Overview of Dynamics 365 for Field Service October ’18 release – Part 6

Connected File Service

CFS – Integration with IoT Central

For the first phase of integration, the focus of the integration solution will be through Microsoft Flow. This is a one-way communication from IoT Central to Connected Field Service. With IoT Central monitoring remote devices, any measurements that exceed thresholds defined in IoT Central will trigger an action to fire an alert in CFS. Field service managers can group these alerts by criteria such as customer asset and incident type.

For the October ’18 release, technicians can be equipped with and act on insight from IoT devices when on site, with a few options depending on the state of IoT Central.

• Embed IoT Central device state and measurement visuals directly within the Field Service mobile application.
• Store telemetry data from IoT Central in an Azure blob and enable an embedded Power BI visualizing the data.
• Allow technicians to send commands from the Field Service mobile application back to IoT Central.

Resources Scheduling Optimization (RSO)

Enable more objectives

• Support preferred resources as an objective: Businesses will be able to define preferred resources for requirements and the optimizer will assign bookings to preferred resources first while meeting other constraints and objectives.
• Support best/least matching skills as an objective: Different business have different goals for using the skills of resources. With best-matching skills, businesses can better meet SLA and customer satisfaction, while balancing cost and efficiency with lower matching skills.

Single resource optimization

Single resource optimization provides a quick and simple way to re-optimize a selected resource to ensure that resource still has an optimal route after some schedule change happens during the day. For example, a resource may have overlapping bookings after getting assigned an emergency work order in the middle of the day or may not be able to make it in time for a booking due to traffic.

What-if analysis statistics

RSO administrators can leverage simulation runs to adjust optimization scope (include/exclude more resources), objectives (re-order rankings of objectives), and other parameters to understand what optimization results look like before locking down the recurring schedule. Additionally, with an analytic statistic, administrators can better evaluate optimization and compare simulation runs versus existing bookings.

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Gopinath