For reactive maintenance, Microsoft Dynamics Field Service handles all of the common constraints when booking jobs (such as availability, skillset, location, travel-time, work-hours, capacity), maximising first-time fix rates and ensuring SLA (Service Level Agreements) can be met. And through the capabilities of “Connected Field Service”, organisations can operate with high levels of efficiency and value, exceeding customer expectations by anticipating issues before they occur.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service puts planners in control of the scheduling process. Available people with the correct skills and equipment can be matched precisely to work order requirements via a Schedule Assistant, with a range of visual tools to support resource allocation.
When planning Work Orders, the Schedule Board includes a map-view, plotting the location of the job and displaying available or suitable resources within close proximity. Service accounts or asset locations are tracked in the system, including the ability to update geo-location from the Field Service mobile app as Work Orders are completed or as Assets are added to the system.
For planned maintenance or predictive maintenance, Microsoft Dynamics Field Service can help organisations ensure that ongoing work is completed on time. Resource Scheduling Optimisation (RSO) is a powerful Azure service integrated with Microsoft Dynamics Field Service to automatically schedule and allocate work based on a wide and complex range of constraints and requirements.
Whilst Microsoft Dynamics Field Service includes its own “stand-alone” functionality to generate invoices and purchase receipts, to provide job costing, to control the work hours of resources and more, it also provides templates to Microsoft Dynamics Finance for common integration scenarios (bi-directional customer, vendor, product, warehouse and asset integrations).
Azure IoT now allow assets to become “connected devices”, sending meaningful data into Field Service to generate alerts or cases. This allows organisations to remotely monitor devices and reduce maintenance costs by only dispatching technicians when they are needed.
The Microsoft Dynamics Field Service Mobile App provides robust offline working for field technicians who need data and functions to do their work in remote locations where a signal is never guaranteed. Inspections can be carried out, images and media-uploaded and documents generated and issued directly from the mobile device.
Hitachi Solutions have experience in implementing small and large Field Service programmes and has been awarded by Microsoft for our work in the industry. We also invest in Accelerators to support our Field Services projects (such as the Planned Maintenance accelerator for asset-oriented work planning)
