City FM scales up its presence and transforms service with Dynamics 365

Growing pains present an opportunity

Founded in 1985 in Glasgow, Scotland, City businesses worldwide manage over 350 million square feet of retail space at over 15,000 partner locations across five continents. Its thousands of team members pride themselves on delivering exceptional service, transforming customers’ facilities, lowering their costs, and supporting them on their sustainability journeys with a holistic, data-driven approach.

City established a US presence in 2016 and now supports store chains all along the East Coast. With regional expansion underway and additional states on the roadmap, the company’s legacy ERP and service solutions were beginning to show the strain. The on-premises systems were highly customized and challenging to maintain. Business operations were managed in different, disconnected systems, limiting visibility and collaboration. Technician schedules, locations, work orders, and inventory were manually tracked in various legacy tools. These systems lacked a common data source, modern features and automation that could streamline financial and dispatching workflows.

After reviewing 14 solutions from a range of providers, City selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 for its growing US business. The new solution meets all key feature requirements out of the box but can be easily customized to meet specific business needs.

Easing into efficiency

Along with the company’s new cloud-based ERP and field service solution, the project would include customer and vendor portals created in Power Pages for visibility and collaboration, and near-real-time data syncing along with on-demand reporting and data insights from Power BI. City took an incremental approach to its Dynamics 365 rollout, starting in May 2023 with full migration expected by the end of 2024. 

Although the project is still underway, team members in every department from executive leaders to help desk representatives are already noticing improvements in daily business processes, and they appreciate the intuitive dashboards that put so much information at their fingertips. According to Adam Tessier, Finance Supervisor, City Facilities Management (US), “Now we have more control and agency over things that really impact our business. Dynamics 365 allows us to customize views around daily workloads, create new goals with data we never had before, and keep all our work in one place as opposed to scattered across Excel, Power BI, Access databases, etc.”

Finance

In the past, work orders and invoices had to be transferred nightly to two different accounting and scheduling systems. The systems didn’t communicate with each other until the overnight batch sync. Now, the two datasets are connected continuously, boosting efficiency and allowing managers to stay on top of their contracts, site visits, and budgets more easily.

Managers can choose to receive approval notifications and updates by email, within a dashboard, or in Microsoft Teams. They also have the option to approve requests right in Teams, eliminating the need to sign in to Dynamics 365. According to Carolyn Jasiulewicz, Product Director, “Integration of Dynamics 365 with other Microsoft apps is proving to be a real time-saver. For example, 70% of managers now opt to approve work orders from within Microsoft Teams, eliminating several steps.” And, in a welcome change from the rigid, manual process in the legacy system, Priority 1 cases are now automatically scheduled immediately via Resource Scheduling Optimization Add-in for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service (RSO). As a result, same-day completion of work orders has increased by 26% year over year, from 66% in 2023 to 83% 2024, and days-on-average to complete work orders has been reduced by 17% year over year.

Better field service

Gone are the days of multiple tools, manual steps, and disconnected data for field service operations. Now, routes and schedules are optimized to make the best use of technicians’ time, and the entire service team is connected and informed with near-real-time updates. For example, in the past, help desk staff entered a work order in the legacy field service tool and assigned a technician. The technician would manage his or her schedule according to SLAs and prioritizations, close the ticket, and the information would sync with the billing system that night. Now, when a work order is entered, system automation does the rest. Everyone has access to data they need to do their jobs more efficiently in the Dynamics 365 Field Service dashboard. Technicians can see truck-level inventory across the fleet to acquire necessary parts for service calls, managers can view time spent per visit to identify trends or areas of improvement, and the help desk can see technician’s availability, truck locations via GPS, and more. 

Resource Scheduling Optimization

RSO has been a game-changer for City's field technicians and help desk staff. When a work order comes through, RSO automatically schedules the job to the technician that’s best equipped to complete it, based on technicians’ skillsets and certifications, the work requested or required, and other parameters. The assigned tech receives a notification in the Field Service mobile app and help desk users can see who was assigned. Either of them can edit the assignment, place a parts order or reallocate as appropriate.

RSO now assigns incoming work orders, decreasing the average time to arrive on site by 10% year over year (2.1 days in May 2023 to 1.9 days in May 2024). Jasiulewicz says, “We went from 100% manual scheduling to more than 52% automatically scheduled via RSO”. Based on configuration improvements City is estimating that this figure will increase to 80%. The optimized scheduling workflow allows City’s help desk staff to devote the time saved to customer communications and higher-level forecasting activities.

Field Service mobile app

When technicians are assigned to work orders, they receive notifications in the Dynamics 365 Field Service mobile app on their company-issued iPhone. Here, they can view the tasks in a work order, place a parts order or edit the time window if needed, track their time, communicate with the help desk, and even create a new work order if they discover a problem during a visit. The mobile app’s advanced clock in/clock out feature automatically bills a tech’s time to the correct customer and job, saving time and effort for both the technician and accounting staff. As Jamey Huser, VP of Field Operations explains, “Dynamics 365 provides a powerful, integrated platform to effectively execute work orders and improve performance and decisions. Field Service is tailored to the technicians allowing them to log jobs, parts, and refrigerant gas usage in one place. And the integration to our existing Microsoft applications increases the efficiency of notifications, review of data, and manage approvals in real time.”

Integrations

Integrations with key third-party applications have been particularly effective in improving efficiency. UPS and FedEx sync with Dynamics 365 every 15–30 minutes. Technicians are alerted in the mobile app as soon as parts orders have been received, allowing them to depart for customer visits faster. An integration with Workday’s HR app automatically updates requests for time off in Dynamics 365 Field Service so that techs aren’t scheduled during personal time. The GPS feature in Field Service integrates with a custom-built geofence entity that tracks work time automatically based on a tech’s arrival and departure time at the work site. And the percentage of work orders out of sync with customer data has been eliminated with real time data sync to its customer work order platform.

Data-driven management

In the past, every software application was in a silo. Each ran well on its own but getting a 360-degree view of the business was challenging. Reports were created manually in spreadsheets, which lacked visual elements to help tell the business story. And they were time-consuming to put together, limiting leadership’s ability to respond quickly to changing conditions. Now, with 100% uptime for the 14-months since going live, data housed in a single location, time-saving automations, and Power BI, City leadership and regional managers can make informed, real-time decisions.

Expanding horizons

City’s Dynamics 365 implementation laid a foundation for seamless scalability that includes the latest innovations in ERP and field service, eased the company’s security risk concerns, and is improving performance reliability. Sean Lockwood, Chief Financial Officer sums up the company’s experience: “By consolidating our systems on Dynamics 365, City is benefiting from improved workflows, enhanced data visibility and real-time insights. This is empowering our teams to make more data-driven decisions, optimize resource allocation and swiftly adapt our resources, ensuring we continue to deliver the highest level of service.” The internal team continues to onboard staff and regions, with nearly 1,000 new users anticipated by September 2024. But the company isn’t stopping there.

Another initiative to revamp its website to better meet the expectations of today’s customers is underway. Soon, they will have a modern portal, created in Power Pages, where they can enter work orders, view maintenance schedules and assets, and distinguish between work that’s assigned to City and work that’s handled by others. Vendors are getting a new portal too, where they can upload invoices for automatic entry in the accounts payable system. This will save time and streamline the payment process.

The growth on the horizon isn’t just metaphorical. City’s UK leadership team recently visited the US headquarters to see the new solution in action. The UK leaders were so impressed by the solution’s performance that they plan to take their learnings back and apply them to locations in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in the future.