Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service helps organizations deliver differentiated field service experiences to their customers.

The latest release further empowers field service organizations to provide more advanced capabilities that match real-world scenarios:

• Work orders with multiple resources (crews) can be defined and scheduled.
• Customer expectations can be defined and met though entitlement and service level agreement (SLA) functionality.
• The organization can be more efficient through more accurate work durations based on actual historical results.
• Advanced pricing functionality now enables accurate cost tracking based on roles or other attributes.

Field Service technicians will now be more visible and effective with notification, chatbots, and real-time location tracking. This can all work seamlessly with the back office based on the available integration across Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Scheduling

The Dynamics 365 resource scheduling capabilities now make it easier to embed scheduling experiences to find the right resource, in the right place, in the right time slot. This can occur within a customer support experience or it can be enabled in another customer-facing app such as a customer-built PowerApp leveraging the sample made available by Microsoft. Organizations now have more flexibility to manage resource availability in the scheduling process.

There are new capabilities within Resource Scheduling Optimization (RSO) as well. Enhanced objectives will take preferred resources and skills-matching into account. A new action is available to (re)optimize a specific resource as needed. Configuration of RSO to specific business needs is made easier in this release with the enhanced “what if” capability and statistics.

Connected Field Service

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to enable proactive and predictive service. Connected Field Service and Microsoft Azure IoT Central continue to evolve together to provide an intelligent software as a service (SaaS) for connected devices. Building on previous integration, bidirectional flows are now supported. For example, sending updates from Field Service though IoT Central to the device.

Field Service business application

Integration with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

This integration allows for master data (account, product, and pricelist) and work order data to be pushed to sales orders when work orders are marked as closed. It also offers warehouse, purchase order, and invoice integration.

Entitlement management

With this release, the Field Service application includes the ability to define entitlements and associate them with work orders in field service scenarios. Entitlements help service agents understand the service terms that customers are eligible for.

This capability helps service organizations ensure customers receive the appropriate on-site support that aligns with their allowed entitlements, and that customers are charged according to their negotiated terms.

Multi-resource scheduling

Multi-resource scheduling allows for multiple resources to be scheduled against a single work order. This has been a common request from customers who have complex work orders requiring more than a single resource to complete the work. Incident types will be able to be related to requirement group templates so that when you create a work order and select an incident type, a group of requirements can be added to the work order, lighting up multi-resource scheduling. The infrastructure for multi-resource scheduling was included in Universal Resource Scheduling (URS) in Spring ’18 as a preview, October ’18 GA, and is now being leveraged by Field Service starting with the October ’18 release.

SLA Management

Field Service also has enabled service level agreement (SLA) capability to establish SLAs for customers and populate SLA details into work orders. This enables the scheduling processes to take into account commitments based on SLAs.