The fascinating thing about Schedule Board is, it is as much a planning tool, as it is for monitoring. Talking to one of our customers, we noticed ‘planners’ had opened an additional tab on browsers in addition to Schedule Board. It turned out, since the field technicians, go to different cities and towns (long distances), and the work and equipment involved were impacted by weather conditions (rains, dust storms etc.), the weather was a significant factor for service delivery. This prompted planners to keep an eye on the weather conditions in on-going work areas, and also in the areas where work is going to start in near future, to ensure crews are carrying necessary safety measures, additional equipment etc.
While we understood the need, it was a hassle for the planners to click on the booking, check the location, go to another tab, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, hit Enter and see weather conditions in next 12 hours. A lot of clicks, error-prone etc. Is there a better way to do that? You bet.
Following is what we came up with – without writing a single line of code:
The Schedule Board now show (almost) current weather conditions. Following is an under-the-hood view of how this was achieved:
- Areas of service were setup as territories
- A new ‘Weather’ option-set field was created in Territory with weather icons for rain, sunny, cloudy etc.
- Power Automate Flow was created with MSN Weather to run every hour on three territories (cities) to get the latest weather update and then update the Territory record with Weather option-set appropriately
- Schedule Board was configured to show Weather option-set field from the Territory field by configuring Booking Template
Hope it helped. Feel free to share your feedback. Happy 365-ing!