Tips & Tricks - Ali on Tech

How to configure the frequency of Booking Timestamps

By Ali | March 11, 2020 by Ali

One of the latest features announced for Release Wave 1 2020 in Dynamics 365 Field Service is the ability to ‘configure’ when the system should be generating Booking Timestamps. What is it and why does this matter?Booking timestamps is an entity which gets auto-populated to record updates on the status of booking/work orders. It records two important things: status and timestamp. When a Work Order and associated Booking goes through status changes, booking timestamp maintains…

Dynamics 365

How to send a Microsoft Teams notification from Dynamics 365

By Ali | February 13, 2020 by Ali

The story behind this article is a challenge faced by one of the customers to reduce ‘delay’ between ‘urgent’ issue (case) creation in the system and bookings of resource to address the issue. The cases were created in the system by the Customer Service team, who then send those cases to Warranty team based on the nature of the issue, equipment type etc. The Warranty team then review the case, create Work Order and book…

Dynamics 365

How to show current weather on Bookings form

By Ali | February 10, 2020 by Ali

In this post, I will walk you through my experiment last week to show the weather information in a booking screen in Dynamics 365 Field Service. The business drivers behind this information could be for the planners/schedulers to see weather conditions in the specific areas where the field technicians are scheduled to work/are currently working. Take PowerApps out and this becomes another ‘data integration’ project. I did the following without writing code by embedding a…

Dynamics 365

How to create a roster for resources

By Ali | January 23, 2020 by Ali

The Schedule Board shows working and non-working hours in different colours (non-working hours are greyed) to help planners in creating bookings for resources per their roster. In this article, we will have a look at the steps to set up a roster for individual / multiple resources, and will also look at a Pro Tip in the end. For setting up work hours for a single resource, follow these steps: Easy, isn’t it. Next for…

Dynamics 365

How to setup preferred resources for Customers in Field Service

By Ali | January 19, 2020 by Ali

The question which led to this article was: We respect customer’s preferences in terms of who is coming over to their houses (this was in maid and cleaning services business), so if a customer was happy with a certain staff member, we try our best to assign the same staff member for next service. How can I do that in the new system (Dynamics Field Service)? This, admittedly, led to some head-scratching but the solution…

Dynamics 365

Showing current weather on Schedule Board bookings

By Ali | September 22, 2019 by Ali

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…

Dynamics 365

The ‘Currency’ error on Work Order

By Ali | September 5, 2019 by Ali

I was reminded of this gem from XKCD today: The context is a customer call who found this annoying error on the creation of a work order in Dynamics 365 Field Service: The error message is a bit cryptic but what it means is simple: currency should be consistent on a work order AND records mentioned in work order. Three currency fields are at play here: Currency in the price list of a selected Billing…