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Dynamics 365 Community / Blogs / Josh Anglesea D365BC Blog / Business Central Service Ma...

Business Central Service Management Email Queue

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The service management module of Business Central has an emailing feature which is designed to inform internal employees if service level agreements (SLA) are being missed. It also has a feature to update a customer on completion of a repair for a specific service item. The standard documentation on this area isn’t that great. Therefore I will explain in brief more about the feature and the required setups to make the most of it. At the time of writing this area is not part of the enhanced email capabilities and has little scope for configuration. An area I hope that improves in the future.

Part 1 is the Internal warning emails:

In the service management setup page you can determine the duration of time (in hours) that a series of warnings should fire off to internal staff members. In the “Send <> Warning To” fields just add the email address. It could be the same person each time or it could be a group email, the choice is yours.

Now that’s in place how is it being calculated that something has hit a “warning”? Over on a service contract we start to piece the puzzle together:

Each service item line can have a differing “Response Time (Hours)”. Note you can set this at header level too – in the “Service” fast tab. In my case the time to respond is seconds – like to set the bar high worth noting here that a service item must be part of a service contract for the SLA to count.

Once a service order is logged we have a date and time for that taking place – “Order Date”, “Order Time”.

This data coupled with the “Response Time (Hours)” value on the order, which just so happens to come from the service contract, gives us the expected SLA.

You can see the detail on the line level of the service order. Note it is the calculated value. In an earlier screenshot there is a field called “Warning Status” – this is where we can see what warning message has been sent. In my case it will jump straight to the third warning. Of course in a real life scenario it will step through as the clock ticks. Worth noting that the message will only ever happen once. So, if a user manually resets to the “Warning Status” but a message about it has already been sent then no new message will appear.

**Emails will only send if the Service Order has a status of Pending and the service order line has a “Repair Status Code” which is marked with “Initial” true** The out of the box setup here is something worth sticking to if you can but if you have your own repair status codes then I am referring to this setup:

In the case the service order line must be INITIAL for a warning email to send. Which effectively means, no one has started working on it yet. The interesting pat about this is when you have a multi line service order and you start work on it the overall “Status” of the order changes. Again I will state only “Pending” service orders get warnings. This is a good use case for the setup option “One Service Item Line/Order” – which would then give you greater control over getting warnings for all service items

So, what do we need for the emails to start flying out? Two codeunits adding to the job queue entries page. Set them up to run as you need.

An example of the data in the service email queue:

Thing we can’t do is configure the “Subject Line” – would like that to change in future releases. If we need different detail then a customisation is needed here The table has a “Body Line” field which then produces the below email:

Part 2 – Customer notifications

A customer can be kept informed of the order with email messages when the codeunits from part 1 are in place. On the header of the service order there is a field called “Notify Customer” with a series of set options. Unfortunately, as standard the field is blank when the header is created. You would expect it to be linked to a customer record or even set at service order type, but no…..This means we have to set this manually per order, without customisation. You will also need the “Email” field to be populated, as standard it is blank too – you can see what I mean by having this area catch up with the enhanced email features:

To trigger an email to the chosen address you must mark the “Repair Status Code” to a value which sets the overall service order “Status” to Finished.

Upon doing that you will get this kind of message:

Unlike the warning messages this one will fire off multiple times if you chop and change the repair status code:

Final email looks like this. Again, with no current configuration options for changing what the email body is…

Some limitations in the standard offering but could be a nice thing to use if you have this module. The details mentioned are applicable to older versions of NAV which have the same module.


This was originally posted here.

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