Setting up Work Order Types and Incident Types

The Work Order entity in Dynamics 365 Field Service has few fields which look trivial in the first glance but are critically important for system design and for enabling the intended experience for customers. Two such fields are Work Order Type and Incident Type.

In one of the recent projects, we literally spent hours (read: days) on discussions to finalise the right values for these fields. That was a prompt for me to write an article on how to set up these fields and share some recommendations.

The key starting point is that these fields are part of ‘Field Service’ administration and generally the best practice is to either identify all types in the beginning sprints (or weeks) of the project or at least agree on the definition of what each of these different types is to be used in the context of the project. Also important to mention, these fields and possible values for each of them is configured under Settings area of Field Service.

Work Order Type is used to categorise work orders at the top level. The ‘top-level’ is important because this is the first level of categorisation of what work order is about (incident type provide the second level of categorisation in terms of what work needs to be done). Following is a snapshot of out of the box Work Order Types and Incident Types:

There are few takeaways here:

1. Notice that coloured boxes (Diagnosis & Repair, Inspection and Install or replace) are Work Order Types. They are a higher level of categorisation of work, e.g. if work order’s type is ’Diagnosis & Repair’ it can be quickly established that work under that work order will entail some sort of maintenance, and not installations or construction.
2. The Incident Type under each Work Order Type gives a further classification of work. It is important to remember here that there could be one or multiple Work Order Incidents under the same work order.
3. Incident Types also links to resource skills, products and services, which gives a more granular level of control in terms of what products are required to do that kind of work, or what skills are required for resources to do that work etc.

Enough of theory, let’s see how things work in the system. Go to Field Service -> Settings -> Work Order Types

Work Order Types have three configurable properties:

1. Taxable: Is the work taxable or not?
2. Price list: Applicable price list for this type of work
3. Incident Required: When this Work Order Type is selected, should the system automatically created Work Order Incident record?

You’ll notice ‘Incident Required’ is set as Yes for Diagnosis & Repair and No for Inspection.

On creating a work order of type Diagnosis & Repair, you’ll notice system automatically creates Work Order Incident record

However, in the case of work order of type Inspection, the system doesn’t create any Work Order Incident record leaving it for the user to create manually.

Hope this is useful. Feel free to share your feedback and if you have any queries related to Dynamics 365 Field Service, drop a message and I’d love to chat.