Understanding “Products to Assets” process in Dynamics 365 Field Service

For field service organisations, once product is installed at client site, it actually becomes an asset from the operations perspective (since it needs to be serviced and maintained in future). These assets are then inspected (Inspections), maintained (Agreements and Work Orders), and then monitored (Connected Field Service) – all of these are features of Dynamics 365 Field Service and this entire set of functions are called “Asset Servicing”. This articles looks at the function of converting a Product into an Asset with a commentary on limitations.

First let’s setup a Field Service product. For the purpose of this example, we are implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service for a field service organisation that sets up and maintains coffee machines (no brownie points for guessing I love coffee 😊). Therefore we have setup a Field Service product with ‘Convert to Asset’ set as true.

Next let’s create a Work Order to setup and install a coffee machine for a client.

Add a product to be installed in Work Order Product.

Next schedule a work order aka create a booking and mark Work Order Product as ‘used’

This effectively means that the work order to install coffee machine is worked upon and machine is all installed and setup for use. Lets complete the work order i.e. change the status to ‘Open – Completed’.

Magic happens once status of work order is changed to ‘Open – Completed’. Go to Assets and you’ll see a brand new asset record created. Open the record and you’ll see the record is linked to the Work Order Product record.

This concludes our business scenario here but before we conclude, lets have a look at a couple of caveats and limitations:

1. Only 1 Customer Asset record is automatically created regardless of the Quantity of products in Work Order Product record. This effectively means for each product to be installed, a separate Work Order Product record should be created
2. While Work Order Product field is populated on a Customer Asset record, in my testing it did not auto-populate the Customer Asset field on related Work Order Product record. This might be a glitch, but should be looked into in real implementation
3. The default owner of newly created Customer Asset is SYSTEM user. You may want to re-assign or run any business rules based on the business requirements.

For further reading, please refer to Microsoft Docs.

Thanks for reading!

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