Guidelines for Creating Service Territories for Field Service

Why Territories Are Important

The way in which Service Territories are created - what they represent, whether a geography, line of business, or both, and which and how many Service Resources they include - impact several areas of Field Service. Service Territories dictate how Service Resources are viewed within the Dispatch Console, scheduling processes, dispatching processes, optimization processes, and more.

Creating Service Territories

Use the Guided Setup or the Service Territories tab to create service territories representing geographic or functional areas, such as cities or lines of business.

Service territories can be associated with other territories as part of a hierarchy, which is helpful for grouping purposes. Service territory hierarchies can contain up to 10,000 territories. For example, a utility company can have Gas and Electric functional territories, with geographic child territories such as Gas - Northern CA.

Not all service territories in the hierarchy require service resources. For example, some territories serve only as a form of grouping child territories, and resources are members of the lower-level territories only. For example, Gas - Northern, CA can have resources within it, but the Gas parent territory doesn’t. For lower-level service territories that include service resources, you must add an address on the service territory record. The address represents the general location of the service territory and where resources are leaving from and returning to at the start and end of their work day. This address is the home base, used for travel calculation at the start and end of the service resource's day. The home base can be, for example, a depot. If a resource leaves from a different location, such as their home, that address can be defined on their Service Territory member record and used instead of the address on the service territory when scheduling for that particular service resource.

Note If your company provides service across multiple time zones, ensure that territories created don’t encompass geographies that span multiple time zone. For example, Kentucky includes multiple time zones. Instead, create separate territories such as Eastern Kentucky and Western Kentucky. Associate each territory with map polygon KML records that define geographical boundaries aligning with the time zone line. This practice is critical to ensure that when you’re scheduling work, the scheduled times are always set and communicated in the local time zone of both the customer and the technicians.

Note

Most Field Service customers adopt a private org-wide default sharing model for service territories, service resources, and service appointments. This approach ensures that record access is granted on a need-to-know basis. Salesforce Field Service offers out-of-the-box sharing capabilities that facilitate appropriate access when a private sharing model is in place. Specifically, service resources and service appointments associated with a service territory are shared with dispatchers responsible for managing that service territory. This sharing functionality is achieved through the use of public groups, User Territory records, and the user territory scheduled job. See Limit Access to Field Service Records

If your primary and secondary service territories have the same operating hours, you don’t need to apply the operating hours to both territories. It’s sufficient to set only the primary service territory operating hours and leave the secondary service territory Operating Hours field empty.

Determining Territory Size

The size of your service territories has a significant impact on scheduling, optimization, and dispatching. If a service territory is too large and many service resources and dispatchers are assigned to it, optimization and dispatching become cumbersome. Try to stay within these suggested limits when designing your service territories:

• Up to 50 service resources per service territory
• Up to 1,000 service appointments per day per service territory
• Up to 20 qualified service resources per service appointment

Creating Service Territory Members

Service territory members are service resources who work within the territory. Associating them with a territory ensures that they’re assigned to appointments near their home base.

Note Service territory members must have their home base location geocoded so that the scheduling engine knows the resource’s start and end points.

Assign service resources to service territories in the Service Territories related list on the resource detail page or the Service Territory Members related list on the territory detail page. Use the Type field to indicate whether the territory is a primary, secondary, or relocation territory for the resource. Scheduling and optimization is supported only for service territories with at least one primary service territory member.

• The primary territory is typically the territory where the resource works most often—for instance, near their home base. Resources can have only one primary territory. If a Match Territory work rule is included in the applied scheduling policy, the resource can be assigned only to appointments in their primary or relocation territories.
• Secondary territories are territories where the resource can be assigned to appointments if needed. A resource can have more than one secondary territory.
• Relocation territories represent temporary moves and, during their active dates, serve as the primary territory during scheduling. If a Working Territories work rule is included in the applied scheduling policy, the resource can also be assigned to appointments in their secondary territories. If you’re using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, secondary territories remain valid during relocations. If the scheduling policy includes a Maximum Travel from Home work rule, and the secondary territory is further away than the defined travel limit, the resource isn’t considered for appointments in that territory. However, the resource can still do remote work with not travel in ‌the secondary territory, if the appointment is marked as offsite.
• If you aren’t using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, secondary territory memberships must be identical to, or contained within, the primary territory membership for a particular time and resource. If the secondary territory memberships aren't fully covered by a primary territory membership, availability applies only to the overlapping period.

Setting Membership Start and End Times

Follow these best practices to avoid issues during scheduling and optimization.

• Service territory memberships should be 24 hours or longer.
• Service territory memberships should start and end at the same hour, and shouldn’t fall inside the working hours (shift or time slot). This way, there’s no question about the resource’s availability on their first day as a member of the territory. For simplicity, we recommend using midnight (00:00). For example:
  • Start Date: 1/12/2019 00:00
  • End Date: 3/12/2019 00:00
  

  Note We recommend using 00:00 because it aligns with Field Service’s default Start of Day, which is 00:00. However, you can set a custom Start of Day on Service Resource Availability work rules if the default doesn’t make sense—for example, if your team typically works night shifts. To enforce a custom Start of Day, from the Field Service Admin app, click Field Service Settings | Scheduling and select Set the hour that starts a new day based on the Availability rule(s). If the applied scheduling policy uses a custom Start of Day, set your service territory memberships to start and end at that time rather than at midnight.
• During scheduling and optimization, Field Service uses the service territory member’s own time zone—set on the user record—to interpret the territory membership start and end times. If the user’s time zone differs from the service territory’s time zone, adjust the membership start and end time accordingly. For example, if the user’s time zone is 3 hours behind the service territory’s time zone, set the territory membership start time to 3:00 rather than 00:00.
• If you're using optimization, service territory memberships can't be longer than three years. If you need a service territory membership to be longer than three years, keep the End Date fields blank.

Deleting Service Territories

You can’t delete a service territory with service appointments. If you try to delete it, you’re prompted to assign the appointments to a different territory.

If you delete a service territory with members, the service resources who were members no longer have a connection to the territory.

Deleting Service Territory Memberships

Service resources without a primary service territory membership aren’t considered in scheduling or optimization and their associated service appointments aren’t automatically unscheduled or reassigned. When deleting a primary service territory membership, you need to unschedule future service appointments for the service resources that no longer have a primary service territory membership to ensure these service appointments can be reassigned to a different resource with a valid primary service territory membership.

Adding Locations to Service Territories

Associate location records with service territories from the Service Territory Locations related list. Add site, plant, and warehouse locations to the service territory in which they’re located. Add mobile locations, like vans, to the service territories where they can be used for field service work.