Mittwoch, 20. Januar 2021
As I was asked within my network “How can we organize, distribute and manage tasks to all stores or only to some selected stores?”, I remembered the new feature “Task management” I read some weeks ago.
Retail Task management lets you create and monitor tasks that should be fulfilled by the retail stores workers – or as well Headquater workers. Tasks are summarized in a Task process. A Task process consists as a minimum of one or as many tasks as you like. All tasks have to be deployed to individual workers, to an organizational retail hierarchy or a individual part of that.
If you have 5 tasks inside one process, e.g. a process “Prepare an advertise campaign in the stores” and your channel has 40 stores, you can create the 200 tasks for all the stores with just a few clicks. So you deploy the tasks of a Task process to a single store, single worker or a part of the retail organization hierarchy. If you select a node inside the organization hierarchy, the hierarchy will be resolved to create all individual tasks for the stores under the organizationl node.
Task management is designed to be as easy as possible (aeap) to use, as task workes can only change the status, comment and|or reassign to other workers. It can be used to remeber workers for recurring daily, weekly, monthly, … tasks or to run through a list of doings for a specific business process at specific dates.
Before using Retail Task management be sure to run through this process of setup to successful implement an efficient Retail Task management.
Task management
Inside Retail and Commerce you see just a small area called “Task management” which has only two menu items inside. The “Task management processes” and the “Task management administration”
Task management administration
Inside “Task management administration” you define the process, which contains all individual tasks to fulfill a specific business process. This works like a template, if you start the process a new instance of the process is created and the individual tasks are generated. Add all your tasks in sequence these have to be done to the process. The tasks can be fulfilled in BackOffice or Store location depending your assign of Workesr or Channel.
Relative Dates – due date offset
Inside a task definition you can use due date offset from target date. As you can define a target date at the level of a process instance, may be the day a campaign starts, you can give a date to the task to be due e.g five days (-5) before the target date. So the tasks can be created relative to the target date which will be defined when a new process is started. So the due date of a task ist calculated:
- due date = process target date +/- due date offset from target date
With this option you can set tasks to be due before the target date as well as after the target date.
Link Types of a Task
For user comfort you can give every task a Link Type and a link. Users can jump direct to the link information from within the task. Link type can be a:
- Menu item (for use in D365F|SCM|C)
- POS Operation ID (for use inside CPOS|MPOS)
- URL (any website internal|external, e.g. to campaign description)
- Custommer account (jump just to the customer master data)
Assignment
Tasks of a Task process can also be assigned fixed to worker, e.g. a marketing worker of the back office who has to do prepare the campaign poster for all stores. Furthermore a task can have a contact person, e.g. if any questions are to clarify about this specific task.
To distrubute the tasks of a process you start at the process administration page and select inside the organizational hierarchy to deploy the tasks to all stores.
After the assignemt of a task process to a part of an organizational hierarchy – or manual selected stores the individual tasks will be created for all stores. The task does not need to be assigend to a worker at this point. Store manager can assign the task to workers in CPOS|MPOS and worker can then work on that. Store manager can also create Adhoc Tasks without a underlying Task process to give single Tasks to workers.
Task management processes
The “Task management processes” is area to work for daily business processes. You can the use the overview of Retail tasks inside D365F|SCM|C or inside CPOS|MPOS Client.
As a distributor of task you can monitor all distributed task, the due dates as well as the status of the task which can be
- Not started
- In Progress
- Completed
As a frontline worker you can use “Task management process” to work on your task which means to list a tasks and change the status the task. AEAP.
Inside POS Client tasks can be edited if the “tasks” operation is inside the GUI configured, OperationID is 1400.
Inside POS client tasks can be edited by the worker.
Inside D365F|SCM|C BackOffice user can manage all task that are deployed to the store. Predefined filter allow a fast search of overdue tasks and status.
Permissions
Retail Tasks management is integrated in POS permission settings and security roles. Every user of a POS will see all tasks that are assigned to the store he is working, the worker can change tasks that are assigned to himself, except he has “Allow task management” permission in his POS permission groups. To create Task processes a user has to be member of the “Retail Task management” role.
Conclusion
Retail Task management differs from traditional activity (Sales and Marketing) funtionallity as it is more easy, has less options and is straight forward to the main focus. The information what has to be done, what is the due date and what ist the status of the task is primary objective and a maximum of minimum overhead.
As we compare with activity management Retail task management is only the activity type “Task” reduced to a minimum of information and doings to maintain tasks in a distributed Retail organization. It is managed to keep it simple and therefore could be accepted at frontline workers.
This post was first released on http://dynamics3654operations.de, further information and more details on Microsoft Docs