Dynamics 365 Field Service — Inspections
- What are Inspections?
So you get to site, find the piece of equipment that you need to work on but first you need to answer a bunch of questions related to the work order. So that’s where Field Service Inspections come into play.
Inspections are essentially digital forms that allow field technicians to quickly and easily answer a list of questions as part of the Field Service work order process. The Inspections feature allows you to very quickly create simple forms with checklists, different data types and logic via a simple drag and drop intuitive user interface.
2. When to use Inspections?
Let’s take a couple of scenario’s where inspections are commonly used. In both scenarios the field technician, as part of the work order process, will answer all required questions on the Inspection form.
- A field technician arrives on site and prior to starting work on a particular customer asset they must answer some specific health and safety questions. OR
- As part of a work order, the individual has to perform a series of checks on a particular product, e.g. date of expiry, type of product.
3. Where to find Inspections?
Within Dynamics 365 Field Service, if you navigate to settings >> Inspections Templates, you can then create a new Inspections template.
As part of the Inspections toolbox there are a number of different question types that can be simply dragged and dropped onto the form.
The below table outlines the different question types that can be used on an Inspection form.
4. Inspection Logic
One of the features we will look at is Logic. So let’s say for example the field technician selects YES to the question ‘Health and Safety concerns?’ then we want to display a new field on the form where they must enter the actual health and safety concern.
The below screen shows the logic rule we have set up. It consists of 2 steps:
Step 1 — this is the condition that must be met in order for the rule to apply, which in our example is when the ‘Health & Safety Concerns?’ field equals Yes.
Step2 — This is the action that should then take place, which in our case is where the question ‘Please outline H&S concerns’ becomes visible.
Multiple logic rules can be set up on a single inspection form and based on a field technicians response, rules can allow a field technician to skip to a question, make a question visible as well as mandatory.
5. Putting it all together — Inspections & Work Orders
5.1 An inspection can be associated with a service task type as shown below.
5.2. When the service task type is part of a work order the inspection will then appear as shown below:
5.3 Field Service Mobile
Below shows the exact same Inspection but within the Field Service Mobile app.
6. Inspections Analytics
All responses entered for an inspection are stored in Microsoft Dataverse.
First, we need to configure how often inspection responses should be parsed and organised in Dataverse.
To enable response parsing, go to Field Service app > Settings > Field Service Settings > Inspection tab.
Enable Analytics to Yes. For Analytics frequency, consider the following options:
- Daily: Use this setting for inspection responses to be parsed into individual question responses once daily. Every day on the Record generation start time, out-of-box flows will be triggered to populate individual question responses into a Dataverse table.
- Immediately: Use this setting if you need question responses to be available in Dataverse as soon as an inspection is marked complete.
- Custom: Define your own frequency by providing the number of days when parsing should be done. See the following for an example.
7. Inspection Tables
Inspection related information is captured in dataverse in the following tables:
- Customer Voice survey question or msfp_question: stores each inspection question.
- Customer Voice survey response or msfp_surveyresponse: a response to an inspection.
- Customer Voice survey question response or msfp_questionresponse: each individual response to each inspection question.
Hopefully the above provides an insight into how easy it is to set up and create Inspections using the drag and drop UI.
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