Considerations for Scheduling Service Crews

This is a Field Service managed package feature.

Absences

If a service resource of type Crew has resource absences, those absences are considered in scheduling. Absences associated with individual crew members’ corresponding service resources aren’t considered.

Appointment Assignments

Service appointments can be assigned only to service resources. Therefore, to assign a crew to a service appointment, you need a service resource of type Crew that represents the crew. If you create your crew from the crew management tool, this resource is created automatically. Otherwise, follow the steps in Create Service Crews for Field Service.

When an appointment is assigned to a service crew, the appointment gains these assigned resources:

• The service resource of type Crew
• The service resources of type Technician who are active service crew members during the appointment time

The appointment’s assigned resources are refreshed when:

• The appointment is dispatched (if the last status category isn't None)
• The appointment's status is changed to In Progress (if the last status category isn't None)
• The appointment is assigned to a different resource
• Changing the appointment's Scheduled Start or Scheduled End

If you want appointments that don’t require crews to be assigned only to individual service resources, use the Resource Priority service objective in your scheduling policy. Give your mobile workers a lower priority so the scheduler prefers to assign work to them. To prohibit the scheduling of all appointments to crews, assign a “No Crew” skill to your individual service resources. Then, add this skill as a requirement to the work type, work order, or work order line item in question.

Capacity

Capacity-based scheduling isn’t supported for service crews because a service resource of type Crew can’t be capacity-based.

Efficiency

When an appointment is scheduled to a crew, the Efficiency field on the crew’s service resource is used to calculate the appointment’s Scheduled End. The crew members’ efficiencies aren’t considered.

Geolocation Tracking and Service Territories

• The Last Known Location is tracked for crew leaders only. If a crew has more than one leader, the most recently captured location is displayed on the service resource’s map.
• If a service resource is relocated to another service territory while they belong to a crew, the service resource membership record is drawn only on the relocation territory.
• The service resource representing the service crew is the home base considered by Field Service while belonging to the crew.
• Travel calculation follows the service territory or the service territory member's address of the service resource representing the service crew.

Membership Requirements

• Only active service resources of the Technician resource type can be added to crews. For example, you can't add a crew to a crew.
• To belong to a crew, a service resource needs service territory membership in the territory where the crew provides service. The time span of service crew membership must match or be fully contained in the time span of the service resource of type Technician service territory membership.
• A service resource can be a member of multiple crews as long as the membership dates don’t overlap.
• Service resources that belong to a service crew don’t receive notifications about assignments or assignment changes. Assignment notifications are sent only to service resources that are assigned individually to appointments.
• Removing all members from a service crew deactivates the related service resource of type Crew.

Minimum Crew Size

Work orders, work order line items, and work types come with a Minimum Crew Size and a Recommended Crew Size. For example, a crew could have a recommended size of 3, but a minimum size of 2. Work orders and work order line items inherits their work type’s crew size settings.

Note The crew size fields are hidden for all users by default. If you don’t see them, update their field-level security settings in Setup.

Field Service doesn’t consider the Recommended Crew Size when assigning appointments. To determine whether a service crew fits the minimum crew size requirement for an appointment, the scheduling engine either counts the crew’s service crew members or checks the Service Crew Size field on the Service Crew record. You can adjust these settings on the Service Crew Resources Availability work rule. If the Minimum Crew Size is blank or 1, the scheduler can assign the work to mobile workers or to crews. When using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, a Minimum Crew Size of 1 requires a crew.

You can customize the Service Crew Resources Availability work rule to serve one of two purposes:

• Compare a service appointment parent record’s Minimum Crew Size field to the Crew Size field on the service crew.
• Compare a service appointment parent record’s Minimum Crew Size field to the actual number of allocated service crew members at the time of the assignment. Consider Service Crew Membership must be selected on the Service Crew Resources Availability work rule.

