Extra Units

Extra Units are backup units. Extra Units are used to schedule a physical unit, vehicle, or a piece of equipment. In the legacy version of this application, this feature was named Backup Unit. The backup unit concept remains the same, however, purposely renamed to Extra Units, and moved to Organizations when event capability features were expanded to include Event Types.

This application offers two features to place an Extra Unit on the Roster:

Deploy - places an Extra Unit on the Roster.
Copy - Copies a Unit already on the roster.

Extra Units have no shifts, positions, or specialties attached to them. Extra Units take on the attributes of the Unit or Event Type they are attached to. This means...

When an Extra Unit is attached to an Event Type in setup, that Extra Unit will always deploy or copy with unfilled positions because it inherits the settings of the Event Type which is always unfilled.
When an Extra Unit is not linked to an Event Type, then the Backup Only feature enables when using Copy Unit. The Backup Only check box feature located in the Copy interface allows staffers to optionally move the people working on the copied unit to the Extra Unit.

Backup Only check box behavior using Copy:

When Backup Only is selected, the resources working the unit copied will move to the Extra Unit. The copied unit displays the vacancy along with the name of the person who vacated the position.
When Backup Only is cleared, the resources remain on the unit copied and an Extra Unit is deployed with positions to be filled.

Backup Only Check Box Use Case:

The simplest use case is to use a vehicle like a truck as an example.

Suppose that Station 5 has a a new truck with new and more advanced equipment. The new truck replaced the old truck with older, but still functional equipment on the Roster. The old truck is still a serviceable vehicle in Station 5, but lacks the modern equipment of the new truck, and so only used when the new truck is not available.

The new truck is staffed with Bob and Mai when in service.

Suppose that an incident occurs at Station 5 where the new truck is needed out of town hundreds of miles away and will take a couple of days to resolve. The staffer chooses to Copy the new truck on the Roster, and then chooses to send the old truck to the incident and keeps the new truck in town. Next, the staffer decides to send Bob and Mai away on the old truck to the incident.

To do this, the staffer selects Backup Only on the Copy Unit interface to move Bob and Mai from the new truck to the old truck. The new truck needs to be filled because Bob and Mai vacated their jobs to work the incident on the old truck. If the staffer clears the Backup Only check box, then Bob and Mai stay on the new truck and the old truck is placed on the Roster with positions to be filled.