Announcing Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Central

We are pleased to announce new integration between Azure IoT Central and Dynamics 365 for Field Service, coinciding with the general availability of Azure IoT Central.

When customers encounter unplanned outages in a traditional break-and-fix service model, they expect a well prepared technician to respond immediately; unfortunately, this isn’t possible in the traditional model. Meanwhile, the unplanned outage costs the customer quite a lot: $647 billion is lost globally each year when assets, machines, equipment, and systems are unavailable.

Harnessed by Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled assets, we can catch issues before they occur, and then plan for scheduled maintenance. However, implementing integrated solutions from IoT devices all the way up to business applications can prove challenging and complicated, and often calls for an interdisciplinary understanding of IoT and business application systems such as CRM or ERP.

We’ve made it our mission to provide a powerful yet simple get-started experience to integrate Azure IoT Central with Dynamics 365 for Field Service in minutes, so that organizations are able to quickly move from idea, to pilot, to production, without requiring code expertise.

Azure IoT Central and Dynamics 365 for Field Service are designed to work together to tell the integration story and provide a true connected field service experience.

The following scenario paints the picture:

Contoso sells and supports hundreds of kiosks throughout a country, and their ultimate goal is to maintain a “never down” service offering to their customers. A kiosk in a Redmond building has a cash collector that is nearly full. An anomaly signal is fired from Azure IoT Central to Field Service, and then triggers an auto-scheduling of an appropriately skilled technician to go to the kiosk and fix the issue, preventing an offline incident. The customer managing the Redmond building will be notified about the dispatch detail in the Azure IoT Central dashboard.

For more information about Connected Field Service for Azure IoT Central, check out this overview, and be sure to take a test drive with these quick tutorials so you can see for yourself!