Overview of Dynamics 365 for Field Service October '18 release

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Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Note

These release notes describe functionality that may not have been released yet. To see when this functionality is planned to release, please review Summary of what’s new. Delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship (see Microsoft policy). For detailed information about our products, visit the Customer Engagement documentation.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service helps organizations deliver differentiated field service experiences to their customers.

The latest release further empowers field service organizations to provide more advanced capabilities that match real-world scenarios:

  • Work orders with multiple resources (crews) can be defined and scheduled.
  • Customer expectations can be defined and met though entitlement and service level agreement (SLA) functionality.
  • The organization can be more efficient through more accurate work durations based on actual historical results.
  • Advanced pricing functionality now enables accurate cost tracking based on roles or other attributes.

Field Service technicians will now be more visible and effective with notification, chatbots, and real-time location tracking. This can all work seamlessly with the back office based on the available integration across Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.

Scheduling

The Dynamics 365 resource scheduling capabilities now make it easier to embed scheduling experiences to find the right resource, in the right place, in the right time slot. This can occur within a customer support experience or it can be enabled in another customer-facing app such as a customer-built PowerApp leveraging the sample made available by Microsoft. Organizations now have more flexibility to manage resource availability in the scheduling process.

There are new capabilities within Resource Scheduling Optimization (RSO) as well. Enhanced objectives will take preferred resources and skills-matching into account. A new action is available to (re)optimize a specific resource as needed. Configuration of RSO to specific business needs is made easier in this release with the enhanced “what if” capability and statistics.

Connected Field Service

The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to enable proactive and predictive service. Connected Field Service and Microsoft Azure IoT Central continue to evolve together to provide an intelligent software as a service (SaaS) for connected devices. Building on previous integration, bidirectional flows are now supported. For example, sending updates from Field Service though IoT Central to the device.