Dynamics 365 BC – Service Management
Business Central is a business management solution for small and mid-sized organizations that automates and streamlines business processes and helps you manage your business. Highly adaptable and rich with features, Business Central enables companies to manage their business, including finance, manufacturing, sales, shipping, project management, services, and more. Companies can easily add functionality that is relevant to the region of operation, and that is customized to support even highly specialized industries.
Today we are going to focus on Service Management features.
Service Management
Providing ongoing service to customers is an important part of any business and one that can be a source of customer satisfaction and loyalty, in addition to revenue. However, managing and tracking service is not always easy, and Business Central provides a set of tools to help. These tools are designed to support repair shop and field service operations, and can be used in business scenarios such as complex customer service distribution systems, industrial service environments with bills of materials, and high volume dispatching of service technicians with requirements for spare parts management.
With these tools you can accomplish the following:
- Schedule service calls and set up service orders.
- Schedule service calls and set up service orders.
- Track repair parts and supplies.
- Assign service personnel based on skill and availability.
- Provide service estimates and service invoices.
In addition, you can standardize coding, set up contracts, implement a discounting policy, and create route maps for service employees.
In general, there are two aspects to service management: configuring and setting up your system, and using it for pricing, contracts, orders, service personnel dispatch, and job scheduler.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
Too |
See |
| Set up Service Management, including fault codes, policies, default documents and templates. | Setting Up Service Management |
| Manage service pricing, create service items, and understand how to monitor progress. | Planning Service |
| Create and manage contractual agreements between you and your customers. | Fulfilling Service Contracts |
| Provide service to customers, and invoice service orders. | Delivering Service |
Setting Up Service Management
Before you can start using Service Management features in Business Central, there are a few things to set up. For example, you can establish coding for standard services, symptoms, and fault codes, and the service items and service item types that your company’s customer service needs require.
When you set up Service Management, you must decide what services to offer customers and the schedule for those services. A service is a type of work performed by one or more resources and provided to a customer. For example, a service could be a type of computer repair. A service item is the equipment or item needing servicing, for example, the computer needing repair, installed at a specific customer. You can set up services as part of a group of related repair or maintenance items.
When you define a service, you can associate it with the skills required to perform the service. To help your service representatives be efficient, you can also set up real time troubleshooting guidelines and assign typical startup costs, such as travel costs or other fees.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
Too |
See |
| Set up codes that automatically assign lines on service documents for services you deliver often. | Set Up Codes for Standard Services |
| Establish general settings that control aspects of Service Management Processes. | Configure Service Processes |
| Define how your organization works with fault reporting. | Set Up Fault Reporting |
| Set up the service offerings that your company delivers to customers. | Set Up Service Offerings |
| Provide troubleshooting guidelines that help service reps deliver faster service. | Set Up Troubleshooting |
| Set up resource allocation to make it easy to assign the right resource to a service task. | Set Up Resource Allocation |
| Define pricing for services, and set up additional service costs to assess on service orders. | Set Up Pricing and Additional Costs for Services |
| Set things up so you can track resource hours and service order status in order to forecast workloads and service needs. | Set Up Work Hours and Service Hours |
| Set up repair status options so that you can monitor progress on repairs. | Set Up Statuses for Service Orders and Repairs |
| Set up a loaner program, so you can lend a substitute while you work on a service item. | Set Up a Loaner Program |
| Set up service items and service item components. | Set Up Service Items |
| Lay the groundwork for creating service contracts and contract quotes. | Set Up Service Contracts |
Planning Services
With Business Central, you can set up the standard tasks that you need to fulfill your customer service requirements. To do this, you must determine what service items and offerings your service organization supports, and at what price.
Business Central also provides some statistics tools that you can use to determine how well things are going, and identify areas where you can improve.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
Too |
See |
| Establish pricing for the services you provide. | Managing Service Pricing |
| Set up and customize service items and service groups. This includes establishing which skills a service requires and troubleshooting guidance. | Create Service Items |
| Know how to manage the status of repairs on service orders, and how to identify their priority. | Understanding Service Order and Repair Status |
| Understand the relationship between the status of a repair, and the effect they have on allocated resources, and vice versa. | Understanding Allocation Status and Repair Status |
| Use statistics to analyse your service processes. | Viewing Service Statistics |
Fulfilling Service Contracts
One way to set up a service management business is to have standard contractual agreements between you and your customers that describe the level of service and the service expectations. You can create contract templates that include necessary information, such as customer, start date of contract, and invoice period.
After you set up the template, you can customize the resulting contract to keep track of service hours, or other items that may vary from customer to customer. You can also set up a contract manually from a service contract quote. Finally, you can adjust your service pricing to keep track of discounts that a specific customer qualifies for, by specifying the discount amount on the Service Contract page.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
Too |
See |
| Handle a service item under multiple contracts. | Multiple Contracts |
| Create service contracts either manually, or from a service contract quote. | Create Service Contracts and Service Contract Quotes |
| Adjust the annual amount of a service contract or contract quote, so make sure that you invoice the right amount. | Change the Annual Amount on Service Contracts or Contract Quotes |
Delivering Service
Business Central provides features to help you deliver service according to the contracts that you have created and the service orders that you have committed to fulfilling. Your service technicians or dispatcher will find outstanding service orders easy to locate when they use the Dispatch Board. At a glance, the Dispatch Board shows which orders are in progress and which orders are complete.
Another way to review pending service orders is to use the Service Tasks page. In this view of your service obligations, you can see where in your service workflow an order is and change that status to reflect interactions with your customer.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
A service management application must interface with a customer request for service. That service request usually is translated into a service order. Business Central provides tools to create an order both directly in response to a customer request or as part of the contract process, if that is how your application is set up.
If needed, you can manage a loaner program for your customers. You can also determine your pricing structure, put service pricing offerings into logical groupings, and create price adjustments.
The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the topics that describe them.
Too |
See |
| Create quotes that are drafts of service orders, and then convert the quotes to service orders. | Create Service Quotes |
| Create documents that contain information about a service, such as repairs and maintenance, on service items. | Create Service Orders |
| Plan the delivery of service by using the Dispatch Board. You can also use project management tools in the Jobs department to help in planning. | Allocate Resources |
| Deliver service to customers by performing service tasks. | Work on Service Tasks |
| Post service orders for services, so that your accounting is up-to-date. | Post Service Orders and Credit Memos |
| Create and post invoices for services that you have delivered. | Create Service Invoices or Credit Memos |
| Keep customers happy by lending them an item while you work on theirs. | Lend and Receive Loaner Items |