Scheduling for a service business

Customer service is often an accessory to selling an actual business product. For example, if your business product is software, customer service for it might be focused on a call center where your agents validate licenses and solve customer-support issues over the telephone.

What if your business itself is a service? In this scenario, scheduling your service in Microsoft Dynamics CRM does not just support your product – it is your central business activity!

Scheduling a service business calendar

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help you manage and schedule your service business.

Service scheduling scenario

Imagine that you are scheduling personnel for a sports concessions business. Your service business, Fourth Coffee, provides food services for professional sporting events that usually last about four hours. This business includes supplying various food products and providing staff to prepare food and serve the sports fans. Fourth Coffee needs to staff each of five concession-stand locations with a cook, a cashier, and a counter server. For the tailgaters needing refreshments before the game, Fourth Coffee staffs a food-service truck with a cook and a cashier who also doubles as the truck driver.

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Configuring a service business in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Before scheduling can occur, you need to create and populate the needed entities (resource groups and the facilities/equipment) in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that you want to be able to schedule.

• This article assumes you have already added all food-service employees to Active Directory and set their availability and schedules. For information on setting user schedules, see the Help topic "Create or edit a resource group."

  Note

  Because concession workers have short shifts, and demand for service at any single stand is unpredictable, it's better to not provide any breaks in workers' schedules.

• Create resource groups for each of the skilled positions – cashiers, cooks, counter servers, and driver/cashier – to make it possible to schedule the personnel based upon skill.
• Create two business services, Concession and Mobile Food-Service Truck to define a relationship between personnel and location. For information on creating services, see the Help topic "Create or edit a service."
• Since the scenario calls for providing food service over a four-hour program, the default duration of your service activity needs to be set for five hours to allow for set-up and shut-down activities.

The steps listed above are illustrated next:

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The sequence of service-creation steps should resemble the illustration shown next:

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