Finding Technicians by Product Line or Product Family
The business use case is to set up a Product Serviced record based on Product Family or Product Line without using the Product lookup. The goal is to avoid assigning training skills on a product level, since most companies may have a handful of product numbers for a specific unit as revisions are made over time and this would result in inaccuracies over time unless each user is updated with the new product numbers. Keeping the Product Serviced record to the Product Line level will help with reporting as well.
Searching in Dispatch Console by matching work order's Product/Skill with technicians' Product in Product Serviced / Skill in Expertise is hard-wired and is not configurable. So, it is not possible to match Product Family / Product Line from Product Serviced with any Work Order field.
However, because Dispatch Console search matches text type (except text area) fields of Work Order with the text type fields of Technician (or Service Team), you can achieve technician search based on Product Family / Product Line with the following approach:
• Capture the Product Family / Product Line in a custom text field in the Work Order object.
• Record the Product Family / Product Line that the technician is trained on, in a custom text field (e.g. multi-select picklist) in Technician/Equipment object.
• Configure these as Work Order and Technician search fields in the Dispatch Console Configure Search dialog box.
The above approach work when the number of product families and lines is within the limits allowed for multi-picklist fields by Salesforce.