Astrea has strong experience in Field Service Lightning(FSL) implementation and have recently completed a project for a water purifier manufacturing company. FSL provides a widely customisable implementation to facilitate a large range of companies that provide field service based on their number of employees and territories they are spread to. FSL also supports the contractor based service providers where it connects contractors using Partner community License for contractor with full control over access to be provided to contractors.
Service provider’s requirements
This company which provides RO maintenance in the country for a Decade now. They wanted to implement FSL as they are already using salesforce Service cloud for providing effective service to clients. They work for big multinational companies to do the job for their offices across the country. They wanted to implement it in phases to start with Delhi NCR as their first set of Territories.
Implementation Challenges:
The biggest challenge in this project was to accommodate the inter-territory movement of technicians. FSL provided 2 ways of interaction between territories.
- Primary and secondary resources.
- Relocation of resources for a specific number of days.
Other challenging scenario in this implementation was setting up the scheduling policy so that resources are equally occupied irrespective of distance.
Field Service Solution
For challenge 1 above we had to use Primary and secondary resource feature of FSL. This feature allows you to assign the resources to different territories and when they come as choice of candidates it shows you the candidate is in a secondary territory or primary to help dispatchers dispatch according to the need of the hour.
The above example shows a gantt view where Roy is a secondary resource in Houston downtown where as he is a primary resource in Houston lake Houston.
Second challenge discussed above as 2:
While setting objectives if you are setting up resource utilization and ASAP as 50 percent both then it will be assigning to all resources in a balanced way keeping in mind the distance as well. I would recommend to first see the working of the policy you have set up for some days and then monitor it from time to time to check the behavior so that eventually you would know what is best for your client as sometimes client will not be sure to tell you the exact objectives they want to achieve in one go.
Field Service Solution
The company’s main challenges in sorting the resources was sorted by Astrea and based on the clear & focused process setup they are now happy the way it is working and the results they are getting after the Field service lightning implementation. They love the gantt and scheduling features the most.
Astrea has become a goto partner for anything related to Salesforce development and there are small changes that they suggest from time to time which help them to improve their user experience and interactions.