Patron - Orders - give an order priority

As we use duplication on demand more and more and we get more feedback from patrons, one feature we would like to see implemented is a way to create an order and make it the next one to go out or to hold it back for later. Some kind of priority system, much like reserves/requests that have weight numbers, etc. For example a patron decides they would like all books from a particular series on a single cartridge for their next order that goes out, this would ensure that happens. Or a patron calls in and they have a couple of order pre-built and being ready to be queued up they decide they want this other order to be next, or they want to have more recent items sent instead of things that have been placed in a particular order. All of this would be helpful for these situations. One other concept along these lines, that may or may not be possible, would be the ability to go into an order placed, before it's duplicated, and change the order of items or delete them from the order before it's duplicated. Maybe even the ability to "seed" new items into this order. All before it gets duplicated.

Something like this would definitely be useful. I know when I face a situation like this, I usually just go ahead and print the order so the patron is temporarily above their limit if I know the patron is responsible about returning their items. But it would be helpful to just be able to queue everything up and not need to make exceptions or go through extra steps.

My only concern is that this begins to really blend the functions of the Service Queue tab and the Orders tab. At least the way I always think about it, the Orders tab contains books that are out, or are going out in the next 24 hours. Ideally, it isn't really a holding area. Service Queue, on the other hand, is all about prepping items to send out and a place for books to wait.

The root of the problem, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that items in the service queue can only go out in groups of a fixed number. If the patron's order size is 8, it is always the next 8 from the service queue that will go out. This is all well and good for auto-select patrons, but many others want orders of a custom size.

Would it fix the problem for you if you had the ability to place an "Order Break" or similar in the Service Queue? Some way to say, in the service queue, that books above this line are in one order, and books below are in the next? This would let you do everything you want to do, while keeping it contained to the Service Queue. Pair this with multi-item movement, and I think the Service Queue would be much more powerful of a tool.

Terrible MSPaint Mock-up:

Ideally, each BOD Line, or whatever it ends up being, would list useful information like the combined size of all books before the next BOD line, so you can see at a glance if an order will be too large to duplicate.

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Alternatively, we could just add a new tab for order history. That way we have 3 distinct tabs. Service Queue as a pool of items to potentially send, Orders as fixed batches of books ready to go, and History (or whatever) to track books that are out / returned and therefore can't be edited by staff. This would probably be the easier / simpler route.

Those are all good suggestions as a way to make it work.

I agree, we'd like to not confuse things either between the service queue and orders. Although an order isn't really an order until it actually makes it way out to the patron. It's a set of rules used to pull materials for a patron from the Service Queue. I think if the Service Queue were a little bit more flexible that would work well. For example, a way to group items on the service queue in a particular way to make them go out together, regardless of patron defaults. This way you could prioritize items before they go into an order itself.

I will say that you can now custom build orders that don't obey cartridge limits using the manual order build function. Another thing we have been working with Keystone's developers is to get the Service Queue to be available on the Online Catalog, so that patrons can reorganize their Service Queue themselves to get things in an order tailored to their thoughts on a particular day.

I really appreciate the input and feedback.

I'm thinking along the lines of request/reserve weights for prioritizing items. For example, we prioritize series reserves above other reserves currently. Those get priority and are sent before other reserves currently. That kind of a system may be what could help.