If you’ve been following my recent articles, you might already be aware that the release notes for the second wave of 2023 were unveiled on July 18, 2023! In my first article, I mentioned that I had the opportunity to review them, and as a result, I’ll be writing a series of articles discussing the new features and updates included in this release. I kicked off the series by focusing on Dynamics 365 Sales, followed by an article on the features for Dynamics 365 Customer Service. It’s important to note that during the writing of the articles, I didn’t have early access to the majority of these features, (early access starts today! (July 31, 2023)) meaning I haven’t been able to explore them yet. There’s a strong possibility that I’ll delve into more detailed articles on the mentioned features in future. But for now, let’s jump straight into the enhancements awaiting Dynamics 365 Field Service in this release wave!

Generate a work order from a quote*

This is an important one! As you may or may not know, today we have the ability to create a work order from an opportunity. If the opportunity products (and services) are configured to as Field Service products and/or services, these items will be added to the work order as products and/or services. This is a great feature, but some organizations wanted this functionality expanded to quotes! It seems like that’s what’s happening in this release wave! Once a quote has been accepted by a customer this feature will allow sellers to automatically generate a work order with quote details, just like we can do now with opportunities. Keep in mind, that just like when we generate a work order from an opportunity, the products and services added to the quote need to be configured for field service by populating the field service data points on the products and services.
*Update: this feature has been moved to a future release wave.

Expedite service delivery with extended customer details

According to the release notes we will be able to track warranties, assign asset tags to customer assets, and track location contact information. I think what this means is that the functional location table will get some additional columns related to it, like cost center, email address, etc. (See image below). By storing location contact information (email address) and cost center information, field workers will always know who to contact and how to bill for services rendered. Being able to use asset tags means that we will get an additional column related to the asset table where the tag will be stored. On top of that we will be able to track if the asset is under manufacturer warranty or not! It looks like there will be a new table to store warranty, such as the date range the warranty is active, the warranty provider, etc. and we will be able to tie these to several covered assets and/or functional locations. Keep in mind the warranty information is just informational, so there is no logic behind it (yet…?). I’m hoping this will come later, but if not, RSM has built a solution that automates warranty tracking, so we can help if you need this functionality in your environment.

Improved flexibility for booking status automation

This feature will allow users to change the status of a work order to open-unscheduled even if a work order already has bookings related to it. A good example of when this functionality would be beneficial: While attending a work order, a technician finishes certain tasks but requires additional parts to proceed. To indicate that the work order is awaiting parts, the technician will have the capability to close the current booking and transition the work order to an -open unscheduled status. This allows the dispatcher to be aware of the pending parts for the work order.

Complete bookings while preserving end time

This feature will allow for the system to preserve the end date and time of a booking in Field Service. Currently, the end time of a booking is automatically updated to the current date and time when a booking is marked as completed. This could create an issue when someone besides the field worker completes a booking. In this release, the end-time of bookings will stay how it was set initially. I am not sure if this will be a setting that we can turn on or off, which I hope so, but we’ll have to wait and see. The release notes show that this feature will be part of the early access in late July, so we can try it out then!

Maintain customer facilities with enhanced capabilities

This feature expands on the information that is already stored in functional location in Dynamics 365 Field Service. The release notes refer to location types and properties which makes it sound like we’re going to be able to use the existing property table for functional locations, in the same way as we are using them today for customer assets. The location type might just be a column that shows whether the location is a warehouse vs an office, residence, etc. If we are reusing properties, it would make sense to store the location types in the property template table, as this will allow us to tie the properties to the location type.

Manage frontline worker certifications

This is another new table in Dynamics 365 Field Service, which will allow us to store all sorts of information in the application, examples are: insurance, licenses and certifications. The release notes state that will be able to upload the actual documents here as well, which will be stored in the timeline of the row. Keep in mind this feature will not be part of the characteristics table which is currently available in Dynamics 365 Field Service.

Resource Scheduling

The legacy schedule board will be retired at the end of this release, in October 2023. So if your organization is not using the new schedule board yet, I suggest you upgrade soon!

Show bookings proportional to duration on multiday views

Today when we open the weekly or monthly view on the schedule board, we can expand the view to show the bookings related to a resource or multiple resources stacked below the time range selected. All the booking are showing stacked on top of each other by date and time, but we don’t see the duration like we can on the hourly view. This new feature will allow us to also view these bookings proportional to their duration on these multi-day views! This will give schedulers a more detailed and realistic view of the schedule board and resource availability.

Enable mouse scroll to enable date-range granularity

This might be a small feature, but I really like this one! This will allow dispatchers to use a combination of CTRL on their keyboard and the scroll button on a mouse to zoom in and out on the schedule board. The zooming is related to the different views, like hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. Today this is something that we can only do by changing this manually, there are no shortcuts available, so this is a welcome feature to me.

Work hours calendar supports multiple recurrences

Before this release, a resource was only able to have one work hour calendar recurrence. With multiple recurrences, there is a lot of flexibility that is being added in configuring the availability for resources. For example, Jason might work the morning shift 8am-12pm on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, (recurrence 1) and he works the afternoon shift 1-5pm on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (recurrence 2), and lastly he works the night shift from 7-10pm on Fridays (recurrence 3). With the help of multiple booking recurrences we can now configure scenario’s like this!
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