In our daily work, we are usually challenged by a multitude of tasks with a wide range of priorities. Keeping track of these tasks is difficult and requires a high degree of organization and self-discipline. Nothing is worse than a workplace full of handwritten notes and post-its or many self-managed Excel lists with which we try to fight our way through our tasks.
With activity planning, the open source ERP system Odoo offers us a clever and user-friendly solution to improve our self-organization and to distribute tasks within our team. In our blog posts about the Odoo module Employees and the tips for working effectively with Odoo we have already briefly discussed activity planning. In today's blog, we'll take a closer look at activity planning in Odoo and show how Odoo helps us organize our tasks effectively using activity planning.
Activities in Odoo are a kind of template with which we can assign tasks of a certain type to a user of our company and schedule them. We can basically create the activities on any object that has the chatter with the message and note function. These are for example contacts, sales opportunities, purchase and sales orders, tasks of a project or employee objects.
In certain objects, for example a sales opportunity or a sales order, we have the additional possibility to create the activities via the Kanban view.
When creating an activity, we first select an activity type. Activity types are, for example, e-mails, calls or to do's and serve us to distinguish different tasks and can be filtered or grouped later. In addition to a short summary of the activity, we select the date on which the task is to be completed, and assign the task to a user in our company. Finally, Odoo provides us with a text field in which we can specify the task. This is especially useful if we are creating the activity for one of our colleagues.
After creating an activity for one of our colleagues, this user receives a notification in Odoo about the activity assigned to him. Now we have the possibility to mark the activity as done, to edit it or to cancel it. If we mark an activity as done, we can still give a short feedback about it in a text field. In addition, we can directly schedule a new activity in this "wizzard".
There are two ways to get an overview of the activities. Firstly, each user has an overview of their own activities via the clock icon in the top menu bar. This shows which activities are in the past, which activities are pending on the current day and which activities are in the future. In addition, the object in which the activities were created is displayed.
In addition, in some modules, for example in the Contacts, Customer Management, Purchasing and Sales modules, there is an overview of the activities of all users. These activities refer exclusively to the module in which we call up the overview. Here, it is shown to which user an activity was assigned with which activity type and on which date.
Late activities are displayed in red, today's activities in orange and future activities in green. In addition, we can also create new activities in this overview and edit, delete or mark as done already existing activities.
Within each module we have the possibility to configure the activities, especially the activity types. Thereby we can define individual activity types for each module. In addition to this, we can configure automatic operations for each activity type.
Here we can define, for example, that this activity type will always have a specific user, summary or description preselected by default. We can also define how the activity is scheduled by default, for example, two days after the activity is created.
Furthermore, we can configure follow-up activities or a suggestion for these subsequent activities. So, if an activity is marked as done, Odoo will automatically create a pre-configured follow-up activity for us or suggest previously defined follow-up activities.
So, we can see that with activity planning Odoo provides us with a helpful and intuitive tool with which we can plan our own tasks in a structured way and create tasks for our colleagues. What we are still missing is an overview of all activities of our users across all modules. For this purpose, the manaTec development team has developed an additional module that closes exactly this gap - the Central Activity View module.
The module adds a new menu item in the Calendar module. If we open the new Activities menu, we get to the cross-module overview of all activities of our users. By default, a filter is set on the respective user, so that each user sees only his activities. If we remove the filter, we will see the activities of all users in all modules.
The overview shows us in each case the activity type, the name of the object in which the activity was created, the due date, the assigned user and the summary of the activities.
If we open an activity from the overview, we get to the already known view of the activities with all the functions already described. In addition, we find a link to the object in which the activity was created. Thus, we can edit the activity in this overview or navigate to the respective object to document our work status and mark the activity as completed.
So with our Central Activity View module, we complete the already very helpful activity planning functionality. It helps us not only to optimize our self management, but also to organize our tasks in the team. Thus, nothing stands in the way of an efficient completion of our tasks and we no longer use our valuable time for planning, but for the processing of the tasks.
Are you looking for an ERP system that supports you in organizing your tasks? No problem with Odoo! Contact us now and we are there for you as a reliable partner!
Sources: www.odoo.com