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Scheduling versus dispatching – Universal Resource Scheduling

Depending on your organization, you might create bookings and want them to immediately appear on your field technicians’ mobile devices. But what if you want to plan the whole day and have new bookings appear for technicians as you see fit?

The field service industry often refers to this differentiation as “scheduled versus dispatched.”

Out of the box, all bookings will appear on the technician’s mobile application. However, it’s easy to implement the scheduled-versus-dispatched concept.

Step 1: Create a booking status

First, create a new booking status. For more information on how to do so, check out our documentation.

  1. Select New Booking Status. Let’s call it “Dispatched.”
  2. Set the Status field to Committed.

Showing creating booking status with a name of "scheduled" and setting the core status to committed

Make sure the Field Service Status on the booking status record is set to Scheduled.

Navigating to Field Service tab and setting the field service status to "Scheduled"

Each booking setup metadata record (BSM) can have a unique default booking status. This will not update when you add a new booking status. Since the default status is set to Scheduled, when you first create bookings, the status will be set to Scheduled because this is a booking for a work order, and the work order BSM record has the default committed status set to Scheduled.

Showing how to navigate to "Resource Scheduling>"Settings">Administration>Enable Entities for Scheduling>Work Order, and seeing the default booking status is set to scheduled” width=”856″ height=”585″ data-orig-src=”https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Showing-default-committed-status2.png”></p>
<p>To learn more about booking statuses, check out the <a href=documentation and my previous blog post for even more advanced functionality.

Step 2: Adjust mobile configuration

Adjust your mobile configuration to exclude bookings from the mobile application with the status Scheduled.

  • Open your Field Service mobile configuration app and open your mobile project.
  • Go to the bookings view, and change the edit filters and the sync filters (if you work offline) to exclude Scheduled bookings  and ensure bookings with the status Dispatched are included.
  • Add the following condition to your Sync Filter:

Open the booking entity on the side panel, open the sync filter, add the condition to exclude bookings in the status of "scheduled". Then save and close.

  • Add the same condition to your Edit Filter:

Open the booking entity on the side panel, then click "show UI"

Double click the view(s) you use on your mobile application

Click "Edit Filter"

Add the condition to exclude bookings in the status of "scheduled", save and close the view editor, then save and close the window

You can also avoid setting up both the sync and edit filters by choosing to use sync filters in online mode, but that’s a topic for a more detailed mobile blog post!

Setting to use sync in online mode

When you are ready, publish the project. In the following screenshot, I am “publishing all,” but make sure you use proper practices when updating your mobile configuration!

Click publish to push your changes to your mobile users

Now, just synchronize your mobile application. Since there are configuration updates, you will be prompted to download the new configurations on the mobile app.

Let’s see it in action!

In the following screenshot example, I have two bookings on the schedule board for Spencer, both with the Scheduled status.

Two bookings on the board both in the status of "scheduled"

We can take a look at the mobile application and see that this booking does not appear on the mobile app.

Pressing the bookings button on the mobile application homepage

Showing that no bookings are visible on bookings list in mobile application

Now, I will right-click the first booking and change the status to Dispatched.

Showing status of first booking is dispatched from the Schedule Board

I sync the mobile application again, and we can see the booking with the Dispatched status appear on the mobile application!

Booking in the status of dispatched appears on the mobile application

That’s it!

Happy Scheduling!

Dan Gittler, Principal PM Manager