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About Service Activities

Field service engineers work on activities. Selecting an activity template automatically provides a set of activities to complete for a service request. For general information about activities, see Siebel Applications Administration Guide.

Siebel Field Service includes the following common activity types:

• Service activities for the following categories:
  • Installation
  • Preventive maintenance
• Repair activities, including shipping and receiving

You use activities to track the tasks to complete in response to a service request, a preventive maintenance request, a change request, and a request for a repair. The Activities screen shows the activities to assign to field service or service center personnel.

A field service or repair activity can include detailed information about the steps that field service engineers can perform to complete the activity, additional instructions about the activity, items (such as parts or tools) that field service engineers need to complete the activity, and the skills (such as language proficiency and product knowledge) that field service engineers must possess to complete the activity. An activity can also include information about its field part movements, expenses, and labor.

Including activities in a service request provides the following advantages:

• The ownership of the problem remains with the call management, when required.
• The field service engineer looking at assigned activities can easily identify the required information.
• Reporting is simplified.
• You can assign activities to multiple employees.

NOTE:  Service activities can be stand-alone (for example, preventive maintenance activities) or, more commonly, attached to service requests. For complex preventive maintenance activities, you can formalize the activity by creating a service request.

Activities in Siebel Field Service are an extension of the Activity object and have Siebel Field Service customizations that specifically meet the requirements of engineers who work on complex, standardized service activities. Activity objects can be associated with the following Siebel objects:

After users create activities, they assign them to appropriate field service engineers. Assigned activities appear on the calendars for engineers, and the engineers can receive automatic notification about new activities through their laptop computers, handheld devices, cell phones, or pagers. Engineers can accept or decline an activity and, after accepted, use the Activities screen to provide information about its execution.

You can manually assign activities on the Activities, Service Requests, and Dispatch Board screens or use Assignment Manager (with Assign menu command) to automatically assign activities. Automatic assignment uses a variety of criteria for assignment, including skills, role priorities, availability, location, and cost.

You can manually schedule assigned engineers on the Activities screen or on the drag-and-drop interface of the Dispatch Board screen. Also, Siebel Scheduler can automatically schedule assigned engineers. For more information about assigning and scheduling activities, see Scheduling Using Siebel Scheduler and Dispatch Board.