Resource not showing in scheduling assistant while available?!

Last week I had an issue in my Dynamics 365 Field Service environment. The problem I was having was that my resource record didn’t show as an option to schedule onsite work to, while using the schedule assistant in the schedule board. I thought this was very strange, since there were no bookings or other appointments scheduled for this resource. In fact, their schedule was completely clear! After a lot of research from the Microsoft support team the issue was found. Since this was something I wasn’t aware of myself, I figured it would make sense to write an article about why this resource stopped showing up as available on the schedule board and sharing it with the community.

Background

So first let’s talk about the setup of my schedule board. I have a schedule board that I created for the New York region. I have added a NY territory and assigned that to several of my resources. I also created a bunch of accounts in the NY region, and assigned the NY territory to those accounts. I have also created some ‘regular’ work orders for several of the New York accounts. This will allow me to filter my schedule board to show work orders and resources related to the NY territory. When I say regular work orders, I mean work orders that don’t have any requirement groups attached.

Previously I have also created a few requirement group templates, which I have linked to Incident types. For the folks who are not familiar with requirement groups, these can be used if there is a need to schedule multiple resources for a work order. For example, you might have a work order where an HVAC unit needs to be replaced, but you need two technicians to do so. One of the techs would need to have skill A and the other tech needs to have skill B. Maybe you also need a piece of equipment to perform the work. With requirement groups we have the ability to configure these types of scenarios.

To make it a little more complicated, we can also create facilities in Dynamics 365 Field Service. Facilities represent the location where the work needs to be done. This happens when work is not performed at a customer location.

For example, you might be using Dynamics 365 Field Service to setup automotive oil changes or to schedule doctor visits. In these scenarios the customer would actually travel to a location vs having the work performed at the customer location. Let’s take a look at the doctor’s office visit. When scheduling the visit, you would want the scheduling assistant to show doctors who are actually working out of the same facility we’re going to perform the work at. (You might have multiple locations where patients go to, and each of those locations has doctors assigned that only work at that specific location.) In Dynamics 365 Field Service we can actually assign a resource (in this case a doctor) to a location/facility to that we can meet this requirement.

Configuration

In order to configure my instance for the doctor’s office example, there are several things I have to set up. The first thing I needed to do was to create 2 different facilities. In Dynamics 365 Field Service facilities are resources with a resource type of ‘Facility’. I named my Facilities ‘Manhattan Office’ and ‘Brooklyn Office’. In order to assign resources to the facility you can use the Bookable Resource Association relationship. You can access this relationship by clicking on related and selecting Bookable Resource Association (Resource 1). Click on ‘+ New to create a new Bookable Resource Association record. Enter a name for the record. In the ‘Resource 2’ field select the resource who is assigned to the facility. Below the ‘Resource 2’ field you’ll notice the ‘From Date’ and ‘To Date’ Fields. These fields represent the date range of when this resource is working out of this facility. Now this is very important, because this was exactly why my resource wasn’t showing as available when trying to schedule an ‘onsite’ work order, even though the resource (me) didn’t have anything scheduled!

Conclusion

What I found out is that if a bookable resource association record is created for a resource, (tying the resource to a facility) that resource will not be available for any onsite work during the time frame entered in the ‘From Date’ and ‘To Date’ fields. The thought process behind this is that these resources will perform their work at the facility during the time frame that has been configured, making them ineligible for any onsite work where they would have to leave the facility and travel to a customer location.
This means that if you have any work orders where the work location is set to ‘Onsite’ (representing the customer location) the resources that are tied to a facility will not show up as available when trying to schedule these onsite work orders. Of course this is only the case if the date the onsite work order is scheduled to, falls in the time frame the resource is set to be working at the facility. If an onsite work order is scheduled on a date outside of the ‘From Date’ and ‘To Date’ fields in the bookable resource association record, the resource will show as available.

I hope you found this article informative! To see a visual representation of this article, check out the video below! Make sure to check in next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!