Reporting – Allocation analysis

Allocation analysis found in the menu list under Reporting in the main header bar, provides data to allow analysis of how requests move through your organisation.  It reports on when questions that were allocated or reallocated, during the selected period, and in the selected staff location/s.

System administrators and Supervisors will find this report under System>Statistics>Allocation analysis report.  Parameters allow you to choose to report on just questions for a specific staff location (or all locations), and on Allocations/Reallocations or both that occurred during the selected period, or happened for questions that arrived or were closed during  the selected time period.

Managers will use this report to detect questions that are being bounced between staff or staff locations, to detect workflows that are happening regularly, where delays are occurring, and to be able to see why questions are being reallocated (because the report handily includes the Reallocation note!).

Here’s an example of the report showing one question that has had several reallocations.  The Notes column shows why the question is bouncing around, the Staff location column shows how questions are being passed between your staff teams, and the Allocated date column allows the time spent with each staff member to be easily judged.

The system will remember the parameters you used for this report last time, and will present those results on initial display next time you use this report.  This makes rerunning reports for different time periods very easy.

When using this report:

  • Options to show the records for “This month”, “Last month”, “Today” and “Yesterday” are provided, along with the Selected date option that allows any date range to be selected.
    This report may appear to be slow to run as it reviews all of the History records in your system.  It reports on all questions received in your selected period so, no matter what period you choose, you will see ALL Re/allocations for the questions that arrived in that period, no matter when the Re/allocations occurred.  For this reason, we recommend that you choose shorter periods when running this report – as the next time you choose to use this report it is automatically going to show you the results for the same period that you selected last time. 
  • Date type allows you to choose whether the report should show all allocation/reallocations that occurred in the selected period (to see all the changes that have occurred since last time you used this report), or all allocations that occurred for questions that were received or closed during the selected period (all the changes that occurred for questions that arrived or were closed during the selected period).
  • Service type selection options at the top of the screen allow this report to show just the time spent on Customer service, Internal tasks, or KB entries, or any combination of these.
  • Events allows you to select to report on just allocations to the pool, or just allocations to staff members or just reallocations, or any or all of these things.
  • Location/Staff allows you to report on requests just for specific locations (reporting by staff is not appropriate for this report).
  • The Question column displays the same sort of question summary used in the Open questions screen, that includes client contact details. 
  • The sort order is by question number as that is the most logical sort order to be able to review how a question moves between staff in your system, but you can use other orders by clicking the column headings. 
  • The number of records shown in a page can be controlled using the Page navigation controls at the bottom of the screen. It is best to keep this number small, or return it to a smaller number (say 20) after viewing a larger number as a major contributor to the time to display this screen is the volume of data that has to be sent across the internet.   

The [Export] options present the question and answer information in the same Export (Excel spreadsheet) format used for RefTracker Data exports.  As with all other similar reports, additional information is provided if the Export to Excel function is used – Item summary and client contact details are added.  Your System administrator can prevent the Client contact details from being included by denying that Function for that user.

Adding columns to the Export created from the Allocation analysis report

So that this report can be customised to your own particular needs, the Export function will export whatever additional information about the question that you want to define in the report_065.xml file located in the config\settings folder.  Your system will be distributed with an empty report_065 file but you can amend it as required.

Here’s an example of a report_065 showing how to specify four example additional fields to be exported (over and above those shown in the on-screen display, plus the client contact fields that are always added to the Exported data).

This file specifies the fields to be added as columns after those displayed on the screen and before the client contact fields.  The required RefTracker field names are specified using XML, so don’t be shy in asking your RefTracker support representative for help! 

 Client contact fields are included in the export automatically.
Be sure to take a backup of the distribution version of this file, as, if you make a mistake in setting up this file it will result in an error displaying instead of the report. 
And, don’t forget to take a backup of your finished amended file, as the report_065.xml file could be overwritten by a future upgrade.