If the Minimum Crew Size is blank or zero on the service appointment’s parent record, only single service resources (Technician type) are considered as candidates. If the Minimum Crew Size is 1 or more on the service appointment’s parent record, only Crew type service resources are considered as candidates. This is also true for optimization, although a crew isn’t a candidate if it has no valid crew members and Consider Service Crew Membership is selected on the Service Crew Resources Availability work rule.

If your org was created before Spring ’18, you must create this work rule and add it to your scheduling policies.

With Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, appointments requiring a crew size of one are scheduled only to crews unless the Assign Service Appointments to Individuals and Crews checkbox is selected. When enabled, appointments can be scheduled to individual resources or crews of one or two members. Without Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, appointments requiring a crew size of one or null are scheduled only to individual resources.

You can find the Assign Service Appointments to Individuals and Crews option in Field Service Settings of the Field Service Admin app, under Scheduling, in the Crews section.

Multiday Appointments

When a multiday appointment is scheduled for a worker whose start date on a service crew is in the future, the multiday appointment is elongated to last the duration of the worker’s membership in the service crew.

Resource Notifications

Service crew members assigned to a service appointment aren’t automatically made followers when the service appointment is dispatched. Only one assigned resource can be set to automatically follow a dispatched service appointment. If you want all the crew members to be followers, customize the push notifications for the Field Service Mobile App. Using custom push notifications enables getting multiple notifications for different users based on an event, such as dispatching a service appointment.

Note If you’re using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, when the status of a service appointment scheduled for a crew changes to Dispatched, the notification appears twice in the Chatter post.

Resource Preferences

Service resources that belong to a crew can’t be candidates for appointments while they belong to a crew. Therefore, the Required Resource and Excluded Resource work rules and the Preferred Resource service objective don’t apply to active service crew members.

Scheduling Candidates

When the scheduler is looking for candidates to perform a job, only service resources of type Crew and Technician are considered as candidates. If a service resource is a current member of a service crew, the resource isn’t considered as a candidate. If a service resource is manually assigned to a service appointment while they belong to a crew, the Classic Dispatch Console shows a rule violation.

Sharing

When a service appointment is dispatched, members of the assigned service crew get Read access to the appointment and its parent record and the crew leader gets Read/Write access. If the Field Service managed package isn’t installed, service crew leaders don’t receive any extra permissions.

To give all crew members edit access (for example, via mobile devices) for service appointments, select Let service crew members edit their service appointments under Field Service Settings. By default, only the crew leader has edit permissions.

If an appointment’s Scheduled Start changes or an assigned resource of type Crew is updated, the appointment’s assigned resources are refreshed to keep the sharing settings current. A change in a service crew membership record doesn’t trigger the refresh.

Skills

Skills can be assigned to service resources of any type—Technician or Crew—and are considered during scheduling if the Match Skills work rule is included in the scheduling policy.

If you want the scheduling engine to consider a service crew’s combined skills—that is, all skills assigned to the service crew members—enable skill grouping. This way, if an appointment requires Drilling and Installation skills, a service crew that has members with that group of skills is considered as a candidate. When using Enhanced Scheduling and Optimization, only the skill set of the crew members is considered when skill grouping is enabled, and the skill set of the crew is ignored (when skill grouping is disabled, the Match Skills work rule considers the crew resource type skills only).

From the App Launcher, find and open the Field Service Admin app, and then click the Field Service Settings tab. On the Scheduling tab, select Enable resource crew skill grouping and save your changes.

Note

• When skill grouping is enabled, the scheduling engine calculates the crew’s skill set for that time slot. The skill set is recalculated each time the scheduling engine searches for appointment candidates because it can change based on crew member allocations and skills that expire. For example, if a resource skill requires recertification every six months, the scheduling engine considers crew members with the skill while their certifications are valid.
• If multiple members of a service crew have the same skill, the scheduling engine considers the highest skill level when calculating the crew’s combined skill set.

Utilization

When utilization is calculated for the utilization view and metrics shown in the Classic Dispatch Console, a service crew member is considered to be utilized like the service resource representing the crew they belong to.