Field Service isn't a man in a van, so don't scope it like one
It’s a few minutes before face-off at a cup final. The arena is full, the players are waiting in the tunnel, and the ice plant stops. The surface starts to soften, and someone has to decide who to call.
Mark Christie, our co-founder, opens his forthcoming Dynamics 365 Field Service book with that scene, and the questions arrive quickly. Is anyone free who can fix a refrigeration plant, holds the right certificate and is close enough to make it in time? Does the contract cover an emergency call-out, and will they turn up with the right part?
Very little of that is about the van. The van is just the part everyone can see.
The trouble with “we just need a scheduling system”
We hear that sentence at the start of a lot of Field Service conversations. Ask a few more questions and the real list appears: get the right engineer to each job, know where they are, make sure the parts are on the van, tell the customer when to expect them, record what happened on site and get the invoice out quickly. Put together, that’s the running of a service business, and a calendar covers a small corner of it.
Treat it as a diary and the things that decide whether a job makes money, such as stock, contracts, what engineers record on site and how work is billed, fall out of scope. Go-live looks fine because the schedule board looks fine. A few months later, someone asks which jobs made a profit and the system can’t say.
The people behind every job
Behind each completed job is a cast you rarely see. A dispatcher picks someone who can actually do the work, not just whoever is free. A resource planner checks skills and certificates, because an unqualified engineer on work that legally needs a certificate is a compliance risk. A stock controller makes sure the part is on the van, because a missing part turns one visit into two.
Finance raises the invoice and reconciles the payment, since work that never gets billed was done for free. Customer service follows up and closes the job once the customer agrees it’s finished. Field Service connects them around one record of the job, passed along without anyone re-keying it.
It changes dispatch, too. Instead of dropping names into time slots, the dispatcher matches each job’s requirement (the skill needed, how long the work takes, where it is and by when) to a resource who fits it.
Where the money sits
The engineer in the van is only the tip of the iceberg. Most of the value sits below the waterline: territories and routes, accurate skills data, asset history, stock on the right van, agreements that create work on time and invoices that go out the day a job closes. If that layer is weak, engineers get blamed for problems that were made in the office.
You can size the opportunity with simple arithmetic. Estimate how many more jobs each engineer could finish a day if travel, skills matching and parts were sorted, then multiply by what a job is worth, by working days and by the number of engineers. Then be honest about whether you could sell that extra capacity, because a gain you can’t fill isn’t a gain.
Before you look at software, write down who touches a job from first call to final payment and what each of them needs. If you’re still deciding whether you need a field service system at all, our quick checklist is a good first step. Otherwise, start with these questions:
- How does a request become a job, and who decides it’s urgent?
- What makes an engineer eligible: skills, certificates, territory?
- Where do parts come from, and who knows what’s on each van?
- Which agreement or SLA applies, and who checks before anyone sets off?
- How long does it take today for a finished job to become an invoice?
How Proximo 3 helps
We scope Field Service as the operation it is, starting with the people behind the van rather than the schedule board. Every implementation starts from our Field Service Starter Kit, so you begin from years of accumulated work rather than a blank instance. We train schedulers and back-office teams on the schedule board, skills and work orders, train engineers on the mobile app, and stay on hand through go-live.
If you’d like to see the numbers first, our quote calculator gives you licence, implementation and support costs, the extra jobs a day we’d expect you to win back, what that’s worth over a year and the month you break even. The productivity gain is capped at demand you can actually sell, so the answer stays honest.