Service Appointment Scheduling

Service Appointment Scheduling

In our last blog we saw about the purpose of Work order and Service Appointments and how to create those. In this blog we will see how to schedule Service Appointments and assign those to the service resources to complete the services.

How to schedule a Service Appointment?

To schedule a service appointment, there are several options available in Field Service Lightning.

• From the record feed

• From the Dispatcher console

• Schedule automatically

Schedule From Record Feed

To schedule a service appointment from the record feed, we can use Book Appointment or Candidates chatter actions which are available for work order, work order line items, accounts, contacts, opportunities, leads or service appointments.

Book Appointment

Book Appointment chatter action is used to find the possible list of time slots and choose the desired one from that list. Open the work order which needs to be scheduled / rescheduled, go to the Feed tab and click Book Appointment. Then click Get Appointments which will result in the best possible slots, you can select and schedule the appropriate one.

Candidates

Candidates chatter action is used to find the matchable technicians with the time slot and choose the desired one from that list. Open the work order which needs to be scheduled / rescheduled, go to the Feed tab and click Candidates. Then click Get Candidates which will list down the technicians, you can select and assign the appropriate one.

Schedule from the Dispatcher Console

We can schedule service appointments from the Dispatcher console either by Schedule action or drag and drop to the Gantt chart. Go to App launcher ➡️ Field Service app ➡️ Field Service tab. From the left side section you can see the list of service appointments, click on the list view and select “Unscheduled” which will list down the service appointments which are not scheduled yet. Select the service appointments which all need to be scheduled and click the “Schedule” button. Feel the magic, the selected appointments are automatically assigned to the specific Service Resource and on the specific slot. The magic mantra behind this “Scheduling Policies” which runs in the background and finds the best resource for the respective service appointments and assigned to them. We will see about the dispatcher console and scheduling policies in our upcoming blogs.

Schedule Automatically

Rather than clicking a button, there is an option to schedule the service appointments automatically. We have a custom field called Auto Schedule in Service Appointment object, just add this to the service appointment page layout. By selecting this checkbox field while creating / updating service appointments, the appointment will schedule automatically. But it will take some time to generate, wait until the appointment’s location is geocoded. And also we can specify the scheduling policy in the service appointment which will be taken care of while the auto schedule runs. If that's not specified, the default scheduling policy in field service settings will be taken into the account.

Conclusion

In this blog, we learnt the various options to schedule the service appointment and assign those to field technicians. Keep in touch to learn more about FSL features.