Assets and Work Orders - Service Cloud - Spring ‘16

Now, we are going to be looking at our product roadmap for part of our presentation today. So in order to properly set our expectations there, we need to review Salesforce's forward looking statement slide. Now, for anybody who's unfamiliar, this slide urges Salesforce customers to make any purchasing decisions based only on currently available functionality at the time of purchase.

Hi, good morning everyone. My name is Karthik Shankar. I'm a director of Product Management here at Service Clouds. Today I'll be talking about assets and work orders. Let's dive right into hierarchical assets and work orders. Assets have been the object asset has been in the product for quite some time now, and over the last year we've been very aggressive in making some of the enhancements that you've been enjoying. And thanks again for all the inputs in Idea Exchange, we look at them and bring them into the product. Now for spring 16, we've added the ability to nest multiple assets and form a hierarchy which you could use to model your bill of materials. For instance, I mean, the whole idea is we will enable you to now track service requests on an asset that down to the very detailed component level within an asset. Like for example, let's take a regular household refrigerator. It has so many serviceable parts and in the past you have been able to model these as like the refrigerator, the compressor, maybe the water filter, as individual assets and no associations between them. But with spring 16, you will be able to kind of pull things together all under an hierarchy. So a refrigerator has a compressor, has a water filter, has a thermostat, and so on and so forth. Diving a little deeper into the object itself, there are two key fields that one should be aware of. First is the root asset and then the second is the parent asset. Now, the parent child relationship needs no explanation, it's pretty straightforward. But I'd like to spend some time talking about the root asset. Now this is a special, special asset which is system owned, meaning the platform owns it, it sets it and maintains it for you. However, you can access this information either on screen or via APIs. Now, what root essentially means is it is your big asset. In this case, the refrigerator and all of the other component assets are now part of this tree hierarchy. So to the left you can see that the refrigerator is the route. You have the water filter, you have the compressor, which in turn, even though it's a child of the refrigerator, it also has relay and the overload protector as children within the compressor. So this way you can, I mean, this is a very trivial, simple example, but you can think about all the different complex scenarios that it is now possible for you to model within the platform. One thing to note here is that this Hierarchy can go 50 levels deep and one root can have up to 2000 assets under it. We are hoping that that should be sufficient to model most of the products out there. However, the reason we are doing this is just the beginning of a lot of things that we want to do. We essentially want to be able to pull in everything information about almost everything that's there within the platform, within your account and organization. For instance, starting all the way from the price book which has the details of your assets, but there as products with a price. And when somebody creates the opportunity, they're now able to bring in all those products as line items into the opportunity, which then transfers into the code and then into the order. Now once that is all set up, we want to get to a state where all of the line items in the order now transform into assets for that account automatically. And actually we talk a little bit about this later, but one of the use cases here is going back to the refrigerator example. Let's say you place the order for it. The first thing you want is want it delivered and installed so we can automatically generate and work order for delivery and installation related once since you have all this information, you're also able to generate the service contracts and associated with the order and the assets. And we'll actually talk about how service contracts can lead to work orders. And actually I'd like to segue into work orders now and come back and talk about these use cases a little more in detail. Now work orders are brand new in the platform today in spring 16. These are standard objects that will help you track services that you perform either on the asset or otherwise. These are foundational, just like case objects. And as you can see on the right side, you've got your triggers, your page layout, you got your resource types and it is very similar to any other foundational object in the platform today. What it also means is it also has pre built integrations with all the other objects. So again you can link it. It's already linked to accounts and contacts and of course cases and assets and so many other things that are available to you out of the box. One thing I also want to mention is we want to also model this like it does in real life scenarios, right? So every work order can have a number of work order line items. And I will walk you through this in a demo and show you how all these fit together. One thing that I want to call out here is this is now available with Spring 16, but you will have to go in and enable this for your account for it to start working now. So how would you use this combination of hierarchical assets and work orders? And work orders in particular. Previously I touched upon a case where you had the asset, you had it ordered, and then you had a work order created for delivery and installation. Another use case that this could potentially help solve is a break fix model. Going back to the same refrigerator example, it stops working, so it's broken. So I call the customer service agent and they create a case and as they are looking at the case and we'll see this in the demo, they're able to see that I have this asset, which is a refrigerator. They're able to very quickly create a work order and assign it for a technician to go take a look at it. Another thing that we want to also address is the idea behind of planned or preventative maintenance going back to the