Transform dispatching in Dynamics 365 Field Service with Scheduling
We’re thrilled to introduce the public preview release of Scheduling Operations Agent, a feature for Dynamics 365 Field Service enabling dispatchers to improve technician schedules quickly and efficiently. Transform dispatching in Dynamics 365 Field Service today!
In field service organizations, scheduling is not just an operational task, it is a promise to customers about when their issues will be addressed. Traditionally, this complex process requires dispatchers to juggle numerous factors including technician skillsets, travel time, and promise windows. As conditions change throughout the day, such as traffic delays or appointment cancellations, dispatchers spend a lot of manual effort with time-consuming and intricate workflows to update schedules.
The Scheduling Operations Agent allows dispatchers to quickly and easily optimize technician schedules within seconds, ensuring that your customers receive timely and efficient service. You can enable this agent to transform dispatching in your Dynamics 365 Field Service environment using the instructions here.
Optimizing technician schedules with custom settings
Wherever you are in the Dynamics 365 Field Service application, reviewing work orders or analyzing the schedule board, you can use Copilot to bring up the Scheduling Operations Agent. After specifying the technician for whom you want to optimize the schedule, you can select among the optimization goals:
- Maximize utilization: suggest a schedule so that the technician completes more work orders, taking priority and promise windows into consideration while minimizing travel time.
- Front-load high priority work: prioritize the inclusion of more high priority work orders, at the expense of more travel time.
When optimizing the schedule, the agent considers existing bookings as well as additional unfulfilled requirements. You can influence the schedule generated by the agent by crafting requirement views according to business objectives. For example, if you are trying to compensate for cancelled bookings, you may want to select requirements which have promise windows which are soon to expire.
You can optimize the schedule over a time range that can be up to 72 hours in duration.
Also, you can further influence how the agent produces a suggested schedule by specifying whether or not it should:
- Match the characteristics of the bookings and requirements with those of the technician.
- Match the territory of the bookings and requirements with those of the technician.
- Consider the time constraints of the bookings and requirements.
- Consider the historic traffic information (e.g. rush hour patterns) when calculating travel time.
Read our documentation to learn more about adjusting the behavior of the agent.
Optimize with confidence
When there are dozens of jobs to be scheduled, dispatchers need to have confidence in the optimization result. With each autonomous scheduling recommendation, dispatchers can delve into the details to review and approve, combining the efficiency of AI with the crucial oversight of experienced eyes. This collaboration ensures that every schedule is optimized and locked in with confidence.
When using the Scheduling Operations Agent, the dispatcher can compare the original schedule with the suggested schedule in a Gantt chart and compare the travel routes.
Learn more
The Scheduling Operations Agent is now available in preview to customers with Dynamics 365 Field Service. Its use requires Copilot Studio capacity packs. To learn more about enabling the agent and using it, read the documentation.
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