What would be the best software to replace a magnetic schedule board?

Factual Questions
1

I’m associated with a large landscape company that has many crews that go out and do landscape maintenance, as well as “construction” jobs (installations of new trees, shrubs, etc.).

There are various locations, and each location has a production scheduler who uses a very large magnetic board (12 feet wide, five feet tall) as a tool. Along the top of the board there are columns that represent calendar days. Along the left is a separate row that represents each crew.

Each job (house or estate that the landscaper goes to) is represented by a label that goes on top of a magnet. When new work is sold, a new label gets produced with some important information about the job, the label goes on a magnet, and the scheduler moves the magnets around to designate which jobs are being worked on by which crews.

The system works, except the people that purchase the plant material don’t have visibility into the board because they are in a different location. Furthermore, the client representatives don’t have visibility into the board, so they can’t easily tell when a crew will be visiting their client.

Is there an electronic equivalent to this? The trick is that to ease adoption it needs to be easy to use (not MS Project) and be very visual. As much as possible, it should have the feel of a board where you move around magnets, but instead maybe you are moving things with your mouse.

Thanks.

2

I think Google Calendar’s interface is locked to calendar form, but its UI as pretty much exactly what you want. Perhaps there’s an API somewhere you could use.

3

Yes, I just looked at Google calendar. That’s the right track, except instead of hours on the left, you’d have the crews, and each location would have it’s own calendar that would ideally roll-up into a master calendar.

4

I totally made something like this a little over a year ago. You can do EXACTLY what you are trying to do with Microsoft Excel. EXACTLY this!

Post the file on a server somewhere and give everyone visual but not administrative rights to the file and they can view it.
Or… just email it out to a distribution list everytime you update it.

I made one of these for my Command Sergeant Major at my last unit to replace the white board in his office and to give it more visibility to all the First Sergeants in the battalion.

I duplicated every little column, row and category as well as every label and magnet he had on his board. There was a little space off to the side where he could dump the unused “magnets”… just like a real board. And making new magnetic labels is a cinch with a simple copy/paste.

If you want me to email you the thing I made to give you an idea, PM me your email.