A national facility-maintenance provider gives its technicians each unit’s history, manual, and readings on site

The provider’s technicians work across tens of thousands of client sites

The provider maintains the facilities of retail and restaurant chains with many locations. Its technicians handle that work at tens of thousands of client sites.

At that scale, its leaders wanted better scheduling and technician management, with decisions based on data. They also wanted technicians to troubleshoot faster and more accurately once they reach the unit.

Its leaders rolled out scheduling and reporting in pilot phases

The provider runs technician work in Dynamics 365 Field Service. Resource Scheduling Optimization builds the technicians’ schedules, and Power BI shows its leaders operational performance and customer satisfaction in real time.

The rollout ran in several pilot phases. The provider’s leadership refined it along the way with Microsoft’s engineering teams, and best-practice workshops ran throughout to prepare for more scale.

Technicians read one summary before they start on the unit

The provider gave its technicians a virtual assistant inside the Field Service workflow they already use, so there is no separate app to learn.

For the job in front of the technician, the assistant sums up the work-order data, the asset’s manual, and the equipment’s telemetry. It went out in phases, like the scheduling work.

The repair call and the safety call stay with the technician

The assistant summarizes and the technician decides. The person at the unit judges what is wrong, what to repair, and whether it is safe to work.

The provider’s expertise stays with its people in the field. The assistant’s job is to find and sum up the facts before they start.

The provider aims for less downtime and shorter service calls

The provider set three aims for the assistant: less equipment downtime for its clients, shorter service times, and less time spent on training and dispatch.

In facility maintenance, the margin on a service call turns on dispatch speed, first-time fix, and technician time. Service hours are labor costs, and so are the hours spent training and dispatching. Two of the three aims go after that cost on every job.

These are the provider’s aims. Measured results and payback figures are not published here.

Ludia’s part: Ludia’s consultants implemented Field Service, Resource Scheduling Optimization, and Power BI with the provider’s leadership, and ran the best-practice workshops. They built the technician assistant with the provider in Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI, worked with Microsoft’s engineering teams, and integrated it with Field Service.

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For your IT team: how the assistant and the scheduling are built

The assistant is built with Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI, other Azure AI services, and Azure↗ Data Lake, and it is integrated with Dynamics 365 Field Service. It summarizes work-order data, asset manuals, and equipment telemetry inside the technician’s existing Field Service workflow. Scheduling runs on Field Service with Resource Scheduling Optimization, and reporting on Power BI, both deployed in phases.