This is another post in my series regarding FieldOne Sky for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.
This time I am going to look at the concepts involved in creating resources. Before you can think about creating work orders you are going to need to create some resources capable of delivering the services on those work orders. A resource is essentially anything which can be scheduled, this might be a field agent, a piece of equipment, crew or even an account or contact.
Note: You may wish to schedule accounts or contacts to enable scheduling of resources who are not directly part of your organization but you sub contract to.
Below is an example resource and below that is a table which describes each field in a little more detail.
General Fields
| Field | Description |
| Resource name | Free text name for the resource |
| Site | The site at which this resource works or is located. |
| Primary Email | |
| Time zone | Significant if your organization has field agents that work in multiple time zones. |
| Business Unit | |
| Warehouse | The warehouse associated with this resource. This is used for inventory management. If you don’t sue warehouses then simply select the default of Main. |
| Description | A free text description giving details about the resource. |
Service Settings
| Field | Description |
| Resource Type | Possible options include user, crew, service center, company asset ,account or contact |
| Hourly Rate | The hourly rate this resource is paid at normal pay. Pay types can then be used to give a percentage uplift for overtime. |
| Resource Category | The resource category is for reporting and can optionally be used to group resources. |
| Start Location | Used by the routing logic when calculating travel time. Options are company address (from site) or resource address (from user etc.) |
| End Location | Used by the routing logic when calculating travel time. Options are company address (from site) or resource address (from user etc.) |
| User or crew, service center, company asset ,account or contact | Depending on the resource type the resource record is then linked to a CRM user, or contact etc. |
Tip: The location may be taken from the user record, if you are using CRM on-line this will be entered in Office 365 admin. I had a problem that a particular resource would never show up on the resource scheduling assistant. The problem turned out to be that global admin had entered the country code as GB instead of UK. Resulting in a incorrect GEO-Code for the resources address. You might want to be mindful that addresses need to be entered correctly!
Scheduling
| Field | Description |
| Display on schedule board | Resources can optionally be shown on the schedule board and assistant. You may (for example) only want to see field agents on the scheduling board. With equipment being handled separately. |
| Display on schedule assistant | Resources can optionally be shown on the schedule board and assistant. |
| Time off approval required | Time off requests may or may not need to be approved. |
| Glympse enabled | Glympse is a fast, free, and simple way to share your location in real-time. If the resource has a glimpse enabled phone then real-time location data can be maed available to FieldOne Sky. |
Set Work Hours
Having saved the resource, it is import that you use the work hours’ option to define the working pattern for this resource. As this will be required to support any scheduling logic.
Skills
You use the penknife icon to add skills to this resource. These are then used to ensure that only services which require skills this resource doesn’t have are not offered.
Territory
The territory option is used to say which area(s) the resource can be allocated work from.
Tip:
FieldOne Sky is using a manual many to many relationships between resource and territory. The name attribute on the manual intersection is optional and doesn’t default. I found this confusing as it is easy to create the relationship without entering a name. You need to remember to give each record a name. I’ve started to always call it the name of the territory. As that looks logical when viewed on the resource form.
Great Work, Hats off to you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You are a true example of “sharing is caring” 🙂
On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 5:07 PM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Unified Service
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