Work with crews, facilities, and pools
It's important that organizations can schedule resources to support all the potential scheduling scenarios they provide. To help with this, Universal Resource Scheduling provides multiple resource types. You can use them to handle everything from booking a room to more advanced scenarios where we need multiple resource types for the same job. In addition, it defines resources for specific users, accounts, contacts, or pieces of equipment. Resources can also be defined that represent facilities, crews, or pools of resources.
Defining facility resources
When creating resources, we can define them as a Facility resource. Facility resources are helpful when you need to reserve a physical space, such as a room for an event, or a repair bay at a mechanic shop. Facilities are also useful when you might need to schedule an appointment with a person at a facility, such as an appointment for someone to fix a laptop at a Microsoft retail store, or a wealth management consultation at a bank.
Because facilities represent a physical location such as a conference room or meeting space, they're required to be associated with an Organizational Unit that contains a valid Latitude and Longitude address. The starting and ending locations for a facility need to be set to the organizational unit address.
Crews
Crews are a type of resource that is used when you need to represent a predefined group of people that can be scheduled for items. For example, a company might use a crew that provides maid services to represent and define the individual cleaning crews that are sent out on jobs. Crews appear on the schedule board like any other resource. The members of a crew can be displayed on the schedule board, so you can see the overall availability of all the members of the crew. When a crew is scheduled, all the members of the crew are scheduled as well.
When crew is selected as the resource type, you need to define the specific members of the crew. Define members of the crew by selecting the related tab on the crew's resource record and selecting Resource's Children. Unlike other records in Dynamics 365, when you're defining a crew member, every field on the form is required.
For each crew member you define, you need to provide:
Name: The name of the resource as it appears as part of the crew. For example, install Team 1 - Dave.
Parent resource: Defines the name of the crew to associate the resource with. (It's prepopulated by default.)
Child resource: Defines the bookable resource that you want to associate with the crew.
From date: The first date that the resource is available as a member of the crew.
To date: The last date that the resource is available as a member of the crew.
Important
A resource can only be associated with one crew or resource pool for a specific time period. For example, if Ashley is assigned to the maid service crew one 1/1/2019 - 1/31/2019 Ashley can't be in another crew or resource pool during that time period.
When attempting to schedule a crew for a specific date, only resources that belong to that crew on the dates and times specified display and can be scheduled.
For example: An organization defines a new crew called Maid Crew 1. They add the following child resources for the crew.
Crew 1 Lead: Ashley Chinn - From June 1 to December 31.
Crew 1 Member 1: Bernadette Foley - From June 1 to December 31.
Crew 1 Member 2: Clarence Desimone - From June 1 to October 31.
Crew 1 Substitute 1: Dawn Phelps - From September 1 to December 31.
If a dispatcher attempts to schedule the crew for a job on 4 September, the entire crew will be displayed and scheduled since they're all defined as crew members for that date. However, if a dispatcher attempts to schedule the crew for a job on 12 December, only Ashley, Bernadette, and Dawn will be displayed and schedule because Clarence isn't defined as a crew member after 31 October.
Resource pools
Resource Pools enable schedulers to book requirements to a generic pool without needing to decide which resource actually performs the work. We can then reschedule these bookings to the pool members on a later date.
There are many reasons why defining resource pools can be useful:
Prevent overcommitting: When you schedule jobs, resource pools can act as place holders. Use them to block off and mark time as committed until the actual resources can be provided.
Assist in regional dispatching: Enable central dispatchers who oversee multiple regions to use them as place holders, until the specific details can be supplied by a local manager.
Capacity planning: We might not know the specific resource yet, but the capacity of a pool can be established, and resources named later. Schedulers can still schedule since capacity of the pool can be set as if it was a named resource.
Deliberately enable overbooking to expected cancellations: With resource pools, we can overbook resources with the understanding that customers are going to potentially cancel.
Resource Pools are created the same way you create other resources. When you select pool as the type of resource, you need to define the type of resource pool it's going to be. Resource pools are intended to be homogenous resources, meaning that they should all be of the same type. For example, you might have a pool of resources that are electricians, or a pool of rooms that have the same scheduling capacity. Resource pools also have the capability to auto calculate the pool's capacity, meaning how many resources are in the pool.
A resource pool type can be:
Facility: Represent buildings or locations.
Facilities must have an organization unit defined from them.
The start and end location must be set to the Organization Unit that is selected.
Accounts / Contacts/ Users: Represents individual people and items that can be scheduled.
Equipment: Pieces of equipment.
Important
A resource can only be associated with one crew or resource pool for a specific time period. For example, if Ashley is assigned to the maid service crew one 1/1/2019 - 1/31/2019 she cannot be in another crew or resource pool during that time period.