This wave we're introducing Knowledge Management directly in the Field Service app. Some folks may
be familiar with our existing knowledge management feature uh that that has existed for a long time
with customer service we're bringing this capability directly down to the work order
level for technicians we're out in the field so the idea would be if I'm a check out in the field
now i'll be able to have right at my right in my hands while i'm while i'm on site
the knowledge that i uh i need to help resolve an issue that i might previously have had to leave
and not be able to solve the issue which obviously is the worst case scenario for any field service
scenario well if i if i send somebody all the way out there and they can't solve the problem
then it's incredibly expensive and frustrating for your customers
uh so let's talk about um you know sort of creating an article and then associating that
to us to some of our records here um so we have so we have a knowledge articles in the system um
if we look in settings and field service settings um so the settings area and then
we have the knowledge articles so if we go to knowledge articles we'll see the list of articles
which are in various states um let's take a look at the the one that we're gonna use for our for
our scenario today so we've created this article for uh for this wine press uh which has a bunch
of content in there that you know folks are going to find useful as they're out on site um
what's especially helpful now so we can associate this content that has been created to a bunch of
bunch of levels within the field service system can be related to you know work orders directly
can be related to uh to our assets can be related to products it can be related to incident types
and as always it can still be related to a case and so when we create a work order that's related
to any of those things though the knowledge that is associated to those records would flow
directly down to the work order level so that uh the technician has all of that right there for him
and he doesn't have to try to find it so in this case let's go ahead and create or
associate this article to the uh to add to the main wine press at coho winery
so i'm just going to associate it to the to the main wine press if i wanted to i could also you
know i could associate it to the incident type uh to you know which is related to uh you know
to wine maintenance or whatever uh you know from that record directly i could also associate it
so you know we're able to do it here from the article i can associate the article
to the asset or from the asset i could associate the asset to the article so whichever comes first
you can associate it to the to the you know you can make sure that knowledge is
related to these key pieces of uh of your your data and the organization in the environment
all right so now i've got my on this main wine press for coho winery i've
got this this article associated so if we go ahead and raise a work order related to
this wine press um so let's go ahead and create a new work order for coho winery
and we'll pick our monthly juicer maintenance and we're going to go ahead and pick our main the main
winepress asset um so then let's go ahead and pick preventative maintenance price list as well
so save that so what we're going to get asynchronously is our knowledge article
showing up here on the recorder so if we look at the knowledge article we can see all the content
that's here that's available to the technician or well to anybody who's working on this on this
asset if so now if i go ahead and book this i'll book it to abraham uh 350.
so this is this is book to abraham so now if i switch over to abraham on my mobile device here
so we can see here that uh that abraham's been booked on our
wine press maintenance monthly juicer maintenance work order and if we look under service
so we can see all the information under service that we that we would always see but in addition
we now see some linked articles and if i click on that linked article uh so the content that we
share works the articles that we share work both online and offline so the technician regardless
of whether they're currently connected would have access to the content to help them resolve
these work orders one thing worth noting is that currently articles only work in online
i'm sorry knowledge article images only work in in online mode so if you're not seeing an image
just make sure that you're in online mode um the idea behind this is that you know at the the at
the when i create a work order the most important content uh related to that work order whether it's
coming from uh products that are associated to this work order assets that are associated with
the work order incident types that are associated with the work order or the case that originated
this work order uh any article that might have been associated to any of those pieces
of information would flow directly down to the work order so the technician would have all of
that available to them while they're out there on site trying to solve the problem
but you know really that's the key key capability that we that we're enabling here we've worked
really closely with the knowledge management team to make sure that um the knowledge articles
are easily consumable whether you're online or offline uh you know making sure that these uh
these these uh knowledge uh article the knowledge articles and read are that are
in read mode uh for the technicians that you know that that's really easy to consume and that there
that if you're online and you're authoring the the articles as a you know as a back office staff
uh that it's super easy to author that article uh and publish it so that it's available for the tech
in the future one of the things that we're doing on the mobile on the mobile app uh is
serv is surfacing the knowledge articles that are related to well it's all knowledge articles
at the moment uh we will be we're working towards having a more specific filter which
will only surface knowledge articles that are related to your work orders but at the moment it
will show it will it would sync all the knowledge articles that uh that are in the whole environment
but against that work order it's only going to show the knowledge articles that are linked
um and uh we don't show directly from the mobile app uh all of the associated article you know you
couldn't just scroll through all the articles today we aren't adding an additional navigation
item for knowledge articles um so that you you know so the tech the idea is to make it as easy as
possible for the tech so it's it's just available to them right from the work order they shouldn't
have to search for it if they have to search for it we think you know that we think we hopefully
don't we're making it easier than that hopefully making it right available for them immediately
we will automatically associate articles that come from um you know in this case we saw obviously uh
that this was an uh this was related specifically to the asset that we related to so it got that
article association automatically we can also it would also have picked up articles that were
associated to the incident type if there were any and if this work order had originated from a case
and that case had knowledge articles those knowledge articles would also be available
at the work order level uh finally the other the last place where we pick up knowledge articles
are products so if you have a number of related products you know any of those have knowledge
articles um perhaps you know installation guide or something uh those would be available at the work
order level as well but to your point you can link an article directly so if you say add existing
brings up this um this really cool really powerful search control for knowledge articles
and then you can search for an article so if we want to search for our wine press
we can link it here in this case it's already linked we can see that it's already linked
if i wanted to i can unlink it or i can link other articles so let's look for
if i wanted to link this article you know i could i could link it it would show up at as linked to
the work order now uh and we would see uh we will see here that we have multiple linked articles
3d models we've supported association of 3d models against assets for a long time
so you can you can always use that functionality that's always that's existed for at least at
least a couple of years now uh where you associate a 3d model to an asset
at the moment uh we we aren't trying to do anything special around 3d models associated to
articles but it is a good question um you know and if there's interest if there's a bunch of demand
for direct association of 3d models to the article itself that would definitely
be something we'd be interested to to enable but not something we're doing at the moment
there are no special behaviors for but between cs and fs i'm
what one thing that we do right out of the box in fs i suppose that uh is that we enable uh
automatically in uh article uh sorry we enable knowledge against assets products incident types
and and work orders so when you when you install field service those are automatically enabled for
knowledge uh which then means you can absorb you can associate knowledge articles at those levels
and then in in addition to the standard um sort of article association capabilities that
that knowledge management brings within field service we have logic that will bring all of
those associations down to the work order level based on the associations to the work order uh
of those key entities so asset asset incident type product case um so you know so by default
those associated articles would flow to the work order level directly you know so that like we said
we make it as easy as possible for the technician to pick those things up and do their work