D365 Field Service Inspections Updates – Dec 2020

Posted by: Dian Taylor | on December 22, 2020

I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Neha Jain last week, who is a Program Manager at Microsoft focusing on Field Service Inspections. During our call we reviewed the latest improvements and enhancements in Dynamics 365 Field Service Inspections that have been added since the last article I wrote on Inspections, which was published in June of 2020 (If you haven’t read the article you can do so here.) If you haven’t read my first article on Inspections (when Inspections became available for preview) you can find the article here.
My opinion after reviewing these updates: The Dynamics 365 Field Service Inspections team has done it again! There is a load of new features and functionality that will be added in v 8.8.32.52!! (The automatic (up)date for this version in North America is 01/08/2020, dates for other regions can be found here, but you can also manually push the update by updating the Dynamics 365 Field Service App in your environment.) Needless to say, in this article I will write about the new features in this release and additional features that have been added since my last article (in June) which I can’t wait to share with you all!

Export to PDF

When you navigate to the inspections section and open an inspection, the first thing you’ll notice is that there are some additional buttons on the top; there is a ‘Export to PDF’ button and and a ‘Revise’ button. The ‘Export to PDF’ is exactly that, it allows users to export a blank inspection to a PDF. Your next question is probably going to be ‘can we export the results (questions and related answers) as well? Unfortunately the answer today is ‘No’, but I am pretty convinced that this is something that will come later on.

Revise Inspection

When the ‘Revise’ button is clicked, the system will create an additional version of the inspection. If you navigate to the ‘Versions’ page, you should now see a ‘published’ and a ‘draft’ version of the inspection. You can then make any changes you want, and publish them again. Once the inspection is published, you should only see one published version again in the versions list. Keep in mind that all existing work order service tasks that have this inspection linked to them, will not be updated to the new inspection. Only newly created work order service tasks will get updated. Definitely something to keep in mind!

Question Updates and Enhancements

There is a new question type/question control that has been added to the toolbox. This new question type is called ‘Matrix’ and it allows us to put a table-like question with several columns on the inspection. This will allow field techs to add rows of data to the table. When you drag the matrix type of question on the inspection you’ll notice by default it has three columns. Additional columns can be added by clicking the gear icon on the question and clicking the ‘Add New’ button on the right side. Existing columns can be deleted by clicking the X next to the column. Inspection creators have the ability to change the data type of each column. There are three different data types available in this new release: textbox, number and dropdown. The properties of the columns can be changed by clicking the edit button for a column. A screen will open where users can set the name, title and even an input placeholder. The input placeholder will show inside the field, this could be used to give the field tech a suggestion on what to enter in the field.

An update has been made to the ‘text’ type question. Previously when we clicked on ‘Advanced’ settings for the text question, we would have the ability to enter an input type of either singe-line or multi-line, but with this new update we now also have the ability to choose ‘barcode’ as a type, which as you suspect allows field techs to utilize their phone as a barcode scanner!
Another great feature is that when you add the ‘file’ type question to the inspection, field techs who open their mobile app will now see the option to take and attach a picture all at once. There has also been an additional option added to be able to type in comments related to the picture. Lastly, the character limit of the question description fields have been increased to 1000 characters and there is a new field that has been added to the ‘entity’ type question which is called ‘depends on’. This can be used to filter the entity lookup based on a response of another entity question. I.E If the first entity question is ‘Service Account’ and the second question is ‘Customer Asset’, we can use the depends on to filter out customer assets related to that service account.

Pages

Users who create inspections now have the ability to create pages in the inspection, which can have different questions on each page. This functionality goes hand in hand with the logic that can be configured for each inspection. Previously we had the ability to define actions on questions, I.E show a question, make it required, etc. With the addition of pages in Inspections the ability to make a page visible has been added as an action within the logic.

Data Parsing

If you navigate to the field service settings area and open the field service setting record, you will notice there is an inspection tab on the top.

When you click on this tab you will see an option to turn on Analytics and select an Analytics frequency. When you turn this on some of the inspection data will be parsed into the customer voice tables, (questions and answers) which allows us to report on this data by using tools like PowerBI. There are a few options on when to parse this data into customer voice tables by setting the analytics frequency:

– Immediately
– Daily
– Custom

For more information on parsing inspection data click here or download the guide to understand inspections response parting here. Neha was nice enough to share her PowerBI report with me so that I can show you a visual of what this could look like. This report is not yet publicly available, but it will be coming out shortly for you to download!