Dynamics 365 Enterprise Field Service

What is Field Service and why people use?

What is Field Service? Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is a component used to manage a workforce while delivering products services to customer locations in well-timed, all from within Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment.  It accommodate to changing needs as your organization extend and to new markets and geographies and could add more workflows and detailed scopes to your services.  A large number of factors that are constantly changing make Field Service management a real challenging task.  Every job assignment decision must consider all the factors to make sure you get the right person with the right resource at the right time.  Some of the factors may include field resource, current location, customer availability, parts, job duration, the promise date and a time window, and the Service Legal Agreement among many others.  The goal is to pick the right person with the right skills in the right place at the right time.  The way Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service is organized provides many benefits to your organization, some of which include optimizing travel time.  This includes a typical 15 percent savings in fuel, vehicle maintenance, and normal wear and tear.  Increasing the number of service calls by an average of more than 12 percent more per week, which in turn increases revenue and decrease costs.  The Field Service organization decreases your carbon footprint with an average reduction of tons per year per technician for a greener efficiency.  This decreases wasted time which increases customer satisfaction.  It leverages the power of social applications such as Skype and Yammer.  For example, you can yammer from tech to tech about how the jobs went and Skype for real-time video, sharing communications with others.  Rather than calling your IT manager about an issue that you may not know how to resolve, you can Skype with them instead and show them the issue at hand, which saves time.  And, finally, Field Services creates a world-class service organization by providing customers real time access via Web portals and mobile apps with techs also using mobile devices.  This not only makes the technician's life significantly easier, but it's extremely more efficient since everything is real time.

Field Services is an end-to-end solution that delivers advanced scheduling, inventory tracking, and asset management for service depots with highly mobile in-field specialists fulfilling work orders and providing preventive maintenance across multiple sites under complex service agreements.  Some of the numerous capabilities the Field Service solution provides to your company includes characteristics and proficiency ratings.  It's possible to define proficiency and competency levels and set them as requirements for a work order.  Proficiency and competency levels are also part of the worker profile.  So you can make an appropriate match when scheduling resources.  They can be defined and set as requirements at any given work order to ensure correct technician is scheduled for a specific job.  Detached schedule support.  Field Service supports time allocation outside of a work order.  For example, a field tech can schedule time for lunch or supply provisioning without having to associate that time with an empty sales order.  Shared resources across Project Service and Field Service.  Field Service and Project Service share a resource pool with resource schedules appearing in both.  This provides a simplified structure that can be utilized throughout Microsoft Dynamics CRM for multiple tasks and schedules.  Let's say you have an experienced service technician who's familiar with coding and development.  You can book this technician for a service job, for example, or even to update software.  You can also use the same person for a new project that is needed for that needs a developer.  As an added bonus, since resources are utilized across both solutions and are interchangeable, you would only have to update the skill set for that resource one time.  Out-of-the-box business process.  Another Field Service capability is that it includes an automatic business process.  A firm handshake between CRM incident management and work orders creates an alignment between those two processes.  If a work order originates from a case, the originating case is visually part of that workflow which spans from the case creation to the completion of the work order.  Mobile access.  A key element of Field Service is the use of mobile applications.  Without mobile availability, Field Service would not be possible.  For mobile devices, drip scheduling enhances and de-clutters the user experienced by displaying fewer upcoming work orders.  It also improves the dispatch control by limiting the number of declined work orders or change requests by field technicians.  Now that we have a basic context where Field Services might fit into a solution, let's go ahead and just navigate through some of the basic record types and the overall module.  To get to the Field Service module, you click on the module selector and go ahead and select Field Service.  From there, just like you would see in other parts of Microsoft CRM, you see the various kinds of record types involved, anything from work orders to scheduling board to resource bookings, monitoring agreements, accounts, contacts, even requesting time offs.  You also have the ability to manage purchase orders, inventory transfers and inventory management, as well as return management and return to vendors.  Within the administration area, there are a number of configuration options

What type of companies would use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service application?

Anyone who provides a service that requires an on-site visitation is an ideal candidate. Some examples include medical services, landscaping services, home healthcare companies, industrial services, utility departments, safety inspectors, and IT technicians, just to name a few.  For example, if a customer calls in with a network security issue, you can simply look at the schedule to see who's immediately available to go on site and have them look into resolving the issue.  Let's dive a little deeper into Microsoft Field Services and all of the benefits that come with it.

How to use Field service?

Work order management

 Service requests are tied to work orders and right parts monitoring which improves inventory management. In work order life cycle they are created, scheduled, Dispatched, Serviced, Review or Approval, invoiced & inventory adjustment

Resource management

Field Service solution, there are three main resources.  There's dispatchers, managers, and Field Service technicians.  Field Service dispatchers are typically people in the organization who are responsible for scheduling and need to manage resources and work orders.  This provides the ability for more work orders and resources being managed with a minimum amount of people and overhead.  The second resource consists of Field Service managers.  They are the users that organize resources to ensure maximum efficiency.  Managers verify that dispatchers and Field Service technicians are assigned to the right place and inspect everything to make sure it's properly aligned.  They're involved with the service tasks from the beginning to the end, whereas a work order must first be reviewed and approved by a manager before it can be closed.  Another type of manager within Field Service is an inventory manager.  These are the people within your organization who are responsible for inventory, purchase orders and managed returns.  The returns would include items such as RMAs, which are return merchandise authorizations, and RTVs, which are return to vendors.  A third resource are Field Service technicians.  Technicians are generally people within the organization who'll access Field Service from a mobile device while actually being on site.  In the field, a technician is notified via email or text to check their job queue.  They can then easily capture any sort of information that might be deemed important such as tasks, product parts, notes, photos, and even signature captured directly from the field on their device.  This allows them to have a complete customer insight, real-time guidance and cross-team collaboration.  Once the job's complete, a final status change is displayed within the Microsoft CRM application

Inventory management

Field Service inventory management manage the inventory as well as provide updates and stock history for any types of locations warehouses, depots, or even trucks.  A warehouse is any company location where inventory can be located such as an actual warehouse, a distribution center, or a truck.  Realtime updates ensure that your inventory is accurate and replenishment and purchasing can be done within the system or through an integration