Four Search Features to Identify the Right Resources for Your Project in OpenAir

A big part of scheduling and bench management is identifying the right resources for your projects. In this post, we will share with you four search options and how and when you might use each.

Search within the Booking List View

OpenAir provides several options for identifying resources and the first area we’ll look at is in job code substitution. While you’re in booking list view, you can perform a search by clicking on the magnifying glass next to each booking.

This will give you the list of people who have the same job code as the person on the booking you searched for and that allows you to do a simple substitution when you need to.

As an example, if you know you need just a project manager (and you are using “project manager” as one of your job codes), you can search all the project managers in your organization. When the results come up, you can clearly see if the person is available, based on their job code.

Searching with Quick Search

In the resources module, you need to click on the quick under search. This will bring up the types of skills you have in your database. Select the skill you want and a list of all the users, or resources, will come up, and you can filter down from there.

Searching with Custom Search

The link to perform a custom search is just under the quick that we discussed earlier. This feature gives you filters that you can use to narrow your search, on the top of the page. The availability tag is one that is used often. As an example, you could use the filters to search for I need someone who’s available 50% of the time in a specific date range.

Searching with Advanced Search

Advanced search gives you the same features as custom and can be found with the quick and custom tags. You can use a specific resource type as a filter in this view and at what level of experience you need.

Under advanced, you can perform a search for inactive resources to help you find subcontractors whose skills you may be interested in. Even though they’re not active in your database, they’re still easy for you to find.

Tips for Improving Search

It’s important that you keep your skills database updated. If you have people on there who have left the organization or are no longer available for any reason, you will only clutter up the system with irrelevant information.

Some organizations allow their people to update their own skill profiles. This can work well, but it can also lead to a person entering a skill that they are not qualified for, even though they think they are.

A way around this is to have a centralized approval process built into your system. The user is responsible for updating their own profile, but someone else decides if their skill level is up to scratch.