How to create a follow-up Work Order?

This is a quick “How-To” article on an oft-used scenario in field service organisations: how to create a follow-up work order for future work?

The ‘Why’

This may happen for several reasons, such as:

1. Technician does a quick workaround fix today and is wanting to book a future work for parts replacement, 
2. field service staff installs a new part and wants to set a reminder to check the status in a month time 

How to achieve this? An obvious solution is to set up a ‘Follow-up Work Order’ which can be then scheduled by Dispatchers. Is this feature supported in Dynamics 365 Field Service? The answer is, as you may have guessed, yes  – as an out of the box feature. Let’s have a look at how it works.

The ‘How’

Create a work order in Dynamics 365 Field Service and book a resource to create a booking. Next log into Dynamics 365 Field Service app, click on Bookings to view bookings. Click on a booking to open a record.

Next, click on ellipses on the bottom to see all sub-menu items and click on Follow-up

This will open a ‘new’ Work Order screen

Notice that Service Accounts and Billing Account are pre-populated.

That’s it! Quick and easy with a minimum number of clicks for field resources to create a new Work Order record.

Caveat: this function doesn’t auto-link the two work orders or set one parent of another. However, this behavior can be easily set up using Power Automate flows [or using client site script – but I won’t recommend this approach].

Thanks for reading!

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