PCS Bullhorn Web Integration: Virtual Brew 7/18/2024

Transcript

Introduction: PCS 2.5 Overview

[Presenter]
Today we’re going to be talking about what PCS 2.5 is all about, and looking at some of the capabilities in that release. PCS 2.5 has a few different things in it, but the big one is that we’ve completely redesigned and refreshed the integration between PCS and Bullhorn Web. I’m going to show you what that looks like in a lot of detail today — I know a lot of people use both PCS and Bullhorn to manage their corrosion control needs, and we’re really hoping this integration gives you what you’ve been asking for. Really excited to show it to you today.

We’ve also completed our wireless sync capabilities between PCS and Survey Manager, letting you wirelessly upload surveys out of Survey Manager into PCS for close interval and DCVG surveys. There have also been some issues with the job services PCS uses to pull data in and send data out — intermittently stopping for various people in their environments, and in our hosted environment — we’ve resolved that. And we’ve defaulted previous readings in field computer send to “one” — this goes hand in hand with a capability added in a recent FDC release, where users can see the latest reading for any previous inspection right on their screen while executing a survey in the field, so this just makes that a bit easier.

Redesigned PCS–Bullhorn Web Integration

Moving forward, we’re going to talk a lot about the integration between PCS and Bullhorn Web today — some really nice capabilities here. There’s a brand-new Bullhorn Web API, which I’ll show you a bit of — that API will eventually be unlocked for external third-party use as well, coming soon. The team still has some additional work to do on it before it can be used for systems besides PCS, but it was built with that intention in mind.

We understand a lot of you have already gone through the process of mapping Bullhorn units to PCS facilities using the Bullhorn Bridge — if you’ve done that, when you start using this new integration tool, we’ll prompt you to import all of those previous mappings, so you’re not starting from ground zero.

Smarter Auto-Mapping

We’ve taken auto-mapping to the next level. In the previous version of the Bullhorn Bridge, things had to match pretty much exactly, key-for-key, between PCS and Bullhorn units to auto-map. With this new integration, we still use that same logic — if the facility ID in PCS and the facility ID on the Bullhorn unit (a free-text field) match, we’ll auto-map that for you — but we also use things like GPS proximity. If we know a Bullhorn unit is reporting from a specific location, and we know from your PCS database that there’s a test point facility or rectifier at that location, we’ll attempt to auto-map those together. You can still confirm it to make sure our best guess was right, but it’s a way to quickly bring a bunch of Bullhorn units into PCS, auto-map them to your PCS facilities, and get up and running on the integration faster.

Finally, the big piece here is enhanced issue detection and resolution, which we’ll look at as well.

The New Bullhorn Web API

Here’s a glimpse of the Bullhorn Web API — a new capability available under the Admin tab in Bullhorn Web. You’ll see this “active customer IDs” section — previously, if you had multiple Bullhorn accounts, you’d have to create a separate bridge in PCS for every single one to bring in Bullhorn data. Now you can daisy-chain Bullhorn accounts together on the Bullhorn Web side, and you get a single API client key and secret that you copy and paste into PCS — in this case, it bundles all the units from both accounts together and sends them along in one data payload.

I don’t believe there’s a limit on how many accounts you can chain together — some of our customers have up to 30 different Bullhorn accounts, so we’re hoping this really streamlines the setup between the two. This capability also lines up with the third-party use case — when we unlock the API for third-party systems, the same concept applies: you can add as many accounts as you want under a single credential, and send that to something like Power BI to manage your Bullhorn units in a dashboard. That’ll likely be available later this year — the team has some additional documentation and cleanup work to do before it’s available outside of PCS, but PCS can use the API today.

Setting Up the Bullhorn Web API Connection in PCS

So, one token needed from Bullhorn Web shows all the accounts associated with it — I took that API client ID and secret from the previous screenshot and pasted it in here. This is a new screen within PCS, a new utility under Tools called Bullhorn Integration, its own standalone capability within PCS. You paste it in once, and it shows you all the customer names and customer IDs from Bullhorn Web associated with that credential. If you want to add more accounts later, just go back to that Bullhorn API screen, add one more, and PCS will pick it up automatically. Finally, you’ve got your inspection frequency settings — if you use the Bridge today, that’ll look pretty familiar.

Streamlined Mapping: The Unmapped Tab

I mentioned streamlined mapping earlier — here’s what that means. This is the Unmapped tab of the new utility: you’ll see a lot of blue highlights and some gray highlights. Everything highlighted blue has been auto-mapped automatically; anything with mismatches between PCS and Bullhorn Web shows up gray, and you can free-text into the PCS facility ID or location description fields to find the PCS facility you’re looking for. From there, you can also align the data elements between the two so they’re completely in sync — I’ll show you that a bit later.

Additionally, since you can have multiple Bullhorn accounts under a single API key payload, we’ve added Bullhorn account groups, with account and group filters throughout the entire system. In this screenshot, we’ve got the two companies from that API screen I showed in Bullhorn Web, each with a number of groups. What you can do here is set it and forget it — check the groups that apply to you. If you’re a technician only over a specific region, and all the Bullhorn units in your area are in groups you know about, you can select just those groups, and it’ll filter all the data down in the Mapped and Unmapped tabs, and any units you’ve excluded from bringing data into PCS.

The issues dashboard, which we’ll look at in a bit, works the same way — filters are saved and remembered per user, so once you set what you want to see and manage, it stays that way until you change it. This really lets people granularly keep the noise out of their integration tool and only see what they care about.

