How should we be structuring our large number of products (inc. Services) in FS?

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Posted on by CM-10012028-0

Hi,

We're about to configure our products and services for field service to start adding them into our incident types and therefore work orders.
The team had already had a go at this and there are around 700 non-inventory products in place. When it comes to services, I understand the process of product creation, using fixed fee fields and price lists. However, it appears field service doesn't really have any product structure/hierarchy in place compared to other non-ms products I've used before.

For example, I've read in the docs that bundles do not work in field service. I've had a go at creating a product family to try and group together a number of services, but this doesn't seem to change anything in product selection or layout.

When assigning products to a work order, I can see that products get filtered down based on the associated price list of the work order which is helpful, but for the technicians adding services/products this can still be a lengthy list.

For context, we service repairs across residential homes, therefore we can have 6 or 7 types of trades, with 100's of incident types and you can imagine the associated services that go with this. Before I start defaulting to using the product title to segregate, is there anything I've missed or should be looking at first?

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Dynamics 365 Field Service

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Tom_Gioielli 918 on at

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How should we be structuring our large number of products (inc. Services) in FS?

I have a Field Service customer who I have worked with in a similar position as you. They have multiple divisions doing very different service calls, and each one has their own lengthy list of products. We handled it in the following way.

1) We added a custom table called "Product Category" to the system and used this to define the type of products that may be used on a Work Order. In theory, depending on how you have your module set up you could use your Work Order Type table in a similar way. This field was filled in on products to basically group them up

2) The Product Category was defined on the Work Order, and we had that value filter down to all the child records using real-time workflows or just good old fashioned field mapping. This added the category to the Work Order Products and Work Order Services as they are created

3) We used the standard lookup field filtering option to reduce the available products to select down to just those that matched our Product Category

Not sure if this level of effort would be worth it for you all, but it has worked very well for this client. Pay extra attention, however, if you are using Mobile Offline functionality as any custom tables would need to be added there as well or things won't work.

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Holly Huffman 3,737 on at

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How should we be structuring our large number of products (inc. Services) in FS?

Hi there!

I totally get wanting to make it as easy as possible for technicians in the field. They should be focused on repairs & not fighting the technology!

Couple of suggestions (apologies if you've already tried these).

You can set specific products & services on the incident type record. This way when work orders are created, any associated product / service will be automatically added to the work order

You can also guide the technicians on which products / services to use through Service Tasks (which can be set up to walk the technician through the work to be performed & also guide on services / products to select)

Creating custom views (especially if you don't want to auto add the items through incident types) is probably your best bet

you can create views and based on other selections, default the view they'll see to make it much easier on them

Hope this helps!

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