Dynamics 365 Business Central: Skilled Resources

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Skilled Resources

Okay so, Service Management again, we're going to talk about skilled resources. So, if you're doing a service order and that is connected to a service item, you can have resources available to you and that's usually people, but in Business Central, we call them resources, which have a skill to work on that service item. So in our case, we have Linda, and she has a MS Surface certification and so she can work on the service item surface. So basically what happens is that whenever I bring up available resources to work on the service item, the group that the service item is in, and that's how it's worked together, there is a skill group for particular skill that is set up so that you can link together the service item and the resource by a skill. And if that works together, then you get the list of those resources available for that. So it's more clear in the system, let's take a look at it there.

Okay, now we want to talk about the resources for service items. So if I go into my Service Item list and I have the surface computer here with all the individual components and I get into the surface computer service item. I want to see who is actually certified or who can work on this, who has the ability to fix the surface computer. So if I go into Related here, actually sorry, into Navigate and Resource Skills, I have set up something called MS Surface, a skill code, which is required to work on this. So I can basically create as many skill codes as I like and I assign them to the service item. So a resource will have to have that skill code in order to work on that.

So if I go out of here and go into Navigate and I take a look at Skilled Resources, I can see that Linda is the only one in my team that can work on surface computers. So it comes in here as Skilled, yes. And if I go into Manage for this, I can see or get here into the Resource Cart. So the actual employees or staff that works on service items is coming from the Resource Cart, which is very customary for Business Central. And I can go ahead and look for the Skills, right here in Navigate. And I can see that we've assigned MS Surface to Linda. The others do not have this skill, so therefore they're coming up with no. So it's a simple matching on that. And you can of course, have more skills required to more than one for the service item and then the resource will have to have that entire set.

What would have been nice to see and that didn't really happen as I was going through this, is that the skill would inherit. So if MS Surface was the skill required for this surface computer, then that should also inherit into the tablet and the components because they're components of the actual surface. But I did not see that inherit through. So I actually had to set up a skill that is required for this as well. So I have to go in here and say Resource Skills and would have to add the skill for that. Otherwise, if I go into Skilled Resources, everyone can do it because right now the surface tablet, which even though is a component of the whole thing requires no skills to work on. So if we fix that, we go into Resource Skills at also the MS Surface here, and then go ahead and say, Skilled Resources. Now we have the same thing as we had before.