Field Service on-call duty: shifts beyond operating hours

On-call duty, weekend service and overtime are planned in Salesforce Field Service with shifts. Operating hours describe the regular working time of a service territory, usually Monday to Friday. A shift adds working time outside it: a Saturday on call, a night, two hours of overtime. Only confirmed shifts count, and an Extended shift takes appointments only if the work rule for availability allows overtime. Filter criteria limit an on-call shift to machine-down jobs. Without a confirmed shift on Saturday, the engine finds no technician for a breakdown with a committed response time. In Germany the works council has a say on all of this.

What are operating hours, and what are shifts?

Operating hours are the time slots per weekday on which a service territory works. Technicians inherit them through their territory membership. This is part of the master data that scheduling needs, described in what data scheduling needs.

Shifts cover what does not fit into this pattern. Trailhead1 defines a shift as “any set of working hours that are not normal operating hours”. It can come on top of operating hours, as with overtime, or overlap with them. Shift is a core Salesforce object, but the full function needs the Field Service managed package. Before the first shift, territories, service resources and operating hours have to be set up.

Salesforce Help on shift availability2 adds three rules that matter for on-call duty:

• Shifts always add availability. If a technician is not available, that is a resource absence and not a shorter shift.
• Shifts sit inside a territory membership. A shift with a territory must lie fully within the technician’s primary membership in that territory.
• Territory-specific shifts win. If two shifts overlap, the one with a territory takes precedence over the one without.

Salesforce sells the product today as Field Service and Operations. The shift logic described here applies to it.

How do you set up an on-call shift?

According to Salesforce Help on creating shifts3 and the list of shift fields4, five settings decide how an on-call shift behaves:

Setting	What it does	For on-call duty
Time Slot Type	Normal takes any appointment, Extended only those allowed as overtime	Extended
Status	Tentative, Published, Confirmed; only Confirmed counts for scheduling	Confirmed once the rota is agreed
Recordset Filter Criteria	Limits which appointments the shift can take	Only breakdowns with high priority
Job Profile	With a Match Skills rule, only technicians with the profile’s skills qualify for automatic assignment to the shift	Breakdown skills of the region
Non-Standard	Marks evening or on-call shifts	Set, so they can be counted and shared fairly

The link between Extended shifts and overtime sits in the scheduling policy. Help states that the Overtime field on the Service Resource Availability work rule controls whether appointments can be scheduled on Extended shifts. A policy for planned maintenance with Overtime switched off therefore never lands on an on-call shift, while the emergency policy with Overtime switched on does. For shift designations to count, Help recommends the Timeslot Designated work rule in the policy.

Shifts do not have to be created one by one. Trailhead on templates and patterns5 shows shift templates that prefill fields, for example a template “Weekly on Call”, and shift patterns that repeat templates over a length in days. With New from Pattern you choose a start date and an end date or a number of occurrences. If the service resource stays empty, the shift can be assigned later, by hand or by the scheduling tools.

Why does a machine-down call on Saturday find no technician?

This is a typical surprise after go-live. A customer with a contract for “technician on site within 24 hours” reports a stopped machine on Saturday morning. The work order gets the entitlement, the milestone starts, and the engine searches for a candidate.

For the call to land on the on-call technician, these have to fit together:

1. The entitlement. It carries the response time and can have its own operating hours for booking. How response times reach dispatching is described in modelling maintenance contracts.
2. The shift. A confirmed Extended shift for the weekend, with a filter that lets breakdowns through.
3. The policy. The policy used for breakdowns has Overtime switched on in the Service Resource Availability rule.

If a voice agent takes the call outside business hours, the on-call technician gets a classified case instead of a raw call. How I would set up triage on the hotline is in Breakdown hotline with Agentforce Voice. The agent cannot book anything, though, if there is no shift behind it.

The works council co-determines under section 87 BetrVG

On-call duty is working time, and in Germany that brings the works council in. Section 87 of the Works Constitution Act6 gives it a right of co-determination on, among other things, the start and end of daily working time and its distribution across the weekdays (no. 2), temporary extension of normal working hours (no. 3) and technical systems designed to monitor behaviour or performance (no. 6).

An on-call rota in Field Service touches all three. Shifts distribute working time, Extended shifts are overtime by design, and the system records who took which shift and when. I would discuss these points with the works council before go-live:

• who creates and confirms on-call shifts, and how far ahead
• how on-call shifts are shared fairly; the Non-Standard flag makes them countable per technician
• whether evaluations per technician are allowed, and who sees them
• how the on-call rota relates to time recording and pay

This is the same conversation as for timesheets and location, which I describe in rolling out Field Service in waves. It is easier to have it once for all topics. I am not a lawyer; the legal assessment belongs to your labour law experts.

Worked example: weekend call in three regions

The figures are assumed. A compressor manufacturer runs service in three regions. Each region has one technician on weekend call from Saturday 7:00 to Sunday 19:00. Contracts promise 24 hours on site for premium customers.

The setup I would choose:

1. One template per region with Time Slot Type Extended, the region’s territory, the job profile “breakdown” and a filter on priority.
2. A pattern with a length of 7 days and three entries on the Saturday, one per regional template. New from Pattern with 13 occurrences creates the shifts for a quarter, 39 in total.
3. Assignment by the service manager per region, status Tentative until the works council has approved the quarter’s rota, then Confirmed.
4. Two policies. Planned maintenance with Overtime off, breakdowns with Overtime on.
5. A test on a Saturday in the sandbox: a breakdown work order with a premium entitlement must land on the on-call technician, a maintenance appointment must not.

The data model is small. The effort lies in agreeing the rota and in keeping shifts confirmed every quarter.

Write down today’s on-call rules

List your current on-call rules: who is on call when, for which customers and which kinds of jobs. Then check whether your scheduling policies distinguish between planned work and breakdowns. If they do not, fix that first, because Extended shifts only work through that distinction. Where shifts fit into scheduling as a whole is covered in chapter 2 of the Field Service masterclass, and long jobs over several days in Field Service multiday jobs.

Sources6

1. 1Trailhead (opens in a new tab)trailhead.salesforce.com
2. 2Salesforce Help on shift availability (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
3. 3Salesforce Help on creating shifts (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
4. 4list of shift fields (opens in a new tab)help.salesforce.com
5. 5Trailhead on templates and patterns (opens in a new tab)trailhead.salesforce.com
6. 6Section 87 of the Works Constitution Act (opens in a new tab)gesetze-im-internet.de