From Dynamics365 Team Blog: Maintain business continuity with Dynamics 365 Field Service

In today's dynamic business climate, field service teams are still expected to maintain infrastructure and customer equipment, often with fewer onsite technicians and limited face-to-face interaction with customers. That means adjusting one's field service model to continue providing proactive servicesending in the right people and tools at the right timewhile being prepared with the processes and technology to do more with less from the field.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist can help organizations provide proactive service at the speed, volume, and quality customers expect, while reducing latency and cost burdens of onsite service. To drive these key business outcomes, we've invested in the following areas for the 2020 release wave 1:

• Increasing technician success by enabling field service inspections and technician time tracking capabilities with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist
• AI-infused insights to improve incident categorization and connected IoT capabilities
• Enhanced proactive service delivery with tighter integration between Field Service and Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Intune for Field Service Mobile

Optimized resource scheduling with the new, next generation scheduling board.

Increasing technician success

We know that for onsite visits, enabling technicians to achieve a first-time fix is the ultimate goal, while also leveraging the technician's valuable onsite time to drive increased proactive customer service. To that end, we've added the following capabilities:

• Now in preview, the new Inspections feature allows technicians to analyze and capture essential data while performing Field Service inspections, which can better assure quality, safety, and end-customer visibility.
• Enhanced the technician's ability to track their time in both automated and manual ways, directly within Field Service rather than in separate applications. In addition to the ability to track time, we've enhanced it with time capture precision to ensure the most granular data is available to derive the insights that can help to ensure better scheduling and utilization.
• We have updated Dynamics 365 Remote Assist with enhanced data capture and sharing. When technicians use a Microsoft HoloLens headset when performing inspections or fixing equipment, they can record and share the session with experts located elsewhere, enhancing real-time team collaboration with the ability to review onsite work, helping to improve quality of service and first-time fix rates.

These new Field Service and Remote Assist features help ensure technician success and optimize resource utilization, creating confidence in an uncertain business landscape.

AI-infused insights

We're enhancing Field Service with AI to help technicians properly categorize incidents, which leads to improved business metrics like parts inventory and availability, technician scheduling, and increased first-time fix ratesdriving down the overall cost of service for customers.

Device telemetry and service maintenance data helps to make intelligent decisions around dispatching technicians, however analyzing and prioritizing IoT alerts can be challenging. To address this, we've enhanced IoT alerting in several ways to increase proactive service delivery.

• Using AI-generated suggestions (preview) based on the past service history data, organizations can easily identify which IoT alerts are most important and can drive the biggest impact to increased proactive service delivery through connected field service.

• We've also added time series insights and a summary of the measures for the alert making it quick and easy to view and analyze the service history and take action.

Enhancing proactive service delivery

Improving proactive service with remote delivery helps to increase customer satisfaction and reduce overall service costs. We're enhancing proactive service delivery with tighter integration between Field Service and several enabling Microsoft technologies, including:

• Integration with Power Automate (preview) to expand the automation workflow capabilities to the massive library of connectors and robust logic building user experience.
• Aligning asset management capabilities and integration with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to complete the field service workflow scenarios, end to end, all in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• Intune for Field Service Mobile to enable IT organizations to easily manage the Field Service Mobile app.

Optimizing resource scheduling

Resource Scheduling Optimization (RSO) automatically schedules jobs to the people, equipment, and facilities best equipped to complete them. Updates include:

• new, next generation schedule board (preview) and resource management features to help service teams more quickly and efficiently manage technicians at all stages of the service journey. The new schedule board has a modern user experience with greatly improved performance and a fluid drag and drop functionality.
• A simplified and improved experience for managing technician work hours and time off, including a Microsoft Power Apps control that lets customers modify technician time through even more simplified app experiences. In addition, we've added requirement dependencies to schedule work orders in sequence increasing first-time fix rates and technician and customer satisfaction.

• A new dashboard for managers and dispatchers to surface insights that can help them monitor utilization and identify optimizations for time utilization.

Delivering more agile, simplified, and proactive field service

Siemens Smart Infrastructure intelligently connects energy systems, buildings, and industries to adapt and evolve the way people live and work, helping companies make buildings safe, comfortable, energy-efficient, and economical. Siemens is deploying Dynamics 365 Field Service to support more than 12,000 employeesincluding 7,500 service technicianswith the tools, processes, and agility they need to quickly and proactively handle customer issues and ensure smooth communication. Now, by taking advantage of capabilities such as proactive service delivery, resource scheduling, AI-infused insights, and more, Siemens is empowered to be more nimble and able to react to disruptive changes while continuing to provide high quality service to their customers. To learn more about the Siemens journey, read the customer story.

Like Siemens, Microsoft can help you and your service teams continue to meet ongoing demand for service despite new challenges. Explore the resources below to learn how Dynamics 365 Field Service and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist help ensure your ongoing success so you and your team continue to flourish long after this crisis.

To learn more about these recent enhancements, visit the Dynamics 365 Field Service documentation. Learn how Field Service can help you move to proactive service and watch a Field Service demo.

Discover how to enhance technician success with Remote Assist and watch a Remote Assist demo. And check out new Remote Assist features. Plus, learn how combining Microsoft solutions like Azure IoT, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, and Microsoft Intune can digitally transform your organization into a proactive-predictive field service model.

To further support our customers in meeting these challenges, we're offering Dynamics 365 Remote Assist free of charge for up to six months for customers implementing a Remote Assist solution in response to COVID-19. Contact your Microsoft sales representative to activate the offer today.

The post Maintain business continuity with Dynamics 365 Field Service appeared first on Dynamics 365 Blog.