Hello there,
I hope this is ok to post (and please tell me if not and I will happily remove it).
I wanted to ask the Replit community for some help on a new topic as I had such genuinely helpful responses the last time I reached for a different project I was working on.
The situation is that: I have started a new role at a charity, and it is my first time using salesforce, Airtable etc. For context, the charity where I work has to book in workshops and allocate trainers to those workshops. At the moment this is a manual process: a client requests a workshop, someone manually reaches out to a trainer who might be free, then the person waits for the trainer to confirm or deny their availability. If a trainer confirms their availability, we then proceed to allocate the workshop to them and if they deny it then the process begins again with someone reaching out to a new trainer.
One of the key (anecdotal) issues that I’m hearing about from the team is that this is a labourious process and leads to lots of back-and-forth interactions with trainers, as well as trainer dependency on the team. I would like to take the burden away from the central team when it comes to allocating workshops, to free up their time to focus on other things.
As such, I would like to streamline the whole process, using a programming solution (maybe integrated with Salesforce?) I feel like other industries would have already solved this problem! The use case sounds similar to medical professional booking shifts (except for us it is trainers booking workshops) or any other jobs where people are required to be booked onto shifts.
My vision for the solution would be that: a workshop is requested by a client, it gets loaded into salesforce. This then automatically populates an email that gets sent out weekly which lists the available workshops for trainers to book themselves on to. The trainers then click on the workshop they can do, this takes them to a page and then they book themselves on to it.
As a result of this process, there is no need for anyone from the central team to get involved and the trainers manage their own availability and workload.
There is one big complicating factor which is that it’s not as simple as allowing any trainer to book onto any workshop. There are certain workshops where it would not be appropriate to send certain trainers (due clashes in personality etc) and so we would need a way of blocking them from booking onto those workshops (perhaps manually).
I would love some guidance and advice from the community on what you think could help make this work, if you know of any existing tools that could help (maybe an adapted version of Calendly?) or just some general advice about whether you think it’s realistic or not!
Very grateful for any insight you can provide! And hope the problem is at least interesting to read about even if it’s not solve-able!
All the best,
Cedric