D365 Field Service Inspections – Updates – June 2020

If you weren’t aware, Microsoft released their own version of inspections for field service (for public preview) in April. I wrote an article about it which you can find here. Since inspections came out the team at Microsoft has been busy! More functionality has been added to inspections in the Dynamics 365 Field Service app and I am very excited to discuss some of the new things that were added. I do believe that a lot of these features are things that most customers ask for when looking at an inspections solution. NOTE: If you have the inspections preview solution installed this update should have been automatically applied to your environment as an update. You still need to install the solution update yourself. The version number of the latest update is 8.8.28.50. Now let’s talk about what’s available in this update!

Copy inspections

The ability to copy inspections was added in May of this year. There is now a copy button visible when you are in the inspection view. This button is not visible when you open the inspection form. When you make a copy of an inspection (this can be a published or draft inspection) the system will copy the inspection name from the source inspection and add (1) at the end. Copied inspections will be in draft status by default.

Branching and Conditional Logic

The first one is branching /conditional logic, which I’m super stoked about. Branching logic allows us to perform actions based on responses given to previously asked questions on the inspection. I think every inspections solution should have this. If you go to the inspection screen in Dynamics 365 Field Service you’ll see that there is a new tab that has been added to the inspections form that is called ‘Logic’.

This is where we can configure where the inspection form needs to change (show a question, make it mandatory or skip to another question) depending on the answers given by a field technician. This reminds me a little of business rules, where we can also configure a condition (I.E if the value of this field equals this) and have an action happen when the condition is met. We can configure these conditions at the top (step 1) section of the tab. Just like with business rules, we have the option to add multiple conditions if needed. The different options available are:

• is empty
• is not empty
• equals
• not equal
• contains
• any of
• all of
• greater
• less
• greater or equal
• less or equals.

The cool thing is that when you pick a question and an option, (depending on which option you choose) you see the actual question below it. As you can see on the screenshot above, I’ve picked the ‘Is on latest patch’ question and I can see below step one that this field is a checkbox type of field. The only time when I didn’t see this was when I picked the ‘contains’ or ‘not contains’ values. One you save the rule it looks a little different but you can still edit the rules as long as you haven’t published the inspection.

Step 2 is where we configure the action. This is the actual thing that needs to happen if the condition in step 1 is true. The actions that are available are:

• Showing a question – which means we make it visible on the inspection
• Making a question a required question
• Skipping to another question – this means the cursor is put in this question, even though there might be other questions before this one

Just like business rules we can also configure multiple actions per rule.

Entity Lookup field

We can now add an entity lookup field to an inspection. This has been added to inspections as a question type. This allows field techs that are filling out the inspection to link a record from Dynamics 365 to the inspection. For example if the customer asset was not selected on the related work order task, you can put this lookup field as a question on the inspection and even make it required. In the designer you can drag the ‘entity lookup’ on to the inspection in the same way you drag other questions types on the form. You will have to select the entity the lookup field is pointing to when you’re configuring the question. You will also need to select a field that will be displaying the entity record information. When I added the lookup field for the customer assets entity the only field I could select was the name field. Which means that the field tech will have the option to select a customer asset from Dynamics 365 in this field. The interesting thing here is that the field values itself look like an option set type field. Keep in mind that this lookup field will only show records the signed in user has access to, which depends on their security role.

Additional Updates

Field techs are now able to enter date and time values that are in the format that is specified in the field tech’s personal settings.
There is another question type that has been added that allows us to configure questions that will only allow for numbers inputs as a response.

Inspections in Woodford

We were already able to test inspections by using the Dynamics 365 Field Service app, but inspections will also be available using the Field Service mobile application (woodford). The mobile project can be downloaded here.

Future Updates/Roadmap

Some additional things that are on the road map for inspections are the ability to modify a published inspection, this is something that we can’t do today. When an inspection is published, we cannot make any changes to it and that’s a little annoying right now. Another thing that is planned is the ability to add pages to inspections. This would allow for adding questions to pages and then skip the entire page instead of just a question! All and all some exciting things happening! The next release of inspections will be the early access release in August, followed by general availability in October of this year.

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