My colleague and I have been playing with Retool over the last few weeks and it seems to be an excellent platform for what we are trying to achieve. There is one area we are a little concerned about developing so I thought we would reach out to the Retool forum to see if anyone else has built something similar, has experience in this, or can advise, put us in contact, point us to resources, etc.
We are working with approx 8000 clients. Currently, we are using Excel as a manual customer database and a manual scheduler (to schedule a job). The customer database aspect is easy enough for us to build out with Retool but it's the scheduler that we are most concerned about.
Our existing manual excel scheduler has clients being serviced like:
Clients being collected weekly
Fortnightly
Sime twice a week
Some once a month
Some are special once-off collections.
Some are special for months leading up to Christmas (for example daily)
And a lot that changes based on annual holidays like bank holidays, Christmas etc, example a client normally serviced on a Monday & Wednesday gets moved to a Tuesday / Thursday for weeks with bank holidays
And there are furious different service types that can apply to a customer on different days. (example service A on Monday and service B on Tuesday)
What we are hoping to achieve from this is to predict staffing, vehicle, and resource management several months in advance. We are hoping to build this ourselves or with the help of some developers. We have already reached out to a large-scale SaaS who said they can't do what we are requesting.
Your thoughts, suggestions & insults are all welcome!
It certainly looks interesting and looks like something we could use after we have our basic tools built. Its not quite the basic scheduling I had in mind for starting off though. What we are more after is like a calendar booking system but on a mass scale. Our existing excel scheduling is done in Gantt style so we can visualize across several months.
You will be hard pressed to find any low-code platform with a decent calendar. With the introduction of nested list views in retool we have built our own calendar but we only have 3-5 items on each day. Sounds like you would have a much harder time displaying data in the calendar the way we do.
We plan on releasing a public version of this when we have the time but here's a little preview of what we are doing for our scheduling.
I've redacted the events because they have client information but you get the idea. You can click on that little button on the bottom to pop open the event and edit it or move it or mark it as complete.
Unfortunately even with this calendar there are issues. The way retool creates components and sizing we cant effectively fit Saturday and Sunday with a decent amount of space. We are going to add a few more features, like filtering by event type, but it works for us pretty well.
That calendar you've coded up looks pretty neat. I look forward to seeing more about that but certainly not workable for our volume of data. I'm toying with the idea of using an API to write the schedules into a Google or Office calendar but I really dont know if they are designed for this volume of events either.
Just for a bit of context this is the type of schedule we are currently doing (with some data blanked out) and imagine scrolling down a lot! Running across the top row are each date across the months and below to the left is client information and to the right of them are numbers to reference if a job is on or not along with various other codes for different types of jobs.
