Set Up Field Service Appointment Bundling

Available in: both Salesforce Classic (not available in all orgs) and Lightning Experience

The Field Service core features, managed package, and mobile app are available in Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.

Watch the video to see how grouping short appointments at nearby or same-site locations to create a bundle helps you and your customers.

Watch the video to learn how to configure Appointment Bundling.

Service appointment bundling lets you collect multiple service appointments and define them as a single entity, called a bundle. The bundle:

• Simplifies the dispatcher’s work by treating a set of relatively small service appointments as one, large unified job.
• Helps mobile workers work more efficiently by organizing the service appointments in an assembly line manner.
• Improves customer satisfaction by scheduling a mobile worker to perform all the customer’s service appointments in a single visit.

Consider the job of reading 100 water meters in the utility room of a high-rise apartment complex. The job can be scheduled in several ways.

• 100 short appointments—Create and schedule a service appointment for each meter. Each service appointment has a duration of 30 seconds. This approach provides maximum flexibility. You can schedule each service appointment independently of the others. However, this approach also has high computational overhead because the system must schedule numerous service appointments, and having 100 short service appointments on the Gantt is confusing for the dispatcher. The schedule specifies a precise sequence in which the meters must be read, even if the mobile worker finds another sequence more convenient. This approach could cause other inefficiencies, too. Suppose the mobile worker must get the key to unlock the utility room. If you schedule the service appointments individually, the mobile worker must technically unlock the room multiple times.
• One long appointment—Create and schedule the entire job as a single service appointment. This approach has low computational overhead and is easy to understand. It implements economies of scale, such as unlocking the utility room only one time. The disadvantage is the lack of flexibility. You must schedule the entire service appointment to a single mobile worker in a single assignment. You can’t schedule an urgent job in the middle of the long service appointment. And you can’t reschedule meters that the mobile worker couldn’t access during the service appointment.
• A single bundle appointment—Create a service appointment for each meter and bundle them together to create a single entity. The individual service appointments then become bundle members. You can apply constraints to ensure that the bundle is efficient, for example, that only similar service appointments in the same location can be bundle members. This approach has all the advantages of the long service appointment approach, plus the flexibility of the short service appointments approach.
  • Low computational overhead—Only the bundle is scheduled, not the bundle members.
  • Easy to understand—The dispatcher sees only one service appointment on the Gantt. The dispatcher can drill down and view the bundle members as required.
  • Flexibility—The mobile worker can perform the service appointments in any sequence. You can add or remove service appointments from the bundle if needed.
  • Better tracking—If a meter can’t be accessed, it can be skipped without being forgotten because the system marks the individual service appointment as incomplete.
  • Economies of scale—In our example, the mobile worker unlocks the utility room only one time, unless returning for incomplete bundle members.

Meter reading is only one example of how bundling service appointments can improve the efficiency of a schedule. Other scenarios include:

• Same customer scheduling—Bundle together all the service appointments of a single customer. The customer is pleased because a single mobile worker arrives at a single time to perform all the services.
• Same site scheduling—Bundle together all the service appointments in a large office building, even if they are for different customers. The mobile worker saves time by traveling, parking, and passing the building security only one time.
• Out-of-town scheduling—Bundle together all the service appointments for an out-of-town job. For example, a Chicago-based organization has several appointments in Cleveland. Bundle together all the Cleveland appointments and schedule the bundle to a single mobile worker. The mobile worker can then stay overnight in Cleveland until all the service appointments are complete.
• Scheduling similar tasks—Bundle together service appointments of a similar type. For example, an organization prefers to assign a single mobile worker to perform all its network-related service appointments on a single day.

• Add Permissions for Service Appointment Bundling
  Add the permissions for service appointment bundling.
• Enable Service Appointment Bundling
  Enable appointment bundling in Field Service Settings.
• Set Up Automatic Bundling
  Use automatic bundling to create and update bundles instead of managing them manually. Automatic bundling includes two modes: Automated Bundling and Live Bundling. The automatic bundling process looks for service appointments in a particular service territory and then looks at the priority of the bundle policy. After the bundles are created, they appear in the work list and can be scheduled.
• Create Recordset Filter Criteria for Bundling Appointments
  You can create filters to bundle only the appointments that meet the criteria that you set. Creating recordset filter criteria is optional, but if you want to use them in the bundle policies, you must create them first.
• Create an Appointment Bundle Policy
  Use the default policy, or create multiple policies. You can use the policies for manual bundling, automatic bundling, or both.
• Create an Appointment Bundle Config
  Use the default configuration, or edit it to determine the status behavior when bundling and unbundling service appointments. These configuration settings apply to all your bundles.
• Test Your Appointment Bundling Configuration
  After completing the configuration steps for appointment bundling, test it in Field Service.
• Appointment Bundling Limitations
  Review the limitations of Appointment Bundling.