignments

When an employee is assigned to a Schedule that differs vastly from the actual hours they worked, it's possible that some assignments may have been associated to the wrong work schedule when the WMS files were imported. These situations are easily identified using the Weekly View on the Daily Inquiry screen as the yellow and blue bars will not match up at all. These assignments can be manually transferred to their proper work schedule using a similar approach taken when editing the Schedule's End Time.
In the following screenshot, on 1/10/11 the employee was scheduled to work a 12:30 PM to 1:30 AM shift (as illustrated in the yellow bar). However, the blue bars (representing the actual worked schedule) look strange; the employee's actual work schedules are stretched end-to-end, which indicate that there were assignments occurring during that time when the employee was not scheduled to be working.

Daily Inquiry – Employee Assigned to Incorrect Schedule
This single work schedule contains assignments that should have been split between two work schedules. Scrolling downward to look at the individual assignments reveals this to be obviously true:

Large Gap Between Assignments – These 2 Assignments Should Have Been Associated to 2 Different Work Schedules
To correct this, we want to associate all assignments (up to and including the one ending at 7:45 AM) to the previous day. This is accomplished by editing the end time of the previous day's schedule to sometime after 7:45 AM (perhaps the employee went home at 8:00 AM) and selecting the Assignment Transfer option. Click on the date who's work schedule you want to edit (in this example 1/9/11). Now, viewing the Daily Inquiry for this date, click on the blue bar to edit its Schedule Times.

Edit Schedule – Transfer Assignments by Specifying a New Schedule End Time
On the right side, enter the correct Schedule End Time (when the employee clocked out), select the second radio button "Transfer Assignments", and click Save. The Schedule End Time will be changed to the specified time, and any assignments ending after this specified Schedule End Time will be transferred to the adjacent work schedule. Behind the scenes, ProTrack re-derives the buffer split time (between the two work schedules) based on the specified end time.
Upon saving this Schedule, the next day's (in this example, Monday) Schedule Start Time will most likely adjust to a much later time. It will snap forward in time to when the actual first assignment of the Monday shift occurred. This is evident as the blue bar for Monday 1/10/11 is much shorter and starts at 9:51 PM now.

Worked 1/9/11 Schedule – After Editing End Time & Transferring Assignments
Now note how long the 1/9/11 work schedule is; its Start Time is still set in accordance to the Scheduled Start Time and needs to be adjusted. Edit this to the employee's actual start time as described in the previous section. The final resultant work schedule for 1/9/2011 is shown below.

Final Modified Worked Schedule





Splitting a Work Schedule and Transferring Assignments
There are cases where a single work schedule may need to be split into two separate work schedules. This may occur if an employee leaves for several hours in the middle of his shift or if he worked a split shift on a single day, but his Schedules weren't configured accordingly ahead of time. ProTrack supports the configuration of two Schedules on a single calendar day, but if this isn't configured before the employee works it will be necessary to go back and correct the Work Schedules.
In the example below, this associate was assigned to a typical day-shift schedule (6 AM – 6 PM), but went home for a few hours in the middle of the day. He then returned at 12:30 PM.

Single Work Schedule Needing to be Split Due to Time Off-Clock

To correct this issue, click on the blue bar to edit the Schedule Times. In the popup window, on the right side, enter the time that he clocked out and select the option, "Split Work Schedule and Transfer Assignments". This action will effectively cut the work schedule at the specified End Time; all assignments ending before this time will remain on the current schedule and all assignments after will be transferred to a new work schedule. The Start and End Times of the newly-created work schedule will be determined using the assignments transferred to it.



Split a Work Schedule by Editing Its End Time
Upon clicking the Save button, the Daily Inquiry refreshes back to the same work schedule, which has now been shortened. Note that some of the assignments were transferred out of this work schedule and are no longer listed on the D.I.


Resultant Daily Inquiry – First Work Schedule
To bring up the newly-created work schedule, click the Search button and search for this employee. You will now see two links for this employee for this day, indicating that there are two work schedules on that day. Click on the second link to bring up the second work schedule.

Daily Inquiry Search – Multple Work Schedules for a Single Day
Bringing up the second work schedule for this employee reveals the newly-created work schedule.
Daily Inquiry Header Field Description