Rakesh Ambre Functional Consultant

On the schedule board, resources are listed in alphabetical order. Resource type (User, Contact, equipment etc.) is not considered while ordering the list of resources. We can think of two options here 1. Creating a hierarchy of resources using Roles and Resource Types and showing the list of resources in a tree structure 2. When a dispatcher applies a filter using Resource type (combination of User, contacts, equipment or facility), the filtered resources can be grouped with Resource Types and shown in the list. This will help the dispatcher to have clear view of the resources grouped under Resource Types and to understand to which hierarchy a specific resource belongs to.

While working with one of the customer I came across an interesting requirement to track movement of the customer assets. The scenario is as below 1. A work order is created to service a customer asset located at a customer location. 2. The resources planned for the work order involves technicians along with equipment which they need to carry to inspect the customer asset. 3. Technicians reach at the customer location, inspect the customer asset and based on the inspection results they might decide to move customer asset to a service center. 4. The customer asset is then moved to a service center and further service activities are carried out. 5. Once the service is complete, the customer asset is moved back to customer location. Considering this scenario, the FS organization wants to track movement of the customer asset while the work order is being executed. At any point of work order life-cycle, they need to understand where exactly the customer asset is located (at customer location, in-transit to/from service center, at service center etc.). It will help to draw analytics like efficiency of movements to and from the service center, waiting time at service center and efficiency of service center to execute the service and ship the asset back to customer location. Please check if this idea fits into Field Service landscape.

With Power BI report/ dashboard getting enabled as a system dashboard in model-driven apps (in 2020 wave-2 release), field service organizations can make data-driven decisions and generate trackable actions in the form of work orders. Enabling organizations to create work orders directly from Power BI dashboards will help in keeping the context, avoiding too many clicks, and form switching. We can provide the functionality to create a work order directly from a Power BI system dashboard. Automation can be leveraged to copy certain attribute values from the Power BI report to the work order. It is particularly effective in field service implementation for production lines of manufacturing customers. Dip in the production line output can be traced to malfunctioning equipment and can be quickly addressed by creating a work order and dispatching a technician. Currently, for one of the customers, I am enabling this functionality by embedding a canvas app within a Power BI dashboard. It would be of great value if the same can be made available out-of-the-box in model-driven apps.

Currently, avenues for incident types are as below. 1. Creating incident type from model-driven app 2. Uploading incident types through importing 3. improving Incident type through AI suggestions While creating a work order for which no specific Incident type is available (consider a situation when the customer has recently implemented D365 FS and they don't have incident types already imported), the person creating the work order can add characteristics, products, services, and service tasks. Post completion of the work order, the user feels that the combination of characteristics, products, services, and service tasks can be pushed as an incident type for later reuse. At this moment, if the user has ready functionality to create an Incident type from a work order, it would save loads of time in re-creating the incident type from scratch. Work order type, characteristics, products, services, and service tasks can be pushed from the work order to the new incident type, and the user can then append other generic details to save the Incident type.

While working with a customer from the insurance domain, I came across a requirement wherein they perform property surveys as part of the policy recommendations or renewals. The surveys involve a lot of questions and based on the responses received for different questions, the surveyor provides a recommendation. The recommendation will be against each question and can be free text or options dropdown. Current inspection functionality does not have the feature to provide a recommendation for each question response. This would be very much helpful if implemented.

A common business scenario is to create specific schedule board tabs for different dispatchers who are managing work orders belonging to different territories. While working with a pharma customer (a chemical production plant) we are evaluating applicability of Field service application to track and manage activities which are assigned to chemical production plant operators. The plant operates 24x7 with operators working in rotating shift pattern. The before mentioned concept of different schedule board tabs can be applied in this case by creating schedule board tabs mapping to different shifts. However, there is one limitation with current schedule board view settings. The working time parameter can be set for single day working hours and does not allow to configure overnight shifts. For example, the customer has below shift pattern Weekday shift pattern Early morning shift - 6 am to 2 pm Evening shift - 2 pm to 10 pm Night shift - 10 pm to 6 am (next day) Configuration of schedule board tabs for the first two shifts (Early morning and Evening) is possible. However, a schedule board tab cannot be configured for the Night shift as we get an error "Start time must be before end time". The customer also has a different shift pattern for weekend operations as well. Day shift - 6 am to 6 pm Night shift - 6 pm to 6 am (next day) The board view settings should allow to set the start and end working time to span multiple days. Allowing this will enable creation of specific schedule board tabs (mapping to shifts) which can be eventually assigned to different dispatchers. This will simplify work for them as they can look at a specific shift (narrow display of working hours) rather than using 24 hour working day with horizontal scroll which can be quite bothering. In the context of the manufacturing customers of various industries (Pharma, Oil & gas etc.) this is of particular significance as all of the workforce operates at one plant location, predominantly in shift pattern and supervisors/dispatchers assigning the work to operators working in specific shifts.

Resource work hours has been kind of a gray area, which over the period of time has seen improvements in user interface. However, from functional perspective it still lacks sort of flexibility that Field system administrators would definitely welcome. Manually setting work hours for individual resource is more of a laborious task and needs lot of user input. It has been simplified to an extent with Set Calendar function which utilizes Work Hours Template. It is eventually some other resource's work hours used to create a reusable template which can be assigned to other bookable resources. One thing to note, setting calendar of a resource using work hours template, sets the entire calendar. So if the template has work hours for all 12 months then the work hours of the target resource to which this template is applied will be set for all 12 months. In a typical shift roaster, resources are planned in rotating shifts and usually the calendar of the resources are alternating either every week or month. Lets say, John who is operations analyst for Oil and gas company works every odd month in the morning shift (6 am to 6 pm) and in the night shift ( 6 pm to 6 am) in even month. Currently, there is no simple way to set John's calendar for the month of Jan (odd month) and copy it to the months of March, May, July and so on. There can be two solutions for it. 1. Simply having a Repeat option of "Alternate Month" will help to set the calendar for alternate months. 2. Set calendar function can be modified to extend resource's current calendar to other months. So John's work hours for the month of Jan can be set for the months of March, May, July etc.