Field Service Lightning: Optimizing Work Orders For Maintenance Plans

Salesforce FSL (Field Service Lightning) offers an advanced, mobile-friendly hub for field service businesses to manage their various tasks.  Creating maintenance plans and templates to standardize field service tasks is one of the major features of FSL.

Maintenance plans in Salesforce FSL help you define how often maintenance visits happen and also mass-generate work orders for future visits. Maintenance plans determine the period of maintenance and generate work orders accordingly. To reduce the number of work orders generated for maintenance plan: Create a single work order with work order line items for each asset which are covered by the maintenance plan.

Generation Method:

For the creation of the ‘Maintenance Plan’ in Salesforce Field Service Lightning, enter the start date, work type, account, and contact, etc. Work Orders which are generated from Maintenance Plan inherit the duration, required skills, product and articles from Work Type.

On Maintenance Plan, we have Work Order Generation section, Ensure ‘Work Order Generation Method’ and ‘Service Appointment Generation Method’ fields are present.

Work Order Generation Method

There are two options available in the Work Order Generation method:

1. One work order per asset
2. One work order line item per asset

With the first choice, one work order will be generated for each asset that is covered by the Maintenance Plan, whereas with the second option, one work order line item will be generated for each asset covered by Maintenance Plan.

Service Appointment Generation Method

If you select the second option i.e. one work order line item per asset then you can further define how many appointments you want for the Maintenance Plan. To achieve this, we select the options available in the Service Appointment Generation Method.

Here you have two options which are available for Service Appointment Generation Method:

1. One service appointment per work order
2. One service appointment per work order line item

If you can achieve the maintenance in a single visit of all the assets, then it is advisable to select the first option. If you have one appointment for maintenance work order then it becomes easy for dispatcher and field technician/service resource to view all the assets which need to be serviced for an appointment.

Generating Maintenance Plan:

1. One Work Order Per Asset

With Work Order Generation Method as ‘One work order per asset’ and one frequency

and two assets, we generated work orders:

One work order is generated for each asset:

2. One Work Order Line Item Per Asset:

• One Service Appointment per work order:

With Work Order Generation Method as ‘One work order line item per asset’ and Service Appointment Generation Method as ‘One service appointment per work order’ with one frequency and two assets, we generated work orders:

One work order is generated and two work order line items are generated for each asset. Generated work order contains the appointment for both the assets.

• One Service Appointment per work order line item:

With Work Order Generation Method as ‘One work order line item per asset’ and Service Appointment Generation Method as ‘One service appointment per work order line item’ with one frequency and two assets, we generate work orders:

One work order is generated and two work order line items are generated for each asset. The generated work order line items contain the appointment for both the assets.

This process can help you manage your Maintenance Plans better by reducing the work orders generated. If you’d like to have a certified Salesforce consultant help your organization through the maintenance plan process or with any Salesforce products, please email customersuccess@appshark.com