The vacation and distribution settings in Distro Fire are an easy way to define how the distribution should happen across your reps and also how Distro should behave during a vacation period.
How Distro Handles Vacation?
Distro can read vacation time automatically on a rep's calendar if they have blocked their calendar using all-day busy events. These events should have a 24-hour slot, with no gaps, and they can also be a series/recurrent. Partial OOO blockers (i.e.: 9 AM to 3 PM) are not considered as a vacation period or vacation day(s).
When a rep has the 24-hour blocker on their calendar, Chili Piper will skip that User in the Team round-robin to a different rep during this time.
If all reps happen to be on vacation at the same time, for example - on December 25th - Chili Piper will ignore this vacation and still route the records to ensure none are lost.
Vacation Adjustment
This setting can be adjusted to determine how Distro should behave while a rep is on vacation and also when they return:
Enabled: A user on vacation will be paused from receiving distributions while away. Upon their return, they will be caught up to other users from meetings they did not receive while away. That said, they'll most likely receive more meetings than other reps upon their return, as Distro will catch up with the other reps' distribution levels.
Disabled: A user on vacation will be paused from receiving distributions while away, but the Vacation Adjustment will maintain its position in the round-robin. Hence, their priority is the same as other Team members upon their return. The catch-up mentioned above for the "Enabled" status will not happen if you use the "Disabled" one.
If a user is OOO, they will not receive any record distributions through the round-robin, unless all users in a Team are OOO at the same time, then Chili Piper will round-robin anyways to ensure distribution is unaffected by this scenario.
If a record matches and is distributed via Ownership during the object owner's vacation, we'll still assign it to the owner.
Vacation Buffer
This setting specifies how many days before vacation starts reps are removed from distribution and how many days before vacation ends they are re-added to distribution:
For example, suppose that John Doe is leaving on vacation from January 15th to January 30th. The vacation buffer is set to 1 before and after vacation, as shown in the screenshot above.
In this scenario, John will stop receiving records on January 14th (1 day before starting the vacation period) and will start receiving records again on January 29th (1 day before the vacation ends).
If you use "0" in both or one of the above buffers, the rep will be removed and added back to the distribution on the same days that they started and finished their vacation.
Still using John Doe's example above, if the buffers are set to 0, John will stop receiving objects on January 15th, and will start receiving them again on January 30th.
If a buffer is longer than a vacation period, for example, "5" is used as the buffer and the rep has a 4-day vacation, the user will not be removed from distribution.
Last but not least, you can use different numbers in each buffer, as they don't need to be necessarily the same for starts/ends.
Distribution Cycle
You can reset your round-robin fairness algorithm in a pre-defined cycle or even never reset it.
For Monthly and Quarterly options, the reset will happen at midnight in the selected timezone, on the first day of each month (Monthly), or the first month of each quarter (Quarterly).
Monthly - Reset happens on the first day of each month.
Quarterly - Reset happens automatically on the first day of each pre-defined month. In the Reset Month setting below, you can define which months the algorithm will be reset.
For example, if you choose the first option above, the algorithm will be reset at midnight on the first day of January, April, July, and October.
Never - The distribution numbers will never be reset.
Timezone - You can define the timezone considered to happen this reset. For example, if your company is CST-based, probably you would likely like to have the distribution reset at 12:00 AM CST on a monthly or quarterly basis.
If, at some point, you decide to switch from Monthly to Quarterly (or the other way round), the current distribution statistics will not be reset once you do this. The last reset date will also be shown in the Reporting page.