Introduction to Power BI Solution Templates for Dynamics 365 Field Service

By Arbela Technologies

If you have implemented (or considering implementing) Dynamics 365 for Field Service, you have to gather a lot of valuable data including:

- Work Orders

• Work Order Types (Preventative Maintenance, Repair, etc.)
• Incident Types (types of problems or incidents)
• Priorities
• Customers and Service Locations
• Price Lists

- Bookings

• Estimated, Actual and Billed Duration
• Products used and billed
• Cost, Revenue and Gross Profit for Products and Services used and billed
• Travel Duration and Distance
• Service Tasks completed
• Customer Assets serviced
• Meter readings
• Technician utilization (amount of time spent by technician on work and travel)
• Non-billable work (covered by warranty or extended warranty) 

Power BI solution templates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enables field service managers and dispatchers to analyze and visualize this data and draw useful insights to help with better decisions and corrective actions (if necessary).

The template uses Dynamics 365 Data Export Service to replicate relevant data from the Dynamics 365 instance to Microsoft Azure SQL database. Data Export Service is a free add-on and can be provisioned with a few steps.

The template comes with pre-built data model, reports and dashboards. However, you can extend the data model and reports to include additional data including custom entities, fields and calculations.

Because the data resides in Azure SQL database, it allows you to process and view large volumes of data without performance impact. You also have an option to install Azure Analysis Services to handle large data volumes.

The following screenshot shows the partial data model included with the template.

Here is one of the dashboards included in the template. This can be customized to include additional data and calculations.

Want to learn more about Power BI solution templates for Dynamics 365? Get in touch with us and we'll be happy to help.