Smart Reports and Analytics in Dynamics 365 Field Service

Dynamics 365 Field Service is a data-rich system. Imagine just a scenario of a resource picking up a scheduled job in the mobile app, changing the status from Scheduled to Traveling and then from Traveling to In Progress – this leads to system capturing the following data and resulting analytics:

• Travel time per Booking/Work Order
• Total work time per Booking/Work Order
• Total work hours of resource (timesheet)
• Work time invested on an asset
• Average work duration per work template (Incident Type)
• Estimated vs Actual work duration
• etc

These analytics are often very useful for field service organisations because data is coming from the ground (high quality data) and it can relate to historical trends (status, types, customers, resources etc.) which then lead to optimisation in estimations, better allocations and re-aligning service strategy per season, demand trends etc. However one difficulty pre-Release Wave 2 this year (2020) was that Dynamics 365 Field Service didn’t offer many of these analytics as out-of-the-box feature. This has now changed with the latest out-of-the-box reports.

What are new reporting and analytics capabilities?

There are primarily two reports:

1. Field Service History
2. Resource and Utilization

Field Service History can be accessed from Field Service → Service → Analytics and Insights → Field Service History.

The report provides an analysis of Work Orders based on status, status trends, type, type trends, incident type etc. As you may have guessed, the report is developed in Power BI and can be filtered on date range, status, customer, territory and resource. Following is the list of widgets that are part of this report.

1. Open Work Orders
2. Broken Promise (in percentage)
3. Mean time to schedule
4. Mean time to travel
5. Mean time to complete
6. Work order by system status
7. Work order trends by system status
8. Work orders by substatus
9. Work order trends by work order type
10. Mean time to complete by work order type
11. Work orders by primary incident type
12. Broken promise by work order type
13. Broken promise vs mean time to travel
14. Territory analysis

Resource and Utilisation can be accessed from Field Service → Resources → Analytics and Insights → Reports.

The report provides an analysis of Work Orders based on status, status trends, type, type trends, incident type etc. This report is developed in Power BI too. This report can also be filtered over date range, resources, resource types and booking status. Following is the list of widgets that are part of this report.

1. Average work time per day
2. Average travel time per day
3. Total miles traveled
4. Average miles traveled per day
5. Utilisation rate
6. Late arrival rate
7. Booking cancellation rate
8. Resource utilisation breakdown
9. Duration breakdown
10. Territory analysis
11. Variance to estimated travel time
12. Requirement duration vs allocated duration
13. Resource metrics
14. Correlation analysis (travel time and work time)

As you can see, a lot of above widgets are not just based on depiction of data but actually brings to surface a high quality insights, trends or metric.

How to enable the reports?

Go to Field Service → Settings → Analytics and Insights → Settings. Click on Field Service historical analytics.

Click on Manage and change status to Enabled. Save the record.

Conclusion

These two reports not only provide great built-in analytics and reports on fresh and old Dynamics 365 Field Service implementations but are good examples to demonstrate the art of possibilities. Using the same technology (Power BI and Dataverse) and in the context of specific field service implementation, we can also create more specific and tailored reports for customers / business users.

Read more:

Microsoft Docs: Work order reports and Resource scheduling reports

Thanks for reading!