Customer assets and device registration
In Dynamics 365 Field Service, customer assets represent specific pieces of equipment that a customer owns. An asset could be anything from a large piece of manufacturing equipment to an appliance, such as an air conditioner. My times when field agents are dispatched complete a work order, they're performing the work or maintenance on customer assets.
In many organizations, the asset management capabilities provided by Dynamics 365 Field Service are used with IoT device records. Organizations associate an asset with an IoT-enabled device that can be interacted with remotely by using Connected Field Service.
Before Dynamics 365 Connected Field Service can consume device and customer data, the device must first be registered with an IoT event processing service such as Azure IoT Hub. Connected Field Service includes a table called IoT Device. The IoT Device table in Connected Field Service is used to interact with corresponding IoT devices in services such as an Azure IoT Hub.
From within an IoT Device record, you can see relevant information such as alerts, registration and connection status, registration history, and more.
When you want to track a specific piece of customer equipment at a customer location in Field Service, you create a Customer Asset record. Since many customer assets are often IoT-enabled devices, customer assets can also be registered as IoT devices. When a Customer Asset is created in Dynamics 365, the asset record contains a Connected Device Attributes section. This section stores the Device ID and the Registration Status of the connected device. A customer asset can be registered as a device directly from the Customer Asset record in Dynamics 365.
Connected Field Service uses Dynamics 365’s Connections and Connection Roles functionality to link Customer Asset records with IoT Device records. There's a connection role called IoT Connected Device. When a customer asset is registered as an IoT device, the connection is automatically created using this role.
This functionality makes it easier to manage IoT-enabled devices. It also means that from an extensibility standpoint, you can use the same IoT Connected Device connection role to associate and manage other entities as IoT devices from within Dynamics 365. For example, a company that sells insurance policies can measure driver patterns (such as speed, average miles driven, acceleration and deceleration rates) before issuing policies. They can truly ensure that the rate quoted matches their driving style. When a client applies for a new policy and is given a device, the device can be registered and associated with the potential customer’s insurance application.
At times, a device might not register. A registration error might occur for many reasons. The most common reason is when Dynamics 365 isn't connected to Azure or if Azure is offline. When it happens, there's an error in the Registration Status field of the asset record. For assets with multiple devices, the device status shows the error message for each device.
In the next unit, we explore how to use Connected Field Service to interact with devices.