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Service | Customer Service, Contact Center, Fie...
Suggested Answer

Making all bookings 'soft' in Field Service

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Posted on by 15

Hi FS Community, I am looking for some guidance.

I am designing a solution for a customer. The essence of the scheduling requirement is that a resource being booked to a job shouldn't mean that the resource is no longer available to book to other jobs. For them, a 'booking' simply means that a resource is 'permitted' to work on that job rather than being 'only allowed' to work on that job.

Now, I know that it's possible to manually overbook... but the customer should be using the scheduling assistant, as they need to be aware at the time of booking that there are other 'in effect' work orders. So essentially, lack of availability should not be a determining factor as to whether the resource shows in the available resources list in the scheduling assistant. Whatever I try, at the moment a resource will not appear in the scheduling assistant if they have other bookings.

I spotted an 'Allow Overlapping' setting in the filter pane, but I can't seem to get that to do anything, and if that were the correct setting, it would need to default for users - which is another challenge.

Does anyone have any advice? Thoughts greatly appreciated.

PS(A): I realise this is sort of like the soft bookings functionality in PSA... But I'm in the FS world.

Thank you

  • Al Iggs Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    As a workaround, have you considered giving your resources a capacity greater than 1? However travel duration will always remain an issue in your case...

  • Suggested answer
    Fannie30 Profile Picture
    2,990 Moderator on at

    Unfortunately even something like a "soft" booking just means to a scheduler that they may go to that location.  From a FS perspective, when you Book a resource to a WO, it generally means they are going there during that window and, in many cases, the customer has been informed it's scheduled and X person will be there around Y time.  What you're looking to do is more RSO based it seems or manual booking where you can overlap / double book a resource.  

  • Suggested answer
    Fannie30 Profile Picture
    2,990 Moderator on at

    You can create a different booking status In Field Service Resources > Booking Statuses I created a Booking status called Tentative.

    Name: Tentative

    Status: Committed

    Field Service Status: Scheduled

    When you click on the common tab you can set the status color (we used F9FF45 for yellow)

    Restricting techs from clocking into the booking was done on the mobile app (resco). Not sure if you're using that, but on the Bookable Resource Booking form we changed the "On Save" to add conditions to throw an error message if the bookingstatus equals tentative. We have a bunch of additional conditions in there as well, so a screenshot won't tell the whole story.

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