Creating Jobs from a Spreadsheet

Very commonly, when external contractors visit they leave a spreadsheet containing a list of all of the devices that they serviced during the visit. This spreadsheet will generally include a list of equipment serial numbers, but often other data is included as well.

For example, the spreadsheet provided by O2SM (Oxygen Suction Management) includes: Serial Numbers, Equipment Numbers, Date Serviced, Location and Notes.

Another situation where spreadsheets can be useful is if an engineer uses a PDA to scan every device that he has just serviced in a ward. It is very simple to configure a PDA to write the scanned equipment numbers to a spreadsheet.

Given such a spreadsheet E-Quip now has a mechanism to import this data. This does the following:

1. Creates a Project containing the details of who did the import, and when. This gives a simple way of finding all jobs created during an import. The name of the project will always be “Job Import: dd-mmm-yyyy“. If you want to retain the original information simply attach the spreadsheet to the project. Even better, if the contractor has given you a Rigel 288 Med-eBase database download of any test results,  attach this to the project. If you do this, both the original spreadsheet and the Rigel results will be available from every job created during the visit.

2. Creates a job for each device in the spreadsheet. Each job is linked to the project. If you want to easily find all of these jobs just type “dd-mmm-yyy” in Look For and search by Project.

3. For each job, creates a job test record if the spreadsheet contains test equipment details.

What Data Can you Import?

E-Quip currently supports the following fields in the job import:

Equipment No
Serial No
Location (where the device was actually found)
Job Type
Job Status
Work Start Date
Work End Date
Planned Date
Reported Fault
Work Done
Notes
Test Equipment Number

You must select for import either Equipment or Serial No. Any spreadsheet rows which have neither of these will be ignored and a job will not be created. Similarly, if the spreadsheet contains an equipment number that does not exist in your database a job will not be created.

Apart from this, if the spreadsheet contains any invalid data, such as an invalid job type or location, then a job will be created but the invalid data will be ignored. i.e. the job will be created but without the job type, location etc.)

We hope that you find this useful, and would welcome any feedback or suggestions for improvements.