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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Service | Customer Service, Contact Center, Fie... / Universal resource sch...
Service | Customer Service, Contact Center, Fie...
Answered

Universal resource scheduling - Using Case entity to schedule professional service consultants

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Posted on by Umer Javed 180

Hi,

We have a business requirement to schedule professional service consultants to work on cases based upon their skill/roll match for the type of case. Now depending on type of case, it may require 3 professional service consultants whereas 2 of them being senior with 2 skills and one of them being junior with a single skills and there may be various type of groupings(depending on type of case) or no grouping.i.e. case requiring just a single resource for a time period with a skill and role.

We have enabled case entity for scheduling. I am wondering how can we create "resource requirement" associated with the case using above groupings? If i am not wrong, "Requirement Group" can only be used with work orders? Similarly i guess we'll have to form the crews to return the members who match the criteria and book them at once.. there should be flexibility to book individuals as well. 

Secondly, do you suggest to specify time period(From and To date) on the case and then map to "Resource requirement"  or we just directly specify on the case?

Thanks

I have the same question (0)
  • Suggested answer
    Al Iggs Profile Picture
    Al Iggs Microsoft Employee on at

    Fortunately you are wrong :-) , requirement groups (RG) can be used with any entity. See here for details: community.dynamics.com/.../1042812 That's what justifies the "U" in Universal Resource Scheduling(URS).

    Not sure if you really want to use crews, usually the RG will be scheduled to individual resources, forming a temporary group. Crews travel and work together the whole day, while a RG assumes that the resources only meet for executing one job and after that split up again. RGs can be booked from the RG form using the Book button or from the Schedule Board. For the latter you may need to add RG views to the requirement panels of your board.

    Times must be mapped to the RR b/c that's the only entity that URS understands. Either map it to the date fields only or use the Promised Window, which gives you dates+time. Both will be considered by Schedule Assistant and RSO.

  • Umer Javed Profile Picture
    Umer Javed 180 on at

    Hi Alexander,

    Thanks for the response and happy to be proved wrong:)

    Yes i saw that last night in URS the children(essentially Resource requirements) for a requirement group linked to the schedule entity such as Case entity for our need. However i  couldn't see Requirement Group directly linked to the scheduled entity hence raised the question.  

    Understood about adding view for RG on schedule board, thanks.

    Yes for scheduling itself we can use Crews however i guess we first need to create a Requirement group(indirectly linked to a case) to be able to schedule it via crew based upon availability? Or you are suggesting alternative to RG in order to specify a requirement?

    And thanks for the suggestions related to timings...

  • Al Iggs Profile Picture
    Al Iggs Microsoft Employee on at

    Depends on your use case - can you elaborate?

    You can build a crew of 2 seniors and 1 junior, but that would be fixed for the day. See docs.microsoft.com/.../resource-crews URS does not provide help in staffing the crew. And the crew itself doesn't require an RG, in addition to Schedule Assistant you can even drag & drop a RR to a crew, which will then auto-create bookings for all crew members.

    With a RG however you could say "I need 2 seniors and 1 junior just for one job", then Schedule Assistant would suggest matching combinations including (potentially different) travel times for each resource. A combination could also consist of a crew + another tech.

  • Umer Javed Profile Picture
    Umer Javed 180 on at

    Okay so we get cases to work on for our clients. Resources can apply to work on those cases as they get paid.

    So we need a way to create the resource requirements for the case and then schedule the resource based upon skill/roll/availability. And the requirement could be for example "5 Resources required for full 4 weeks to work on this case requiring particular skills". Hence i am questioning whether we should create RG or we could use some alternative against the case to specify the requirement. such as create a single RR for full 4 weeks duration and  manually schedule that 5 times every week by matching resources?

    We may also use pool for staffing.

    Hope this helps to understand our use case

  • Al Iggs Profile Picture
    Al Iggs Microsoft Employee on at

    Now that's a different story, sounds more like a project. Also RG are not meant for multi-day. Have you looked at docs.microsoft.com/.../schedule-multi-day-work I would create 1 RR per required resource with all necessary skills. Then you can use the hourly but also the daily board to book the 4 weeks.

  • Umer Javed Profile Picture
    Umer Javed 180 on at

    Thanks for reply. Just to be precise we are not handling any payment related data in Dynamics 365 or day/hour rates for resources. Here we only aim to store the actual hours worked on job. i.e. completed booking...hence the system will be looked from work allocation and busyness point of view only....

    Yes i looked at this link quiet a while back however good refresher.i am wondering if we could use "effort" in the resource requirement to specify a value such as "5" therefore to indicate 5 resources requirement for the entire duration? So essentially 40 hours requirement every day(taking 8 hours working day) to be fulfilled?

  • Al Iggs Profile Picture
    Al Iggs Microsoft Employee on at

    Effort wouldn't work here. As soon as you book the first resource for 40 hours, the remaining duration of the RR would go down to 0 and the RR disappears from the requirements panel. This is more relevant for a facility resource with a capacity greater than 1 (a truck would consume more capacity than a car). Also a single RR implies that all required resources have the same skill set and date window, which is likely not the case.

  • Umer Javed Profile Picture
    Umer Javed 180 on at

    Okay thanks,so what is the solution/alternative?  Create multiple RRs against the case and schedule each?

  • Verified answer
    Dan Gittler - Dynamics Field Service Profile Picture
    Dan Gittler - Dynam... Microsoft Employee on at

    Yes exactly, if the requirements are you multiday you should create 3 independent requirements and book them all as requirement groups targets intraday scheduling 

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