Hi Chris,

The item has to be installed at the site before you can do any kind of meter reading on it for mobile.

These MOE settings are referring to working within the work order itself.  Thus the item has to be an object of service within the workorder (installed and linked to the service order as an object of service).  

Options 3 & 4, the way I interpret the settings is that meter readings are mandatory only when there is customer contract either when the activity is completed (option 3) or when the order is completed (option 4).

Options 1 & 2 does not check at all for the existing of the contract so requires the reading prior to completing the activity or order respectively. Your assumption is correct in your statement: The existence of options 3 and 4 would suggest to me that 2 doesn’t require a contract.

Based on your case scenario, I believe your item is not considered installed at the site because it was probably removed or returned to inventory.  You should find this out in the logs of the item after finding it via Item Locator.

Hi Phil. Thank you sincerely for your response!

I am still a bit confused about what criteria make an Item “Uninstalled”. To me, this looks like any other installed item.
 

There was a recent site change, but it was before the service order was raised by about a week.
 

I don’t think it has ever been removed, or returned to inventory. We don’t use the inventory process in Alliance for items.
Is there something that needs to be set or changed after a site movement for it to be considered “Installed” ?

Yeah. That product is not an inventory product.

 

When an item is installed, the column item.item_status has a value of 1 and there are related entries in the item_inst table.  This must be the case as you do see the item in the installed item module.

The question now is why it is being seen as uninstalled in mobile.  It seems like the local database had it already as an uninstalled item at some point and did not get updated even when the new work order was delivered.

I would try to reinitialize the mobile client user to have it erase the local database and download again.  Perhaps this would send the correct information.

Interesting. I will give that a go, but the last change on that item was before we even brought these users into Alliance, so I struggle to imagine that they could have out of date data.

I actually just ended up logging in as that user on my web browser, fully reinitialized, and it still shows as uninstalled.

It seems potentially like this might be a Node security issue. The item does not show as uninstalled if I give the technician node access to the Site node. If I take away the node security, it shows as uninstalled again.

These items are going onto holding accounts in the sales branch node before being moved to the final customer after delivery. We had avoided giving the technicians access to all Nodes. Is that going to be the only solution here?

Yes, that could cause it as the application will filter out data not related to nodes which the user has access.  Thus it can’t find it, so assumes it is uninstalled.

So, these items are not deployed yet at the final site which is what I was trying to say they need to be installed first?

Not sure why you can’t grant access to the specific node to the sales branch  nodes instead of granting ALL nodes not knowing your node tree hierarchy.  You don’t necessarily have to start at the top of the tree or bypass all node security.

They are installed at a site, which is why I was confused that it was saying uninstalled. 
We will need to grant all of our preinstall engineers access to all of the regional nodes in our country, as the pre delivery site (eg, the sales branch) is determined outside of Alliance, and they will end up working on service orders for devices that have been sold by any of the branches.

To be honest, I don’t see any huge issues here. They are mobile only, so I am not really sure what the impact of giving more nodes to them is. We prefer that the Service Order be completed in the Node that it actually took place in, for reporting reasons. The engineer not having access to non local nodes means that any service order having the wrong node makes the order not visible to the SA, which is a dead giveaway that the node needs to be corrected on the SVO. If we grant them access to all of the NZ regional nodes, it introduces the chance that they will complete service orders that have the wrong node.

I will need to have a chat about this internally. We can’t control what site items end up on pre contract delivery, so we will have to agree on a compromise.

Thank you again for your help :)