Locations vs Work Areas: What Is The Difference?

Location

Every business has a location it operates from be it a street shop, a warehouse, an office or a table in an apartment. It normally has a sign outside which helps visitors and customers to identify it. Instead of such a sign it might have a place on some mapping service, like Google Maps, which helps customers find it.

And this is also what TeamUltim considers to be a "location". It is not the official name of the company but rather a place where the business is done. If your business has multiple locations then in the TeamUltim app you would probably want to add locations labeled after the city and/or the street they are on. Or maybe your multiple locations are also the names of your own customers with an added internal key or label, like "Starbucks F1324" or "Rewe / 7892" – these are the labels you can also use in TeamUltim.

Another key factor of a location within TeamUltim context is the team. Every location has its own team. You might have 100 employees spread across 20 locations – each employee assigned to his or her location. This will ensure that any notification related to that particular location will only be sent out to the team assigned to that very location. Every location can have its own shift administrator, too, so delegating some administrative tasks is also possible.

When using reports, a location also plays a key role: you can filter on a particular location so that you can analyse the performance and key data for that location only.

Work area

Now that we have defined what a location is let us see what a work area is. Take a coffee shop, for example. In a busy coffee shop you will probably see an employee taking orders, another employee making espresso shots while another employee doing that very latte art you appreciate that much. These are the work areas the employees act in – and this is what you can assign them to as well. Go to a location settings and scroll down until you see "Work areas". You can now define "Orders", "Espresso", "Milk station" as the three work areas for this very location. Later when adding shifts you can assign a shift to an employee AND to a work area so that the employee knows right away which tasks he or she has for this shift.

Work areas are not universal within a business. They only apply to a particular location they have been defined with. A location might have no work area whatsoever – this is also fine.

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To recap