Prevent Customer Down Time Through Managing Assets Loaned to Customers in Dynamics 365

If your company receives customer’s assets for maintenance and repairs, the asset they are sending may be vital for their day-to-day operations. This could lead to lost production time and revenue for that customer. How can we prevent the customer from having down time due to repairing of an asset? Through managing assets loaned to Customers in Dynamics 365! This feature allows companies to manage the assets temporarily loaned to customers and manage when a loaned asset was sent and received from a work order.

To better illustrate how this tool can be applied, let’s walk through a real-world scenario. Imagine we’re a company that manufactures forklifts. One of our customers reports that their forklift is overheating after just one hour of operation, even though these machines are typically expected to run for twelve hours a day. To resolve the issue, the customer must send the forklift to one of our facilities for repairs, a process estimated to take about two weeks. However, the customer cannot afford to be without a forklift during this downtime. To maintain their operations, our company steps in and provides a loaner forklift for the duration of the repair.

Here we have populated a maintenance request with the overheating issue. From the maintenance request page, we can select the option “Send Loan Asset”.

Selecting this will display a screen to select another asset to loan from the same asset type class. As well as the time the asset was sent, along with the expected return date of the asset.

Once an asset has been selected to loan. You can manage all active asset loans through the “Asset loan” module in asset management.

The active asset loans page will provide information on all loaned assets that are currently out to customers.

Once a loaned asset has been returned. Selecting the “Return asset loan” button will provide a field to record the time and date of the return.

Once the loaned asset has been returned. It will display in the “All assets loan” page with a status of “Ended”. Showing that the asset has been returned and accounted for.

This feature allows your customers operations to continue running smoothly while you complete any maintenance or repairs on their assets.  In the next section, we will illustrate how asset management can be used to track inbound/outbound orders for customers assets.