What's New: Service Management (2024 release wave 1)

Overview

The video (16 minutes, published 2024-04-04) walks through Service Management updates in 2024 release wave 1. The stated aim is to align the service experience with sales and project areas. It follows a flow from service quote setup and number series, through service items, quote-to-order conversion, posting, and service contracts.

The demo covers a new blocked field on service items, attachments across service documents, item selection and item references in service documents, a user-level service invoice posting policy, service invoice and credit memo documents, and contract templates with invoice deletion. It also notes limits, such as the order in which contract invoices can be deleted.

Key points

• When the number series for service quotes is missing, a window now tells you and helps you set it up. If the series is automatic, the number field is hidden and users cannot change or choose the number.
• Service items have a new Blocked field: block an item completely from maintenance, or only from use in contracts.
• Blocked service items cannot be added to service contracts. Items also have a service toggle, and variants have similar toggles for service, sales and purchase.
• Attachments work across service quotes, orders, items and contracts. They can be copied from master data (customer, item, service item) to service documents and carry through to posted transactions.
• Service documents now have a Select Items action for adding several items at once, and item references (for example barcodes) are available. The demo mentions scanning with a warehouse handheld device.
• The service invoice posting policy is set in User Setup, similar to sales and purchase. It controls whether invoices are posted separately from shipments or together. With Mandatory, shipment and invoice are posted together.
• Service contract invoices cannot be changed because they are linked to service ledger entries. They can now be deleted, starting from the last one, and the dates are restored. This was one of the most voted product suggestions.

Features

Every feature below: status not stated, demoed.

AL objects mentioned

As heard in the captions. A name that matches one object page by exact type and name links to it; the others stay as named.

• page 5964 “Service Quote” at 2:17
• page “Service Item” at 3:51
• page 5988 “Service Items” at 4:11
• page 5900 “Service Order” at 8:17
• page 5906 “Service Item Worksheet” at 8:37
• page 5905 “Service Lines” at 8:48
• page 5933 “Service Invoice” at 10:32
• page 6050 “Service Contract” at 10:50

Not found in BC28-30: page “Service Item”.

Quotes

• 0:57 “business Central always give you choice you can do like the same things or achieve the same result in a very very different manners”
• 1:17 “we started in the previous release where we added demo data and setup data so you can now easily demonstrate functionality out of the”
• 1:37 “we decided to align uh service management experience with other areas such as a sales or project areas”
• 4:18 “we have a new tole uh field here which is called blocked which allows you to decide how do you want to block specific”
• 9:57 “we added service invoice posting policy uh similar to purchase and sales areas where you can decide on how you want to process uh”
• 12:34 “it’s a it’s a limitation uh we have a restrictions because it’s linked to Service uh service Ledger entries”
• 12:55 “you can only delete starting from the end because we already have invoice for this Delta”
• 13:43 “this uh this gives you some capability on to review documents and redo if something needs to be redone that is like one of”
• 13:43 “redo if something needs to be redone that is like one of the most voted product suggestions so we implemented it”

Presenters (as heard): Andre PCO.