Dynamics 365 Field Service

It is sometimes required to create a 'soft booking' for service engineers. Soft booking is typically used in cases when a large service job with multiple resources is planned for the future or when for instance customer requests to have a specific service engineer to execute service assignment. Soft planning typically then happens prior of receiving a firm purchase order from customer and hard committing to a service assignment.

In our business scheduling is done by a dedicated person who will not be executing the actual service. In existing solution when such person creates an appointment on behalf of a service engineer also the organizer is automatically booked against this appointment even if organized has nothing to do with the actual appointment.

Once an appointment is created it is not very easy to modify it, i.e. to change the dates and times of the appointment.

This idea has two things to consider:

1. it should not be defaulted that organizer automatically gets assigned on appointment
2. It should be possible to adjust appointment on schedule board the same way as booking i.e. to be able to do drag'n'drop, direct editing of start / end dates, extending time frames etc.

As part of our ongoing Dynamics 365 deployment, we've been investigating the new technician location and arrival time sharing portal with a view to using it as part of our pre-appointment customer engagement strategy. During this process a number of limitations became apparent that we'd want to see addressed in order to make the functionality meet our requirements.

• The arrival time needs to be configurable to be a window rather than the exact time. This being the booked timeslot before the date of the appointment, and a narrower ETA based window on the day. Our appointments have high duration variability, meaning the ETA is unlikely to be met, and we need to set expectations appropriately to avoid call demand. This is a significant gap in capability
• Opportunities to customize of the content of the page are very limited, and we have a requirement to share information with customers to ensure the success of their appointment wherever we can get engagement with them. Being able to include brief appointment advice within the body of the page would greatly improve the customer experience.
• The technician location map shows the exact position of the tech once the travelling status is set. Our unions require us to not disclose the tech location if they are still within a set distance of their home address, which isn't possible with this solution and prevents us from sharing the map. Our current solution also allows us to obfuscate the tech location on the map to prevent their exact location from being shared at any time, and we'd want to see here also.

We would insert an offline control check.

If the field technician haven't completed the booking of previus day, can't insert a new booking.

Regards

Carmine Giacobbe

We can't manage the offline functionalities.

There isn't any control in the validation of booking.

We would a check on booking date and status of booking.

For example If i haven't completed the booking of yesterday i can't insert the new booking

Is it possible activate also this functionality?

Regards

Carmine Giacobbe

When scheduling a Work Order, to find the best time, it would be nice if the system looked at jobs later in the day. Right now the system is only looking at jobs prior but if there is a work order scheduled later in the day, it should take that work order into account for travel time. Would like to see the travel time to the next work order in the day as well as the travel time from the previous work order to find the best fit.

Need to be able to have Field Service block the entire Estimated Duration for all Bookings on the Work Order. If the Estimated Duration is 3 hours and there are 3 Resources assigned, all 3 Resources need to be blocked for 3 hours not 1 hour each. Currently when a 2nd or 3rd booking is added to the Work Order, the Estimated Duration is different for each of the additonal bookings. The 1st Resource is blocked for the entire Estimated Duration, but the 2nd Resource is only booked for 30 min. Need each Resource to be booked with the entire Estimated Duration for the Incident Type.

When an Inspection is updated, the existing versions are not updated if they are already attached to a Work Order. It would be great if those could be updated when a change is made. If you have hundreds of WO's placed and a change is made, the Tech is seeing 2 different versions until the system catches up. It is too time consuming to update hundreds of WO's with the new version.

Hi all,

Entity: Bookable Resource Booking

Sometimes we get the error message "The start time can't be later than the actual arrival time."

What you have to know:

• Booking Status: "Traveling" updates the field "Start Time"
• Booking Status: "In Progress" updates the field "Actual Arrival Time"

Why do we get this error message?

Normal Process (Scheduled -> Traveling -> In Progress -> Traveling -> Completed)

The technician sets the booking status from scheduled -> traveling -> in progress -> traveling -> completed)

With the first "Traveling" the field "Start Time" will be updated.

With the status "In Progress" the field "Actual Arrival Time" will be updated

--> The start time is earlier than the actual arrival time

--> In this case, we do not get an error.

Special Case (Scheduled -> In Progress -> Traveling -> Completed)

We want to use a special process, because of our business.

The technician sets the booking status from "scheduled" -> in progress -> traveling -> competed

With the status "In Progress" the field "Actual Arrival Time" will be updated.

With the status "Traveling" the filed "Start Time" will be updated.

But in this case the first Travel status is after the "In Progress" status.

--> The start time is later than the actual arrival time

--> In this case, we get an error

Possible Solution

The system should check, when the technician sets the booking status "In Progress" if there is already a "traveling" booking status.

• If yes -> Just update the field "Actual Arriaval Time"
• If no -> Update the field "Start Time" and "Actual Arrival Time"

The system should check, when the technician sets the booking status "Traveling" if there is already a "In Progress" booking status

• If yes -> Nothing shoud be updated
• This "Traveling" status is after the "In Progress Status" --> "Start Time" was already updated
• If no -> Update the field "Start Time"

There are few customers asking if they can add Bookable resources to a temporary territory and put an end date for it.

1. Able to make a territory default to a Bookable Resources

2. Able to add temporary territory to a Bookable resource for a defined time period [may be days/weeks/months] and once that time period is expired, make them fall back to the default territory. So, for a given time period their availability is shown only for the temporary territories in the schedule board.

3. Able to do perform this temporary assignment activity for a bulk set of resources 

It would be very helpful if resources with the resourcetype "pool" could also be geolocated by longitude and latitude.

That would make it easier to dispatch those types within the schedule board.