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WinCan VX Job Management

WinCan VX includes and always has included a core function of job management, but many people outside of the HADDMS inspection world pay almost no attention to it.  This cannot be the case in HADDMS projects.  Users must always pay particular attention to their Job control, particularly when working on a scheme with multiple catchments.

When we create a WinCan VX project in any standard, we first setup the Project name and details, like this:

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Then, after a few mouse clicks, we see the Job Wizard, like this:

And the first box that we are expected to fill in (because it’s mandatory) is the ‘Catchment ID’ field.  Internally, this is known as the job key and is a fundamental data value to the entire HADDMS process. This should contain a friendly, easy-to-identify ID for the current catchment.

The ‘Catchment ID’ is just a HADDMS-friendly alternative name for a Job Key.

So, what is a Job in WinCan VX?  A Job is a package of work of any description.  Most often, it is a CCTV Inspection, but it can also be several different job types, not least a Rehab job.  Why?  Because in WinCan VX, we aim to follow the asset through its life from cradle to grave, and there are some very exciting systems and controls inside the application that can apply rehab solutions to pipes and manholes, and then follow them through their workflow and invoicing to the final post-rehab CCTV inspection.

A Job is a sub-set of a project.  As an example, imagine you have secured some work to inspect the drains at an industrial estate.  You create the WinCan project with the name of the ‘Industrial Estate’ and you send the CCTV truck off to do an inspection of the drains.  Of course, when you created the project, you also created the first job in that project, maybe without even realising it, but most likely you will have been given a Purchas Order number for the work from your client (goes in the Client’s Reference Number field), and you probably have your own internal company job number (goes in the Contractor’s Reference field).  So, this ‘Job’ has some attributes which are related to storing projects and invoicing.  The Job Name can be whatever you wish, and in HADDMS it should be a short key that identifies a single catchment.

Now, the job is all done, and all works on site have been completed.  Next the Rehab Manager in the office opens the WinCan project and creates a new job which is a rehab job, and they specify the rehab for these drains which can then be delivered from within the application as a quotation to the client.  This Rehab job may have a new Contractor’s Reference from the beginning, and once the client has accepted the price (maybe this is quite some time later), then they issue a new Purchase Order number to carry out the rehab work.

So now you go to site and manage the rehab using the WinCan VX rehab controls, and then you create another CCTV Job inside the project to do the post-works TV inspections and finally you do some more pipe inspections.

The beauty of this system is that all of the CCTV videos, all of the inspection data, all of the photos, all of the pricing and invoicing is included in one WinCan VX project, and when you are ready to issue a report on the post-rehab inspections, all you have to do is use the filtering tools inside WinCan VX to filter out only the inspections done on the post-rehab job and go to the print manager to create the .pdf report.

The result is that all of the Jobs are part of the project, and there is no limit to how many jobs can exist inside a single WinCan VX project, but good job management will keep it down to just as many as are realistically needed.

Why does this matter?  Because every single CCTV inspection you will ever do will always be attached to a job in your VX project, and in HADDMS we use this to our advantage where there are projects with multiple catchments.  We create each catchment as a ‘Job’ so that all of the inspection data can be attached to it, and at the very final stages of HADDMS data delivery when we export the data to shapefiles (see section Creating Exports for Delivery), the shapefiles are created according to the job data where each job is a catchment.

Furthermore, every time we use the WinCan project merger, it is normal for WinCan VX to create new jobs, so that you can filter between the data that has been merged into the target project and the data that was in the target project before the merge.

Here is an example of a HADDMS project setup with 3 catchments with good job control:

Notice that the Client’s References are the catchment IDs as defined from the HADDMS download shapefiles.

The Contractor’s Reference is the same for all three because the contractor only has one ticket number for this job.  The last piece in this jigsaw is that the ‘Job Name’ field has a simple code (it can be anything you wish) that easily describes the job in other areas of the application, and these will crop up a lot.

Don’t fret, most of this is handled automatically at the WinCan VX Project Setup stage by WinCan VX, but it is not uncommon for the job handling to become messed up when people start to carry out project merges from different vans, so a close eye must be kept on these at all times throughout the process.

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