Technician Service Reports

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 screen (phone, tablet) and can be then sent over email/SMS?

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Service Reports are the answer here.

The Setup

The awesome Dynamics 365 development team has released a reporting solution and a PCF based sample report. Being a PCF control, you can easily make code changes to configure the report per business requirements or you can even create a brand new report using PCF.

The Installations

Download the reporting solution from here and import

Go to Power Apps Maker portal, click on Apps, select Field Service Mobile app and click ‘Edit’

As the App Designer opens in new window, select ‘Bookable Resource Booking’ entity and select ‘Reporting’ form. Save → Validate → Publish.

The Play

Go to the new Dynamics 365 Field Service app and open a Booking (it is assumed you have a Field Service – Resource role assigned to your user). Click on Report.

The system auto-generates a report with details about the work order. You can save, SMS or email this report.

Wow that’s great but…

can we tailor this report? Yes, we can. The sample report can be downloaded from here and can be updated in Visual Studio. I think by extension of this design, we can also create our own custom reports and add in the form (web and mobile) using the same mechanism. The above location also has a handy document to assist in customisations.

References: Microsoft Docs

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Feel free to share your feedback, I’d love to hear you thoughts 😊

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!