Quick Book in Field Service

There are several different ways you can schedule work orders in Dynamics 365 for Field Service. Most of you are probably familiar with the schedule board and the scheduling assistant and how we can schedule resources from there. One of the newer ways we can schedule work orders is the ‘quick book’ option which allows us to schedule resources directly from within the context of a work order without having to navigate to the schedule board. In order to use quick scheduling in Dynamics 365 for Field Service we need to enable it. When quick scheduling is not enabled, clicking the ‘Book’ button will pull up the scheduling assistant.

In order take advantage of the quick book feature, we need to be sure we are on version 8.7 or higher. Below are the steps to enable the functionality in Field Service:

• Open the Field Service App from the Dynamics 365 menu in the top left corner.
• From within the Field Service app navigate to the ‘Resources’ area, under ‘Administration’, and click ‘Booking Setup Metadata’. Open the msdyn_workorder record. Under ‘Settings’ you’ll see an option called ‘Enable Quick Book’; set this to Yes. (you can enable the quick book feature for other entities as well, going through same same steps)

Congratulations! You have now enabled the quick book functionality for work orders.

Now lets discuss on how this actually works. As you probably already know, there are lots of different ways we can manually schedule a work order, but most of them would include the schedule board. The quick book option allows users to quickly schedule resources without having to navigate to the scheduling board. This really simplifies the scheduling process, which makes sense for users who’s day job might not be scheduling, but who need to be able to quickly schedule resources every now and then. It’s important to understand that when we click the book button on the work order, the system will query the system for resources that meet the specified criteria such as characteristics and/or organization unit. If the work order needs someone to travel onsite or to a facility, it will choose the resource(s) that is/are closest.

So how do we do it? Navigate to the Field Service App>Scheduling>Work Orders, select a work order from the list or open a work order. Click on the ‘Book’ button on the command bar.
You’ll see that a scheduling pane now opens up on the right side with available times and a total number of available resources.

When clicking on the resources icon on the right side of the suggested time slot and number of available resources, the user is able to view the individual resources, the estimated travel time and distance. The user can select a resource and book the resource directly from the screen, or open the schedule assistant directly from here.

I hope you enjoyed this article on the quick book feature for field service. Tune in next week for another topic!