One of the standard requirements for Field Technicians is to record ‘what’ happened after they finished the work. This ‘what’ relates to two things: This requirement was usually met using ‘Work Order Summary’ field on Work Order, Status/Sub-status or a combination of these options but now an introduction of ‘Work Order Resolution’ opened new avenues. In this post today, I am going to explore this feature. What is Work Order Resolution Resolutions is a new…
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…
Can UX be quantified? I think one way to assess usability is to count the number of clicks required to complete a functional activity in the system. In the context of Dynamics 365 Field Service, for example, this could be creating a Work Order, scheduling, setting up a servicing schedule for assets etc. So then the question is – how good is the usability index (if we shall call it) of these Dynamics 365 Field…
Quality audit is part of a work management life cycle in most Field Service organizations. To ensure customers are satisfied, equipment is up and running, and there are no SLA breaches, a quality audit is conducted in all or statistically sampled work orders. This often means creating another booking, or a task, or creating a follow-up work order for quality check and of course additional resource requirements – but is there a smarter solution possible…
The Work Order entity in Dynamics 365 Field Service has few fields which look trivial in the first glance but are critically important for system design and for enabling the intended experience for customers. Two such fields are Work Order Type and Incident Type. In one of the recent projects, we literally spent hours (read: days) on discussions to finalise the right values for these fields. That was a prompt for me to write an…
Can there be any scheduling without priorities? Work Orders in Dynamics 365 Field Service can be optionally marked with priorities and this information shows up in Schedule Board to assist planners/dispatchers in managing bookings. This post is about how-to setup Work Order Priorities and then prioritise work order. The Setup Go to Field Service -> Settings -> Priorities Click +New. A new form will open. Enter data (per the screenshot below) to set up ‘High’…
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…
Work Order is the “work” itself – which is scheduled and then actioned by the field service staff. To understand how Work Orders works in the app, we are looking at three areas: In the first part of this topic, we looked at the structure of the Work Order as an answer to the first question. The last two points are the focus of this post. How Work Orders are created?Work Orders are typically created…
Work Order is the “work” itself – which is scheduled and then actioned by the field service staff. Some examples are: The objective of the business is to schedule and complete “Work Orders” as efficiently as possible and with the maximum satisfaction of the customers. For understanding this fundamental part of the app, we will look into following areas: In this part, we will focus on the first question: what constitutes a Work Order in…