This is a quick “How-To” article on an oft-used scenario in field service organisations: how to create a follow-up work order for future work? The ‘Why’ This may happen for several reasons, such as: How to achieve this? An obvious solution is to set up a ‘Follow-up Work Order’ which can be then scheduled by Dispatchers. Is this feature supported in Dynamics 365 Field Service? The answer is, as you may have guessed, yes 😊 – as an…
The heart of every field service-related business (sales, service or operations) is ‘scheduling’. If you do it well, customers are happy, assets are up and working, and faults are happening less frequently (descending rate of failures) and getting fixed quickly. In this backdrop, anything related to ‘scheduling’ is of paramount importance to keep the entire machinery running well. One key area in this context is rostering (work hours and calendars) of resources. This needs to…
Long time ago (read web 1.0 era) there was a time when systems alerts meant sending emails to users. That led to ’email deluge’ with Dynamics 365 (err.. CRM in those times) sending emails to users on every new lead, case or order getting created in the system. Thankfully that time has gone and now we have actually so many smart ways to send alerts that it is sometimes hard to keep tabs with. This…
Anti-patterns are generally defined as a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive. These are those commonly suggested and used solutions, which actually don’t work although they may seem like working. They are usually a product of gut-feeling, imperfect analogies (comparing the situations when they are actually different), and due to lack of understanding of how the system works (and why the solution won’t work). In this…
Imagine going to work desk (aka kitchen top for me) in the morning and finding a new gadget, stationary item or something useful. Dynamics 365 is a little like that, recently — with a stream of enhancements and new features (big and small) are arriving subtly as part of Dynamics 365 product updates, Power Platform updates, and Dataverse enhancements. One recent one is ‘Check Access’. It must have been part of Release Wave documentation but…
As my binge watching of Scottish Summit 2021 continues, today I came across awesome session of Kyle Mclendon on ‘Alternative Design patterns for Connected Field Service‘. The session was full of valuable original content on IoT, CFS and architectures from POC (proof of concept) to real-life implementations. This was the first speaking session of Kyle in any conference, which makes it all the more impressive. Kyle started the session with definitions of assets, devices and…
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…
This is a curated post to share best resources to explore, understand and use one of most amazing feature of Dynamics 365 platform: Inspections in Field Service. “Inspections” is the only option (other than Customer Voice) in Dynamics 365 for business administrators to design a form, end users to fill it up, and then business users to be able to see responses and analytics. The Basics To understand how Inspections works, we need to explore…
Dynamics 365 Field Service, like its other Dynamics 365 siblings, comes with a bunch of security roles and field security profiles. These out-of-the-box security configurations are then updated and tailored in each implementation. This article is to have a look at these roles & profiles, and briefly touch upon associated best practices: The ‘Whats’ and ‘Hows’ Every discussion on security architecture & setup of a new system starts with the identification of personas. Personas are…
Among the latest and greatest in Dynamics 365 Field Service is the introduction of Service Reports. It is very common for service technicians to send a report on maintenance work, installations etc., once the work is completed, with detailed items of products/services, comments, next service date etc. All this information is part of Dynamics 365 Field Service but can it be featured as a PDF on a mobile app which can be verified on the…