Dynamics 365 Business Central: Service Management Introduction

Service Management Introduction

All right, so we're going to get into something new. This was actually a request, came up a couple of times. It's the service management system. There is a service management system in Business Central, believe it or not. You might not have seen it. It's there. It's pretty good. You should definitely be aware of it if you're doing any type of service management and you're using BC today and you might've not gotten into it.

So what we're going to do is sort of slowly get into the pieces. In the beginning there's a couple of interesting things, service management is not available unless you have the premium license. So if you're set up as essential license, you're not going to see it. It's going to be invisible to you. And so you have to actually change your experience to premium. You might have the premium license, but have the experience as essential. So you've got to change that. And I'm going to show you in the video how that changes and how everything pops up. And we're going to maybe create one service item just to see how that jives, and then we'll start moving further into it.

Okay, so we want to talk about service management now. Someone was asking if we had something more about it. Service management is a hidden thing inside Business Central. Obviously Microsoft CRM has service management, but we have it also here. And first thing I'm going to do is go up here into company information. And actually, before I do that, I'm just going to type in “service item”. Now there should be a service item in here, but it doesn't come up. So why is that? And I'm going to show you.

If you go into company information, and click on here, and actually go into user experience down here, it's shown as essential. I don't know if this is like this for you, but if it's essential, it's not going to show those advanced features like manufacturing and things like that. So if I change it to premium and hit okay, and now close it out. I'm just going to refresh the tenant here. And now if I go into service management, I get service management stuff. Service management is set up. Woohoo! Service item. That's right there.

All right. So if I go into service item, I'm probably not going to have any data here. And so as we're going to go through this, we're going to have to populate the data and get it off the ground. So if I go ahead and just click new here, I get a service item, and let's say, we're going to do a computer. So I'm just going to call it S0001, and it's going to be a computer. Now, let's say, it's Microsoft Surface. Let's leave it at that.

Now I can connect this to an item in the system, not going to do it right now. Here I can key in the serial number for this particular computer. So you can see how this is very different than from a standard item. I can set up the warranty for this particular item. If we have a response time, we have that here on priority. If this is actually linked to a customer, I can set that up here, and we will get to that later. But as you can see, the service item is sort of the core of the service management system. And we're going to be sort of poking into that more and more in the series.