Hi, I have following requirement in our current Field Service implementation: the field service technicians are all configured to have starting and ending location as their Resource Address. But it happens quite frequently, that their WO runs longer and they need to stay overnight in a hotel. At the same time, location tracking of resources is prohibited. The requirement is to make it possible to somehow define a temporary starting location for the resource to be able to schedule them for the next day from that temporary location. Is there a reasonable way to achieve this?
Hi Robert, what about creating a dummy booking with the location of the hotel, booking for example ending at 8:00? This way manual scheduling and Schedule Assistant will calculate travel to the next job from the hotel instead of the home location. If you set the booking's lock option, this would even be considered by RSO. You could even configure a custom entity Hotel stay, enable scheduling and then style the booking resource cell appropriately. Might be overkill though...
Flexible start locations is a planned feature, you might still vote to confirm the need: experience.dynamics.com/.../
Hi Alexander, good idea, I will investigate this further. Hope the flexible start location will make it into roadmap soon.
Hi Alexander, I am quickly checking the option with a custom entity and the logical step one would be to create an address field, longitude and latitude and enable automatic geocoding using workflow with the action "Resource Scheduling - Geocode Address". But for some strange reason this action cannot be selected in a workflow, even though is activated as every other action. I have found a couple of folks complaining about the same issue. Do you know why is this so and if there is any other way to auto geocode?
community.dynamics.com/.../resource-schedule---geocode-address-action-in-process-workflow
You will need to use flow for this :)
Hi Alexander, I have checked the simpler solution with creating a booking from the field service mobile app with auto geocoding. It creates the booking correctly also with the correct lat/long. But the next WO I try to schedule is anyway calculating the travel time from my resource address and not from the location of that booking.
Just tried it successfully. Compare today vs. tomorrow (tomorrow I'm starting from the hotel):
If your work hours start at 8:00, make sure your booking ends at 8:00. If it ends at 7:59 already (outside your work hours), it will not be considered.
No sorry, under no circumstances, always just from the resource location. Tried several end times: exact work hours start, after work hours start, every possible booking statuses, schedule boards, schedule assistant, always the same.
Hi Robert,
I appreciate this reply is quite late but we've released a product on AppSource to address this short coming in Field Service. It essentially does the workarounds listed below for your users and makes it far easier to manage. There is a free trial if you'd like to give it a go. You can find it here: appsource.microsoft.com/.../warptechnologiesltd1670946088918.warp_rlo
If you need anything more on it you can contact me james.taylor@warp.co.uk
Thanks,
James
(Sorry for the double post, didn't realise I wasn't signed in!)
Are you using RSO ? If so we had a third party company create a function called Phantom booking within Field Service. We use this function to create a booking for a specific place, mostly hotels for when a tech has to work outside his territory. We create account with the hotel information. We then go into Phantom booking and create a booking for our resource with their location being the hotel account and we list the dates that we want to span. Once saved, the system creates 10-minute bookings at the beginning and end of their day allowing us to use RSO to schedule an efficient schedule for where the tech is located. It is an involved solution however if this something that is a regular occurrence for your business, in the long run it could be beneficial.
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