Like most businesses, Field Service organizations are looking for their systems to help them be more efficient. Not surprisingly, efficiencies are critical in the age of labor shortages and increased demand for top-notch service. In this two-part blogpost series, we will highlight just a few ways that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service takes some of the “extra legwork” out of an employee’s day so they can accomplish more. After all, being able to take one additional call or complete one more work order will positively affect the bottom line.
In today’s first part, we’ll explore how Dynamics Field Service helps dispatchers and back-office personnel. In next month’s second installment, we’ll dive into how technicians can experience more efficiencies in their days with mobile technology.
Part I: How Dynamics Field Service Helps Dispatchers and Back-Office Personnel
The dispatcher for service organizations can often wear many hats depending upon the size of the company. For most dispatchers, days include talking to clients, technicians, and managers. They probably have a schedule board and multiple work orders open at any given time. Therefore, reminders or notifications are key to keep them on track. Many employees talk about “living in Outlook” with email reminders. However, with all the emails we receive daily important stuff can easily get buried. Dynamics Field Service offers up notifications right inside the schedule board through booking alerts. This is great since this is probably the main screen that dispatchers live in during their workday. Booking alerts are great for any note or reminder. They can relate to bookings, work orders, users, or even other entities (like an outstanding invoice). The booking alert can be triggered based on times, alarms, or workflows.
Since dispatchers live inside the schedule board, it is critical that the board be smart and provide guidance to the dispatcher. In Dynamics Field Service, assistive and automated scheduling are key attributes to the solution. This functionality can really help to ramp up new hires or just aid the seasoned employees during the busy season. The Schedule Assistant offers up the right resources based on skillset, availability, and proximity for the unscheduled work order. The filtered list of resources makes scheduling quicker and easier than ever before. Automated scheduling (or Resource Schedule Optimization {RSO}) allows the system to do the heavy lifting on scheduling. This in turn frees up the dispatcher to accomplish other important tasks and manage scheduling only by exception.
Finally, the incorporation of AI into Dynamics Field Service really enhances the productivity benefit by taking the data analysis burden off the managers and putting it onto the system itself. Some of the AI includes predictive work duration, work order incident type suggestions, and IoT alert suggestions. Microsoft includes the built-in AI components out of the box. The system just needs the historical data to analyze and offer up the suggested adjustments.
For example, in predictive work duration, the length of time it takes to complete a work order can be adjusted based on actual historical work time completion. If the estimate is too long, the AI analysis can suggest shortening the estimate, possibly allowing for more work to be scheduled in a day. For work order incident type AI suggestions, the data related to products used, tasks completed, and labor done are reviewed. With these suggestions, an additional task might be added or removed, or another inventory item included to assure higher first-time fix rate percentages. Lastly, for organizations that have a true connected field service solution, the IoT alert from the asset can offer up a recommendation on what type of work order should be created as a solution.
Our team has helped numerous field service organizations with these improved efficiencies. If you would like to learn more, we invite you to reach out to us. Be on the lookout in January for the second installment of this two-part Field Service blog series!
