Our solution
In collaboration with Citation’s in-house developer, we decided that the best solution would be to integrate an out-of-the-box scheduling tool called Dayback into the existing FileMaker system.
Dayback has a smart contemporary interface, but needed to be carefully stitched into the business system to ensure it delivered a fast, modern calendar view while all the system’s other processes remained the same.
The new calendar can be filtered in different ways, with easy-to-understand colour coding for simple usability. You can view schedules across months, or on a single day, or as a Gantt chart, or by topic. If you have a client asking for a particular type of audit, you can instantly see which consultant is available when. You can add alerts, bookmarks and set other rules. And you can see where the team is getting overloaded.
When we integrated Dayback with the company’s wider business system, we made sure the workflow stayed the same and the right information was still being logged for audit trails, eg, why an appointment was cancelled. We were also able to add further functionality – for example clicking from the calendar to view customer records.
Importantly, this was a collaboration. We asked Citation’s bookings team what features they would find useful, and built in their ideas. We also worked closely with Citation’s in-house developer throughout the project, deciding jointly who was responsible for what. We focused on the development work while he took the new system through a testing process before making it live, using instructions we prepared (read more on how we do this). This meant he gained a complete understanding of how the system is configured and can now respond to development requests in future.
