This post is going to cover how to create products and services in Field Service for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.

Whilst I was revising for my MB2-713 exam (Sales in Microsoft Dynamics CRM) I created a number of posts about the CRM product catalog. I mention this here as Field Service shares its products with other modules of CRM. Making product families, bundles and such like useful background knowledge. I have listed those posts below. In this post I will only cover the Field Service specific concepts on products. So I will assume you already have a basic understanding of the CRM product catalog.

Product Catalog

• Product Catalog (Introduction)
  
• Product Catalog (Price Lists)
  
• Product Catalog (Discount Lists)
  
• Product Catalog (Product Relationships)
  
• Product Catalog (Families and properties)
  
• Product Catalog (Bundles)
  
• Product Catalog (Hierarchical charts)
  

Overview

A product or service is simply anything you sell. They can be added to work orders manually or via an incident. (I will cover incidents in a future post.) It is also possible for the field engineer to add products to a work order from the mobile app.

Also in the mobile application the engineer may mark when a product assigned to the work order as an estimate has been used.

Each product or service has a “Field Service Product Type” field. The options include;

• Inventory – Products that are sold and deducted from inventory. (Implying we hold stock of them in a warehouse.)
  
• Non-inventory – Products that are sold but don’t require inventory.
  
• Service – “products” that are sold on a time basis. Such as the amount of time an engineer spends installing a piece of equipment.
  

After installing Field Service additional fields are added to the product entity to support Field Service’s extended functionality. The fields that are used will differ depending on the product being an inventory item, non-inventory or service. You can access products from the product catalog option under settings or from the Field Service administration area.

Product Status
(The product life cycle)

First of all, it is important to understand that each product or service has a status. When initially created that status is draft. Whilst in draft status the product will not be available to work orders. Only once the product has been published does it become available. (As is the case generally with including products in opportunities etc.)

Once published you can continue to edit the product details but there may be an occasion when you want to temporarily stop the use of the product whilst it is updated. In this situation you use the “revise” option, which gives the product a status of “Under revision”. And therefore makes it not available to work orders.

When a product or service reaches end of life it should not be deleted, the status is changed “Retired”.

Services

Services are simply products that have been defined as services. As you create a product once Field Service is installed a new tab is added to the product specific to Field Service.

You will need to define the “Field Service Product Type” field, in the case of a service it will be set to “Service”. Once set this field change be changed. (You can’t change a service into an inventory item!)

Once defined as a service many of the additional fields become read-only, as they only apply to inventory and non-inventory items. You can however define if this service is a taxable item or not. (If it is a taxable item the service tax type field on the account comes into play to decide what rate of tax to calculate.)

A note about unit groups, all products (including services need a unit group). This is used in pricelists to govern the rate at which the service is billed. In the case of a service it will be typical to give them a unit group of time. And then select a default unit group of days or hours.

Products

Again most of the fields found on a Field Service product will be standard but you should pay particular attention to the information found in the Field Service tab.

Inventory and non-inventory products have additional values available that help support purchasing. Including holding details of the vendor who supplies the product, the name and part number used when purchasing and the products manufacturer.

FieldOne used to include some additional fields to enable you to hold the manufacturer name and manufacturer part number. These fields no longer exist. Although I guess you could quickly create them if needed.

For inventory and non-inventory products you can also store a model number and UPC Code (barcode) for the product.

And if the product should convert into a customer asset. I will cover this concept in more detail in a future post. Field Service contains a concept of customer equipment (assets). You may want to use this to record what equipment a customer has on-site. For example: If you installed an air conditioning unit for a customer you many want to record its details against the customer, as that could be useful for future service requests etc.

Product and services are easy to configure but it is an important area to get right. Typically whilst implementing Field Service you will need to give this topic quite a bit of thought! J