Defining Rules and Resources for Services

Provide and schedule services The types of work performed for customers by one or more resources.Services are schedulable activities. to your customers in Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a service activity A schedulable appointment to provide a service to a customer. A service activity uses one or more resources to perform a service at a specific time and place.. When creating a service record, you must define the selection rules and add resources to be able to schedule it.

Creating a service includes the following tasks:

• Managing Resources
• Defining Selection Rules
• Understanding Capacity

Managing Resources

Resources are people (users People who have active user accounts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.), facilities The physical spaces, such as conference rooms or service bays, where service activities can be performed., or equipment The tools or assets used to perform a service activity. that perform the service or are required to perform the service. Resources required to perform a service are defined in the service's selection rules.

To schedule a service activity, you first select the service and then search for an available time. Microsoft Dynamics CRM uses the service's selection rules and the resource's work schedule to present a list of available times. After you select the time that you want, the service activity is added to the schedule.

Defining Selection Rules and Required Resources

In its simplest form, a selection rule is the list of users, facilities, or equipment required to perform a service and the rules that select them. For each service, you define at least one selection rule and select one or more users, facility, and equipment to perform the service. By using conditional subrules, you can further refine the resource selection. Microsoft Dynamics CRM displays your selection rules in a tree view. When you search for a service activity time, the selection rules consider the lowest-level subrules first, and then the next level up, until they reach the top-level rule.

More information: Types of Selection Rules

Understanding How to Use Capacity Scheduling and Effort Required

You can set up services and resources in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to take into account different-sized facilities or the experience levels of your users when a service is scheduled. This is known as capacity scheduling. Capacity is a relative unit that you define.

Capacity can also measure skill level.

When you add effort required into the selection rule, every time a user searches for an available service activity time, the selection rules inspect the resources for capacity available. If the resource is scheduled, then that resource's capacity is reduced by the effort required for the service.