Introduction
Many organizations have common types of jobs that they perform. Often, these standard jobs contain products, procedures, and services that don't tend to vary.
Overview of an incident type
Incident types in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service act as templates that allow users to quickly create work orders for these common types of jobs. You can also use incident types to define specific work order issues and recommended resolutions.
Incident types prepopulate the detail of the work order, which you can manually edit as needed.
Organizations benefit from using incident types because they codify issues, procedures, and resolutions, and help standardize processes across geographies and business lines. Incident types ensure that all field technicians perform the same actions to resolve work orders. Moreover, if better procedures are discovered, the incident type will be updated and implemented across the entire organization.
Using incident types will help you save time while creating work orders. Without using incident types, the customer service reps or dispatchers who are creating work orders would have to manually add details.
Incident types are helpful for reporting because they allow you to see trends for specific issues. By using an incident type, rather than reporting on work order types to understand the number of repair work orders, you can report on the number of power failures for a specific asset category.
Other important incident type features include the ability to:
Add multiple incident types to a work order to define multiple issues or procedures that need to be completed.
Relate each incident type to a customer asset to build service history.
Relate incident types to requirement group templates to auto populate multiple requirements for a work order and schedule it to multiple resources.
Use incident types in agreements to auto populate the work orders that are created for preventative maintenance.
Note
Incident types are not related to the concept of cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
Elements of an incident type
An incident type contains several details for the work order, such as duration, service tasks, products, services, potential resolutions, and characteristics (skills).
For example, consider a company that services MRI equipment. Technicians are regularly dispatched to conduct MRI inspections. A standard MRI inspection might have the following needs:
Products
One lithium battery
Two gradient coils
Service - MRI sanitation
Tasks
Measure energy usage - 30 minutes
Replace battery - 15 minutes
Replace gradient coils - 30
Collect customer signature - 15 minutes
If most MRI inspections performed contain this information, an organization might want to simplify the process of adding these items, pre-populating these details to a work order.
You can accomplish this simplified approach by using incident types. Incident types are best described as templates that you can use to populate items, such as tasks, products, and service definitions on work orders. When you create a work order, you can add one or more incident types to it. After you've added more incident types, all items that are defined on the incident types will be added to the work order.