The screenshot in the middle of this slide is a snippet from the dashboard, showing “currently showing 143 out of 265 unresolved issues” — these counts are a bit elevated since this is test data, but the point is it’ll filter the issues you see on the issue resolution board down to only the data you care about, based on those filters.

Clear Issue Reporting

There are a few different ways to see issues — I realize this slide is a little chaotic, but we’ve got the dashboard on the top left, a larger view of what we just looked at. You’ll see warning messages that give you intelligent information about what’s actually wrong, including which unit and which PCS facility it involves. If you use the Bullhorn Bridge today, you know that getting that level of detail — what exactly the issue is, why you’re getting a warning, which unit it’s in — the Bridge just tells you things like “ROS in a data payload,” which isn’t very helpful. We’ve done a lot of work to make sure we’re giving you clear, actionable information.

You’ll also notice, on the top right of the PCS screen where the account name is, there’s now a little Bullhorn icon with an issue count — a warning and error message count — associated with it. That’s your way of logging into PCS and seeing a little yellow bubble, which is clickable and launches you directly into the dashboard screen, where you can see exactly which issues are driving that count.

Finally, the black screenshot at the bottom is an example of an email — there’s an email notification configuration capability as well, where you can add both PCS users and non-PCS users to a list. They’ll get an integration summary email every time the inspection frequency hits — so if it’s set to pull data once a month, it’ll trigger this email after that monthly poll, with clear error messages telling you exactly what the problem is so you can fix it.

The Issue Resolution Wizard

Let’s talk about the issue resolution wizard. There’s a lot this can capture: a facility marked as inactive in PCS, facility IDs not found in PCS, GPS locations that differ between the two systems, a facility ID that changed on one side or the other, a unit-level label that changed on one side or the other, or a Bullhorn unit that just stopped responding for whatever reason. All of these issues are automatically detected by the system, and we’ve taken it further by giving you ways to smartly fix them.

Any line item on that dashboard we looked at is clickable — clicking one brings you into a screen for that specific data point. It tells you exactly what the issue is at the top — in this case, a GPS location mismatch — tells you the unit, which data point it is, gives you a snippet of the PCS lat/long versus the Bullhorn one, tells you when the last data came in, and lets you update things on the PCS side.

To be clear, today this is one-directional — you can update things on the PCS side from this screen, and a future improvement would be to make it bidirectional, automatically updating the facility ID in Bullhorn Web from here as well. But today, it’s limited to PCS — if you want to change something on the Bullhorn side, you’ll still need to manually go modify that unit in Bullhorn Web. But if you want to update it in PCS — say you moved a Bullhorn unit and want to reassign it to a different facility — you can do that right here and click Save and Next.

Another example: property mapping changed — this tells you an engineering label changed (in this case, we just added an “S” to trigger the issue for the screenshot), giving you clear information on what the PCS side says versus what the Bullhorn label says, and again, you can update things on the PCS side directly from this screen. There are similar resolution screens for each of the different issue types listed on this slide.

The key thing this integration gives you that you haven’t had before is the ability to see exactly what the issue is, so you can resolve it quickly — and make sure a facility doesn’t quietly show up on your delinquency report just because a Bullhorn reading isn’t coming in and you don’t know it, the way the old Bullhorn Bridge could sometimes fail silently.

Q&A: Feedback on the New Integration

I’ll pause there before talking about other PCS 2.5 things — any questions on the new integration, or feedback you’d like to share? I’m interested in what you all think from that short preview.

Other PCS 2.5 Updates

Other things in PCS 2.5: as I mentioned, we’ve added the ability to receive directly from Survey Manager for close interval and DCVG surveys — the final piece of our wireless sync efforts over the last couple of years. We’ve also resolved the issue where job services would intermittently stop, and defaulted previous readings to “one” on the field computer send screen.

You’ll also notice, on the field computer receive screen — and we did this on send as well — the data source options have changed. They used to say “from mobile,” “from mobile from disk,” “Allegro,” and “Allegro from disk,” which led to confusion — if you have an Allegro AX, do you use “Allegro” or “mobile”? It wasn’t clear. We’ve cleaned this up to make it very clear what each radio button is for.

That’s all I have for you today — one last call for questions, and if not, I’ll hand it back over to Christian to close us out.

Closing Q&A: Upgrade Requirements

[Attendee]
I have one question — is this going to require software upgrades on computers?

[Presenter]
Yeah, PCS will require an upgrade — it’s not available yet. We’re targeting a late-August release date, and you’d need to upgrade your PCS environment to get access to this.

[Attendee]
Okay — are there, for people who have PCS… I’m not as familiar with how people actually use a lot of this, since I don’t currently use it myself, but for people who have PCS, is there some sort of automatic notification, or do they get an email prompting them when the update is available?

[Presenter]
No — PCS is typically installed by IT organizations, unless you’re part of our hosted community, in which case we’ll upgrade that environment for everyone at a specific date and time. But most of our PCS customers who run it on their own internal environments require their IT organization to do that upgrade — it’s not like a Microsoft Store type of application where we publish updates and you just pull them down. It’s a bit more involved than that — your IT team has to upgrade the database itself, and then there’s an installer package, an installation wizard, just like any other application.

[Attendee]
Okay, thank you.

[Presenter]
Any other questions? All right, I’ll hand it back to you, Christian.

Closing

Christian
All right, thanks everyone for joining us this morning. If you have any other questions, you can always reply to our follow-up emails — we’ll send links to the recording when it’s ready for you to watch again, and join us for the next one, which will be in August — not September, I’m thinking ahead — same time next month. Thank you so much for joining us this morning, thank you everyone, thank you.