Capturing Hours in real time (time zone they happened in)

[phil_peatfield]

When we move more towards a decentralized field service organization, with a centralized administration team, it becomes more difficult to handle the hours for different purposes.  So for example a technician recording some working hours on site, local time being 08:00 - 12:00 but the centralized office is in a different time-zone (plus 3 hours) then the output from ServiceMax will display as 11:00 - 15:00.  Although the duration will be the same it's sometimes important to have the times correct also as we might well share some reports with the customer.  For example it's sometimes important for us to send the customer a summary of works, which will be compiled by the centralized admin office and sent to the customer along with an invoice or request for invoice adjustment but any report generated from the centralized office will contain hours 3 hours different from what actually happened in the customers time zone.  We try to also be as efficient as possible and capture hours for cost collection, billing and in some cases also for payroll, however the time zone effect can the correct outcome, especially if having hour (time) dependent billing or payroll conditions.

[cidalia_ruas]

Hi We have the same issues - ServiceMax is converting the Start Date time & End Date time of entries entered locally by Field Engineer, in Server time to store them and then translating again in Manager Time Zone for control. We are trying to control the entries made to not have negative values or non realistic time booking and finally struggling as there is no management of the real dates. 

[nschmitz]

Hi, same issue in our business. 

[elina_ristila]

Fyi @katja_tavi 

[rudy117]

We have exactly the same set up and its been a serious headache.

[dmartinez]

Any feedback from product team about this topic?

[cidalia_ruas]

Hi colleagues interested by this question : we have developed our own custom solution to collect time booking in which we have been storing the Real Activity Date independent of any time zone as it has been reported by the Field engineer.

From this custom time booking entry named GE Activity we are creating Work detail if related to a Work Order or Time entry if not related to Work Order : when creating these standard objects we are using the Real Activity date as start date time and calculating end date time with start date + duration as those fields are mandatory.

we have still some time zone issue to fix in the determination of the Timesheet Daily Summary from the time entries coming from the Auto-fill but we are testing to use the Business hours to avoid any conversion of the date during this stage.

hope this will give yo some input to unblock your situation.

[nschmitz]

Hi @cidalia_ruas  - this seems very similar to the solution SVMX implemented for us. But we are still facing some issues especially in WO debrief on Ipads. I am really wondering that there are several customers facing the similar issues and nothing seems to be happen on SVMX side to solve this for globally acting customers...

@mlounas @adrian_modolea - for you information as well - see our ongoing discussions now for more than 2,5 years...