2023 started off strong for the Field Service practice at Thunder, as I was fortunate enough to get to participate in our first Salesforce Field Service Partner Advisory Board session (since invited to become a member of this exclusive group), which took place recently in San Francisco.

First and foremost it was an amazing experience to not only get direct interaction with the SFS Product Management Team, but also an honor to collaborate with the other Partner members in attendance, who represent some of the most skilled SFS folks in the ecosystem today.  The meeting of the collective SFS minds across the various Partners led to in-depth conversation as well as some high quality feedback directly to the SFS Product Team that will help influence the overall product roadmap.

During our full day interactive session, there were definitely a few takeaways I noted down, and although I can’t share all the specifics, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight what I would consider the two most impactful ones:

1. Enhanced Scheduling & Optimization is catching up fast, in terms of what it supports, with the most recent updates (Spring ‘23) including the support of Multi-Day Appointments, Relocations, Capacity Based Resources, and the ability to schedule up to 5 dependencies with a Same Start.  ES&O certainly isn’t done there and the acceleration will continue as more features will be added in the upcoming releases.

    

2. Lightning Web Components are the future of SFS Mobile, specifically when it comes to extensibility and experience enhancement.  It has been a massive undertaking, years in the making, to get to the most recent (Spring ‘23) GA of the feature and it will only get stronger as time goes on.  The best part is that there is a tremendous focus on continuing to provide pre-built components, in addition to the ones that were included in Spring ‘23.  Even better still is that they will most likely (Safe Harbor) be released in the form of unmanaged packages, which means they won’t have to wait for the official releases AND the code that makes up the components can be customized to align to specific business needs.

Obviously there is more to be excited about, outside of the above, when it comes to the future of Salesforce Field Service.  So make sure you keep your eyes open for webinars, announcements, and the updated Release Notes to stay up to date!

Overall I left the session energized and excited about not only what’s coming in the short term, but also what is coming in the long term, which is sure to continue to keep the SFS product in the Leader category of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for a very long time to come.