Dynamics 365 Business Central: Dispatching Service Orders

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Dispatching Service Orders

Okay, so now we are going to talk about service management again, but this time we're going to talk about dispatching. So, if you create a service order, you need to schedule it. So there's usually a dispatcher that dispatches out resources to work on service orders. So there is a particular screen, which is a dispatch screen, which lists service orders. One, two, three, four, etc., and shows statuses whether it actually been allocated or not. So you can filter an unallocated service orders and you can basically select a resource to allocate to the service order. So you have a resource table and you allocate that to the service order, and then it's allocated for a particular day, and for amount of time.

And you can also, and we'll get into that later, there is capacity of the resources. So you could basically be monitoring whether you have over capacity on resource or not, as you're allocating them to serve as orders. And then once a resource has been allocated to a service order, they can actually see what's allocated to them in a task list. So there's another list, this is called tasks. Same thing, it's basically listing out service orders, but there the filters on resource. And so they can filter, for example on Linda.

Let's take a look at that in the system. Let's go ahead and take a look at allocations to resources. So, I'm going to go ahead and create a new service order, so I'll just go in here and it just picks a running number. And I'm going to say the reason for this is Surface Computer will not turn on. So the customer is the Adatum Corporation and the service item in question is our Surface Computer, and that's it. So we basically have a service order creating that is pending and it's ready to be worked on it.

So what we want to go ahead now is assign this to a person to work on. So, if I come in and I go into administration, it's actually in here, we get something called dispatch board. And the dispatch boards will give me all of the service orders that are outstanding, and then I can put filters. So I'm going to put a filter on anything that I have not allocated. So I see there's only one. That's just the one that I created and I'm going to go ahead and then allocate this. So I can go ahead and click resource allocations, find a resource. I'm going to just pick Linda.

Put the allocation date as today, give it four hours and that's it. So I just close that out. And now if I just release the filter, I can see that both have been allocated. And if I filter again and no allocation, there's nothing, not allocated. So this is ready to be worked on by Linda. So if I go ahead and go out of here and take a look at task list, service tasks, and this could be a list that Linda is looking at. So here it's filtered on Linda and she can see all of the service orders that she's supposed to be working on and have been allocated to her in here.