NEIL PARKHURST

Field Service for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 contains a concept of incident types. I will explore how incident types work in this post.

Each work order can optionally have one or more incident types. Each incident type includes a definition of how a particular “job” is conducted. Including general details plus service tasks to be completed, any products that are required, which service or services apply and what skills the resources require. A single “job” may require multiple products, services and service tasks using incident types to predefine commonly occurring situations will make the use of Field Service much more efficient.

As incidents are added to the work order the required services (etc) are automatically added. The work order is the pre-populated with details of all the incidents included. If multiple incidents are added to a work order there is always a concept of the primary incident. (Note: I will discuss the use of incidents on work orders in more detail when I cover creation of work orders.)

The incident form is split into several tabs. Each tab covers a particular item to be added to a work order. So let’s look at each part of an incident type form and I’ll try to explain a few concepts along the way ….

General

The first tab on the incident is the general tab, in this we hold the name and description of the service.

Details

Next we have the details tab this gives “surprisingly” some more detail.

Service Tasks

Using service tasks is an optional feature but sometimes very useful. You can define a list of tasks the field agent need to complete during the service. These act as a prompt to the engineer. When you add a service task it can also be given a duration. This is the duration for this individual task and does not impact scheduling or billing of the overall service.

Tip: The line order field is used to sequence the tasks when the engineer views them in the mobile application.

Products

The products section lets you define a list of parts that might be needed to complete a work order of this incident type. For example, in my example of an air-conditioning service I might need to change some filters. Sometime you may have many parts list here, consider a car service. In that you would need an air filter, oil filter, spark plugs etc etc.

When products are added to the work order, the price list associated to the work order will be used to decide their price. Or if no price list item exists in that price list the product’s list price will be used.

Services

Here we list all of the services to be completed for this type of incident and their duration. This duration field is used to calculate the estimated price for the job based on the price list associated to the work order.

Characteristics

Finally, we have characteristics. This option is available from the navigation bar as it isn’t shown on the main Field Service incident form. (At least not out of the box.)

Here you can add any skills (characteristics) the engineer might need to have to be able to conduct this service. And optionally also rate this skills to say if the engineer needs to be familiar, good or proficient at this skill.

Tip: When using the scheduling assistant, you can filter available resources based on the skills associated with the work order. But in manual scheduling, skills are ignored and you can schedule the work order to an “unskilled” engineer without any warning.

I hope you can see that by defined the products, service tasks, services and skills needed for each type of incident we can greatly speed the time needed to create a work order. J