Describe asset management and customer assets
Customers are going to have equipment that, as an organization, you might be responsible for inspecting, maintaining, and repairing. A manufacturing company may use a piece of assembly line equipment to create products and goods for sale. In the case of Contoso Coffee, a smart device such as an IoT-enabled coffee machine may be used for preventative maintenance.
Dynamics 365 Field Service empowers organizations to be able to maintain a catalog of the different assets for all the customers that they service. By maintaining this catalog, you can easily see what maintenance and repairs were done on the equipment along with being able to quickly open new work orders related to them.
By using the asset management capabilities of Dynamics 365 Field Service, you can:
Easily see all the assets associated with a specific customer
Quickly identify where the asset is located
Open work orders and track against a customer asset
Identify any sub assets that are associated with a primary asset
Remotely monitor and interact with IoT enabled Assets (when combined with Connected Field Service)
Throughout this remainder of this module, we dive deeper into the asset management capabilities provided in Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Asset management and customer assets
In Dynamics 365 Field Service, the customer asset record is used to represent specific pieces of equipment that a customer owns and at their locations. An asset can be anything such as a large piece of manufacturing equipment, technology, an appliance, or an air conditioner.
By using customer assets, field service organizations can:
Record and maintain specific information about the item.
Create a historical log of all the work orders that are related to the item.
Associate the asset with an IoT enabled device that can be interacted with remotely.
Customer assets can be created and defined manually or can be automatically created. Many times, a customer asset starts as a product that is stored in a warehouse. After the product was delivered to the customer, it can be automatically converted into an asset. For example, after an installer completes a work order, a commercial espresso machine can be installed for a customer. The espresso machine can then be automatically converted into a customer asset, allowing for future work orders to be associated with it.
When defining an asset in the application, you can include important information. This may include the customer the asset belongs to, its location, associated product, and IoT properties for remote interaction.
Additionally, if the asset itself has any sub assets associated with it, those assets can be noted and stored on the asset as well. For example, a large piece of manufacturing equipment might have multiple assemblies and other items on it that can be serviced individually. By noting all this information on the asset, you have a more complete picture of what is occurring.
As work orders are opened against the customer asset, you can easily access them from the asset. A work order might be created when a customer contacts you about a repair that needs to happen, or it could be generated automatically as a preventative maintenance work order.