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Users / Contractors / Scheduling in CRM 2011-Step 1

Answered Users / Contractors / Scheduling in CRM 2011-Step 1

  • Tuesday, May 15, 2012 6:31 PM
     
     
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    Hello,

    I have used CRM 2011 before and was quite happy with it. Recently I was asked to redesign an internal tool (I am a software engineer) and I thought CRM 2011 might be a better solution. Here are the high level requirements for the project and follows my thoughts about how to implement in CRM 2011. My request for the size 15 brains in this forum is to critically review my approach as I honestly believe CRM 2011 can do everything that has been asked and we won't need to spend a penny on development effort (I've got more important projects to run with).

    We have employees and contractors / consultants. These employees / consultants all have skills that are of value to us as we provide talent in XYZ area and bill for it.

    So to start things off we have a "skills matrix" that is maintained in Excel. Without getting into tons of details the current application requires the person to first check to see if a person has a skill in Excel then flip to another tool to see if they are available then finally schedule them in a third. Googling led me to think CRM2011 does not yet have this capablity.

    So my thought was to setup employees as Users under the company business unit and contractors as users under a "consultant" business unit. Once I have them entered I was thinking to Services or Resource Groups for the "skills". Then I would add the people to the skill group(s) they belong to. Once configured this way then I could create workflows that  automatically suggest / schedule the skills / instructors that match up to the service being scheduled.

    Ultimately in the end we need a calendar where we can see what is going on where, conflicts, how a change would impact across the board etc.

    So perhaps I am wrong but it seems to me that Dynamics has alot of this foundational work in place and I just need to flush it out and we can hit the ground running.

    Your thoughts?

    JB

     

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  • Tuesday, May 15, 2012 6:47 PM
     
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    Starting with Service Scheduling a good starting point is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syTtn-IdCC4

    Your skills could be Ressource Groups. And a good starting point to build these Groups could be to have a custom entity 'skills' related to users. You could work with n:n or you could build to entities. One for skills and a second one to relate each skill to the user.

    Now you can build workflows or plugins to find all users having skill X and group them as a ressource group or you can do this manually. Having this skill entity you have the opportunity to relate it to service-appointment entity and case entity. So your CSR knows which skills needed to deliver best service.

    Hope this helps to find what you´re looking for

     

    Carsten Groth http://carstengroth.wordpress.com Microsoft Dynamics Certified Technology Specialist

    • Marked As Answer by zzpluralza Tuesday, May 22, 2012 5:33 PM
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  • Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:07 PM
     
     
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    If you'll bear with me I would like to state this back to you to see that I understand correctly.

    My Resource Groups may be something like All Lean Healthcare Instructors or All Agile Instructors.

    I would create an Entity named say Training Skills and then that entity would be owned by the org. It would only be visible in the service area blah blah. The name field and other fields would be for specifics to the course. Say has observed, has co-taught, has led, has internation material etc.

    I would then create all the skills say Lead Agile Instructor, Co-Instructor Agile, Observer Agile Instruction....etc.

    At that point I would then customize the user form to show the skills a user has. I would also create a 1 to many relationship. At this point all would be complete for setting up the matrix. From there it is pretty straight forward creating workflow for scheduling etc.

    Am I even close?

    JB

     
  • Friday, May 18, 2012 12:24 AM
     
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    In addition to above... Instead of creating consultants/contractors as users of another business unit you could define them as facilities in CRM. This way you would be able to use CRM scheduling engine and if you do not intend to provide access to your crm to external users, additional user licenses would not be required as well for facilities. You wont have to create two business units for them.

    Just my thoughts 

    Sam

    Dynamics CRM MVP | Inogic | http://inogic.blogspot.com| news at inogic dot com

    If this post answers your question, please click "Mark As Answer" on the post and "Mark as Helpful"

    • Marked As Answer by zzpluralza Tuesday, May 22, 2012 5:33 PM
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