The Winter ’21 release brought a lot of valuable features to Salesforce. They are related to different parts of the system including Sales and Service Cloud, Work.com, Analytics, Mobile, Marketing, and others. New features bring great solutions in enhancing business productivity.
We have prepared an overview of the most interesting Field Service Lightning updates for field service activities including installations, repairs, professional services, regular maintenance, and sending workers into the field.
1. Field Service Lightning is Field Service now
Despite changing the package name, the API namespace, developer field names, permission sets, and custom permissions remain unchanged.
2. Time Sheets now can be used for time tracking
Managers can create a review and take actions on employee’s Time Sheets to gain visibility about mobile employees’ working hours. Time Sheets can be generated automatically by defined templates.
This feature is easy-to-use for mobile workers since it allows logging time in one application within Salesforce.
3. Record Product Warranties
Mobile workers can get access to product warranty details to request a faulty product substitution. Warranty terms can be recorded and assigned to products or product families for creating standard warranties. In addition to the standard warranty, assets can be provided and additional or extended warranties are entered along with exclusions and void terms.
This feature helps to bill suppliers correctly by checking the entitlements and avoiding free services.
4. Improve Preventive Maintenance with Advanced Recurrence (Beta)
With Maintenance Plan Advanced Recurrence one work order could be grouped with the work for all assets that should be serviced together, even when there are multiple maintenance schedules.
This is essential for technicians to complete all work in a location on the same date in one visit.
Maintenance Plan Advanced Recurrence is just a beta feature and can be enabled by request.
5. Get the Total Price on Service Contract Line Items
The total price of all line items is now available in service contracts.
6. Find the Right Previous Business Day with BusinessHours.add
This change is related to the reflection of searching the previous business day using BusinessHours.add. Now datetime returns holiday before a day without business hours.
7. Get Translated Work Order Subjects
Maintenance word generated from maintenance plans in work orders subject is translated into Salesforce-supported languages.
8. Field Service Scheduling: Street-Level Routing and Prioritized Appointments
- Estimate Travel Times with Street-Level Routing (Generally Available). The Street-level routing (SLR) feature allows workers to be more productive and drive less due to more precise traveling time calculation. However, route calculation is slower compared to a real routing. The feature can be easily enabled in Field Service Settings | Scheduling | Routing.
- Target Work Priorities Using Service Appointments. Compared to specifying priority values on parent work orders or work order line items the new functionality allows to do this directly to appointments. The custom formula can be used to assign priority values. In practice, the priority field might be used for service appointments, work orders, or work order line items to set ranges. Scheduling provides precedence to high-priority appointments and overlaps lower priority assignments. The priority is very important in terms of improving customer service and SLA compliance.
- Shape Up with New Tests in Health Check. New tests help to detect lacking resources with the necessary skills or other parameters for service territory to keep field service configuration healthy
- Offload Sandbox Services for Routing and Optimization. Dedicated remote sites for sandboxes are used to keep production orgs running smoothly. FSL_GIS_SB and FSL_Optimize_SB sites can be easily activated in Setup on the sandbox org.
9. Field Service Mobile: Time Sheets, Notification Enhancements, and Actions Launcher Parity
- Send Meaningful Messages Using Custom Notifications. Messages to mobile workers can be easily customized based on business needs including extending or replacing the default notifications with important information related to any part of the workflow. As an example, low inventory or urgent service appointments could be created for workers. Notifications are essential for workers to tackle important customer problems.
- Log Work Hours with Time Sheets (Generally Available). The working location time zone can be automatically captured for the cross time zone of mobile workers. Workers can also submit past timesheets with corrections on mobile devices.
- Never Miss a Message in Notifications. For workers with Android OS (previously was available on iOS only), all unseen messages are alerted in the notification tab. By tapping alert workers can view the list of messages and check opened messages offline. This feature significantly decreases the chance of important events missing.
Once the list of notifications is opened, the alert disappears. Admin can delete a notification before the worker will notice it. In that case, the worker will see an error message. The notification list can be refreshed by swipe down the screen when it is opened.
- Be More Efficient with the Actions Launcher Redesign. Actions launcher got the same appearance for iOS and Android. Navigation through action lists allows finding something faster.
Action can be expanded on a full screen.
There is a menu for tasks related to an action item. You can open it by tapping the options menu icon.
Actions are organized by object type (service appointments or work orders) via section headers.
Object types are not related to More Action Lists action.
In general new features improved the usability of the application for end-users but some items require additional system configuration. You can set up configuration yourself by using Field Service Implementation guide or request professionals. If you need any help with the new Salesforce Winter’21 release contact JET BI and our experts will help you increase the value of Salesforce.
