As of our February 2020 release to ConSol and ConSol Mobile, work managers have more controls available to improve accuracy in the claim review process. Included in this new functionality are new ways for creating whitelists of claimable SOR items, defining evidence required to support claimable items, and enforcing the field workflows.

Locked Bundles

Bundles were introduced into ConSol to improve manual order creation. This is accomplished by identifying groups of items that are regularly added together on an order and bundling them into a new type of item called a 'bundle item'. When creating a new order, only the bundle item needed to be selected and it would automatically add all its member items to the order. We referred to this concept as a ‘broken bundle’ as the first action on the order after the bundle was added would ‘break’ the bundle and add all of its element items.

In this release, we are introducing ‘locked’ bundles. These bundles enable the concept of a ‘whitelist’ or a list of claimable items to be defined. For orders issued with a ‘locked bundle’ item, the items in the bundle are not added to the order but represent the only items that the supplier can claim for.

Bundles can now be ‘nested’, enabling one bundle of items to be added to another bundle. This ensures that free issue materials, for example, could be handled in a single bundle and that bundles could be added to other work-type defined bundles, if required.

In the ‘Itemise first’ order creation process, orders are scoped and only those suppliers able to provide the scoped items are presented for selection on the Supplier Allocation screen. If the scoped order contains a locked bundle, suppliers who can satisfy ANY item within the bundle are presented for selection.

A new option has been introduced on the Contract Management tab to enable suppliers to request a variation to the order to include items outside of the locked bundle. Only items associated to the locked bundle or items added to the order via an approved variation request are able to be claimed.

Artefact management

NBN, and others, have prescribed the specific artefact requirements to justify any SOR claim, which detail the nature of the artefact as well how it supports the claim (eg. photos before, during and after activity). This information can now be recorded as ‘tags’ on items in ConSol.

Suppliers wishing to make a claim for items that include tags will have to associate each item tag with the relevant artefact that has been uploaded on the order. Items with tag requirements that have not been fulfilled cannot be claimed.

A new Gallery screen is now available on ‘Work in Progress’ and ‘Submit Claim’ screens for Suppliers and on ‘Verify Claim’ screen for customers. This screen displays thumbnails for all artefacts that have been uploaded by the supplier on the order. From this screen, suppliers are able to associate appropriate and relevant artefacts to the items they wish to claim.

If you have any questions about the functionality, please get in touch with your Account Manager or ConSol Support Team.