Travel time outside of working hours?

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Posted on by CM-10012028-0

Hi,

We have our resources setup to travel from their home address to various jobs in the region. Their working hours are typically 8am - 5pm but I'd like to configure FS to allow the out of hours travel time to the first job.

I've found that if we set a time from promised of 8am, then we are unable to book resources using the book button as their travel would have them arriving at say 8:20 with 20 minutes travel.

Options considered:
1. I don't know whether we need to adjust the resource working hours to become 7:30am instead of 8am to allow us to account for travel, this would be different to their general calendars though.

2. I've taken a look at our board settings and can only see the options for "Book based on estimated arrival" and "Book based on start of travel" but these do not quite fit.

3. If we set a Time to proposed of 08:30 then some resources show up, but it seems strange that having the field blank on the search and work order doesn't bring up resources until the field is updated.

4. I've read a few resources suggesting the first job doesnt take into account travel, but this is not the behaviour we are seeing.

5. I've read that resource optimization adding does have this option, but we are not using that plugin, although the behavior discussed is what we are after.

The use case really is:
- Promised window of 8am, the resources for first job can be there for that time. Even if it accounts for overtime.

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Tom_Gioielli 2,762 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Lots of questions here, let me see if I can answer a few of them.

This is a bit of a question between system configuration and training. For example, would it work for your organization to set the Resource start time as 7:30, but dispatchers know not to schedule a job start prior to 8AM? You could always pair training with something like Booking Alerts (Create a booking alert - Dynamics 365 Field Service | Microsoft Learn) that will pop up a warning if a booking is create prior to 8AM for a resource.

I ran a few different tests in a demo environment I have. It seems like it all boiled down to "it depends" for the behavior. The schedule board is highly dependent on how someone performs an action to determine the outcome. This is great for flexibility but can be confusing to learn. It looks like the Drag and Drop of a booking might meet your requirement. See below for some screenshots and test scenarios.

Not sure how resources or your board is set, so I'm not sure on this one. As a general rule, the schedule board will try to only show resources it knows are available, and it will not show someone that it can't validate could do the job (either by time, location, characteristics, or some other metric).

The travel time for a resource on the first or last job of the day is determined by the [Start Location] and [End Location] field on the Bookable Resource record. If you have the fields set to "Location Agnostic", then travel time is not calculated. However, if "Resource Address" or "Organizational Unit Address" are selected the travel time should be calculated from those addresses

You can definitely do a lot with Resource Scheduling Optimization, but it is also expensive depending on your use case

Scenario 1: Drag and Drop Booking to Resource

Result: Booking created with travel time calculated to begin prior to official working hours

Scenario 2: Select Resource and "Find Availability" through scheduling assistant

Result: Travel time is calculated, but it won't start until the resource working hours begin

Scenario 3: Switch to Daily View, select the requirement and the day for the resource, and "Front Load Hours" for the booking

Result: Booking is created right at start of working hours, but no travel time is calculated

I hope this helps. Good luck on this, and let me know if I can provide any additional information.

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CM-10012028-0 85 on at

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We've decided to extend the resource working hours to cover the travel 👍

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