It is time to review Salesforce Field Service Winter ’24 Release Notes Preview.
As in every preview version, things may change so we should treat it carefully.
Let’s get started!
Scheduling & Optimization
All enhancements are made for a new ESO engine. If you are still in LS engine you CANNOT benefit from any of these enhancements
1. Looks like Capacity Reservation is finally GA’ed. According to documentation, it should be possible to define limits on certain days per territory in the number of hours or percentage of availability. It will be interesting to see how the percentage of availability is calculated and what parameters are factored in (such as shifts, availability type, travel, breaks, absences, efficiency, etc.) It seems that capacity can be reserved for the entire day. Many customers are expecting to limit capacity per appointment window rather than a full day. I am sure we will get there soon.
2. Optimization Scheduled Job is running today in the context of a single Scheduling Policy. What if not all territories should be optimized by a single Policy? You had to clone Scheduled Jobs resulting in more confusion, concurrency, maintenance, and risk of exceeding limits. With this release, you can assign different Scheduling Policies per group of Service Territories. Really like it.
3. New Service Objective introduced in this release – Same Site objective. It should boost the optimizer to assign same-site SAs consecutively. While Minimize Travel theoretically is the same – it is not.
4. In a current version of Match Skills Work Rule a Service Resource must have all skills required by SA. It’s not always the case because sometimes it is sufficient to have at least one skill from a specific category. Enhancement of Match Skills rule provides great flexibility in defining the ‘OR’ condition – having any of the skills from the skills group required. It will be interesting to see whether skill level is supported here.
5. Appointment sliding now supports Complex Work. Appointment sliding is a much-needed feature that allows other appointments to slide right or left during the Appointment Booking process. Hope anytime soon SFS will be able to reschedule SAs to other Service Resources rather than just moving them left or right.
6. Crews scheduling is now more efficient because you can define the threshold of extra resources, NOT required by a job. For example, if SA requires a crew of 3 members, you probably don’t want to assign work to a crew of 6 concurrent members because 3 of them will stay idle.
7. Multi-day work is now supported by ESO.
8. Guided setup can be used to migrate from LS to ESO. It also includes a readiness check to ensure a smooth transition.
9. Health check runs ESO-specific tests providing more accurate results.
Dispatcher Console
When I joined FSL forces 6 years ago I was surprised to discover that the first 4 features are simply missing from the product. Here you go!
1. Ability to update SA and Resource Absence duration by adjusting borders instead of editing records using the form. Huge.
2. Ability to create a new Resource Absence with Hours and Minutes rather than just minutes. Must.
3. Ability to reassign Resource Absence using Drag & Drop. Sure.
4. Ability to edit Resource Absence right from Gantt. Yes.
5. Control how overlapped Absences are shown on the Gantt.
6. Ability to sort Get Candidates results by grade.
7. Improved usability of Skills filtering lightbox. Unfortunately, skills filtering doesn’t include filtering by skill level.
8. Ability to resize columns in Service Appointment List and scroll among them. Cool.
9. Ability to see week numbers on the Gantt.
10. Crew Management UI – the ability to filter crew resources by Skills in a similar way to Service Resources in SFS Gantt.
11. Crew Management UI – the ability to search and filter crew resources in a similar way to Service Resources in SFS Gantt.
Field Service Mobile App
1. New and better Service Reports? Is it what Service Document stands for? (!!!!!!) According to documentation upgraded Service Documents (beta) includes document preview, signature capture, embedded images, and PDF generation features. Document Builder provides standard components that the admin can drag onto the Template Builder to create beautiful, functional documents. It will be interesting to see whether documents can be generated offline.
2. Instead of having a static app’s tab bar it is now possible to use SFS Mobile App Builder to customize the app’s bar base and assign the configuration to profiles. Available for iOS only and later on for Android. Not sure if it will be GA’ed in this release.
3. Ability to pass data and parameters between Lightning Web Components or from external apps with deep linking.
4. Lightning web component (LWC) can use the built-in Barcode Scanner plug-in. Available for iOS only.
5. It is now possible to natively interact with NFC Tags right from SFS Mobile App by using NFCService API.
6. It is also possible to scan documents right from SFS Mobile App using DocumentScanner API. The scanned document can be saved in Salesforce.
7. Automatic Check-Ins and Check-Outs for on-site presence (Pilot). I am really expecting that SFS will auto-stamp exactly when the technician receives SA, opened it, accepted, updates to travel and so on.
8. Improved UI for Android tablets allowing mobile workers to see 2 apps at the same time using a split screen view.
9. Mobile Work Briefing with the help of Generative AI? So instead of bringing all critical details into one place customers should pay extra to get a summary done by GPT and presented as a text on an overview card? Is it what it means?
Other
1. Creation of complex work using standard UI is allowed for SAs having the same Account or Work Order. It is a UI limitation and we had to develop our own tools to be able to connect SAs to complex work. With a new field set, it is possible to define lookup fields available in complex work SA selection.
2. Ability to Regulate Data Sharing with Advanced Security Settings – not sure what exactly it means.
3. Recurring Appointments API can be used to create appointments based on a custom pattern. It will be interesting to see what patterns are supported. I hope it will have better patterns architecture compared to what is included in Shift Patterns.
4. The existing getTerritoryIdByPolygons (longitude, latitude) Apex method returns a single service territory by latitude/longitude. While it can be sufficient for customers with standard service territories, customers with different business units where each unit has its own boundaries, structured differently, cannot rely on a common structure. In Winter ’24 the new getAllPolygonsByLatLong (longitude, latitude) can find all relevant territories matching a polygon which allows setting Service Territory by factoring business unit or other attributes.
Asset Management & Preventive Maintenance
1. Various enhancements have been made around Asset Attributes, such as the ability to define default values and the ability to exclude sensitive attributes from being shared using restriction rules.
2. More improvements could be observed around proactive services based on real-time data with the help of the data cloud, more flexible Recordset Filter Criteria Rules, attributes, real-time updates and downtime tracking.
Virtual Remote Assistant
1. Ability to monitor VRA engagement and adoption using dashboards.
2. Automatic purging of expired VRA images.
3. Customers can be redirected to a website after the VRA session has ended.