In today’s marketplace, delivering ongoing service management to your customers can be an important and often integral part of many business. More often than not this can potentially be a significant source of long-term customer satisfaction, along with the additional revenue to your business. Business Central, in its standard form, provides a flexible framework that can be configured to meet your business needs. This incudes delivering functionality to support field service operations and your repair shop.
In addition to those who currently use it, other businesses taking the opportunity to rent or lease their equipment could really benefit from embracing the service management module.
Service Management within Business Central will provide your business with the following:
- Scheduled maintenance of service items on maintenance contracts
- Warranty repair on sold items
- Repair of rental items
- Ad hoc repair of sold items
- Ad hoc repair other items (not from your business)
Service functionality
Below are some of the key elements worth considering when using this module:
Service Contracts
This allows the management of a group of service items, including, discounts, scheduled preventative maintenance and prepayments.
Service Items
As the name suggests, a service item provides a unique identity to an item to be serviced. This includes a detailed record of its service history, something especially useful for rental items. Users can assign skills to the service item allowing the service manager to allocate the best resource. You can create service items manually or automatically by selling the item, granting welcome flexibility to the user’s experience.
Service Order
Fortunately, service orders are similar to sales orders. After a repair or service, users can record what took place for the service item and subsequently invoice the customer. The system also manages warranty and its associated discounts, where the service item is linked to a contract.
Within the Service Order is the Service Item Worksheet, where engineers can log the actual labour and inventory materials consumed. Travel fees and starting fees are also optionally available. In addition, there is functionality to record the repair fault area and relevant symptoms. Users can also ca[ture the the fault and resolution of the repair, which can prove helpful for future analysis.
Setting up a service location or warehouse allows the service department to manage their inventory effectively. If working with field engineers, it is often useful to have their service vehicles set as locations or bins in order to help maintain inventory.
Dispatch Board
The service manager can use the Dispatch Board to see an overview of all the Service Orders and allocate service personnel based on skill and availability.
Service Tasks
The engineer can review allocated repairs on the Service Tasks page. It also allows them to process the Service Item Worksheet where they book labour and material to the repair.
Closing remarks
This is just an introduction to what is quite an advanced, but interesting module. If you have any queries, whether it be service related or otherwise, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. Here’s Microsoft’s own piece on service management.