service contract that was generated or linked to the order. Now, we know that this account has this particular asset and because of everything else that's available, you also know that you need to be able to schedule maintenance visits on a periodic basis. And you're able to do that automatically in the sense that, let's say same refrigerator needs the water filter changed every six months. So not like today, but closer to the event, maybe a day or two, or as is required in the business process, you could set it up so that a work order is generated like the day before and then the technician can now go and fix the issue preemptively. Now actually, let me pause there and jump to the demo and show you all of these features. So I'm on the account screen now and let me pull up the account here, Acme. And going back to the hierarchical asset examples or the example within the account, you are able to see all the assets that are available. And. And this is the refrigerator. Let me click on that. I like to point to these two new fields that enable hierarchy possible that enable hierarchy. One is the root asset, like I said before, it is set by the system. So it's locked, you don't have to set it. It's automatically done as you build your hierarchy. And the other is the parent. So obviously this is the refrigerator. So this is the root. But let's look at some of the other assets that are part of this account. Go to this list. Let me show you an asset called the Start relay. So this is a component within the compressor and it has a kit. So for instance, this though a part of the refrigerator, you can see that this is the root here is the refrigerator. But the parent is a kit which has a combination of relay and overload protections. So when you click on this you're able to see the hierarchy and stuff like that. So all of these are bundled together and are now available, will be available in spring 16. One of the things that you see on screen is the hierarchy, a visual representation of the hierarchy. This is a custom thing that we're building. In the future we will have an out of the box hierarchy UI widget that will help you visualize all of this better than what you're seeing today. So now that we've talked about the hierarchy within assets, let's look at how work orders come into the picture here. So going back to the break fix use case. So the customer calls and complains about the refrigerator not working. So all the agent does is looks up, the customer looks up the asset in this case and they can very easily go in and create a new case. And notice how most of all of these fields are pre filled because it's all linked. And let's say this is a case because the customer called in, it's a phone. And I'm going to say the refrigerator stopped working. And save it. Now notice a few things here. Once I've saved it, I'm now able to go in and create a work order. Now few things to notice here and I think I skipped that. When you enable work orders within your account, you can also play around with your page layouts and the Quick actions bar so that I would encourage everybody to bring those into your layouts when because you need to see work orders. Also switch here and show you what it looks like in the quick action bar. So let's now create a work order. It's very simple and almost every all the information that you need is now pulled into the work order from the case and the asset. This is another custom thing that we build called Explode Complex Assets just to show you the power of the model. And when we create this, you can see that the work order is already created. And when we drill deeper into the work order, you see all the work order line items created for this particular case. Again, remember this is a customer calling with an issue that the refrigerator stopped working and you need somebody to go and have it checked out, check out every component in the refrigerator just to make sure and identify the issue. So this is a very, very easy way for you to generate the work order and generate multiple work order line items. So you can look at keeping track of every asset within the main root asset. So that's work orders in short. And again, all of these are interrelated. So when you go back to the asset, for instance, you will be able to see a list of work orders and work performed on the asset. So this helps with keeping track of service contracts, warranties and other entitlements. And again, when you look at the account, you're going to see all of this information. Anyway, that's the end of the demo right now. And I want to reiterate that this is just the beginning of a lot of different things, a lot of powerful things that we want to do within the product and we'll expand this to provide a lot more powerful capabilities, out of the box capabilities so customers can benefit from this.

Excellent. Yeah, I mean my personally, my interest is already piqued seeing what you've shown us and just knowing how well that's going to play with our other automation tools like Workflow Rules and the Process Builder. So I mean, I'm very excited to see what customers are saying about how they're planning on using assets and work orders, but that's enough for me. Let's actually hear what the customers are saying.

Let me see.

I have a great question from Paul. He's asking if you're using a custom object that you've built from Work orders, is now the time to start planning on migrating to this new standard object and what would you recommend?

Yes, our recommendation is to migrate to the standard objects that are available out of the box and so you can leverage a lot more of these capabilities that we're building. Not just now, also in the future.

Now, what edition do you need to have to use Work Orders? Because I'm not sure it's available in Professional Edition. Right. I think you have to have Enterprise and up.

Correct. Good point. Thanks. Prodded up. So within Service Cloud you need to be in Enterprise and above in order to access these two objects under these work order objects.

The advantage I see is that all of these things like Process Builder and Master child relationships that you have that allow workflows or Process Builder or flows to work, it just becomes easier because now it's a standard object that has those built in relationships in that data model.