Vehicles

When FSRs take inventory items from a warehouse to perform field work, FDM assigns those items to the FSRs’ vehicles rather than to the FSRs themselves. It treats vehicles as a special kind of virtual inventory location that inventory items can be moved to and from, just as items can be moved to and from other virtual locations.

When an FSR installs a meter, endpoint, or other consumable serialized item through work order completion, FDM internally records the item as having moved from the FSR’s vehicle to an abstract consumed inventory item location. In serialized inventory item lists and reports (for more information, see Reporting), the inventory location for installed items is shown as Consumed. FDM does not move items to the Consumed location when you manually change their status to Installed nor when you install and program an item using Endpoint Tools commands.

FDM lets you assign FSRs to multiple vehicles and vice versa. So if an FSR runs out of an inventory item on one vehicle, he or she can get more of that item from another vehicle that he or she is assigned to.

Note:  You can also assign FSRs to one or more vehicles through the Vehicles tab of the User Accounts details pane.

As a business unit user with Modify Inventory Locations permission, you can use the Vehicles view to create vehicle records for your business unit. You can create vehicle records manually—one vehicle at a time—or import multiple existing vehicle records from a CSV-formatted (comma-separated value or comma-delimited plain text) file, or both. If an imported vehicle record has the same vehicle ID number as an existing vehicle record in the FDM database, the imported record replaces the existing record.

A business unit user who only has View Inventory Locations permission can view, but not modify, information about his or her business unit’s vehicles.

The Vehicles view features a standard FDM list filter editor that lets you filter the list by enabled status, vehicle ID, and warehouse, or by any combination of these criteria. For a detailed explanation of FDM list filters and how to use them, see Filtering Lists. You can export the list as currently filtered to a CSV file that can be imported into other instances of the FDM server client or into other applications, such as Microsoft Excel (for more information, see Exporting FDM Lists to CSV Files).