If your technicians travel to sites and the work they do is maintenance on assets you are accountable for, you need both.
Field service management schedules and dispatches the people.
A CMMS records the assets, their maintenance history and their compliance status.
Buy them separately and you maintain two asset lists, two work order queues and a manual reconciliation between them.
FSM stands for field service management.
FSM answers "who is going where, when, and did the job get done". Job creation, technician scheduling by skill and location, route and dispatch, mobile execution with photos and signatures, SLA tracking, customer sites and contracts.
Picture a normal day. A request comes in from a customer. The system finds a technician who has the right skills and is close enough to reach the site. The job lands on their phone. They finish the work, take photos and get a signature. Behind the scenes, the system checks whether the visit happened within the response time promised to the customer. That promise is often called a service level agreement, or SLA.
Typical FSM features include:
- Creating and assigning jobs
- Scheduling by skill and location
- Route planning and dispatch
- A mobile app for technicians, with photos and signatures
- SLA tracking
- Customer sites and contracts
CMMS stands for computerized maintenance management system.
A CMMS is a central record for your equipment and the maintenance done on it. It answers a different question: what do we own, what state is it in, and what has been done to it so far?
A useful way to think about it is as a medical file for every machine. Each pump, generator, chiller or charger gets its own entry, with its full history attached.
Typical CMMS features include:
- Asset register: a list of everything you maintain, often organized in layers (eg a chiller plant contains chillers, which contain compressors).
- Preventive maintenance: servicing on a schedule, set by the calendar and by usage, such as running hours, so equipment is looked after before it breaks.
- Work order history: every repair and service, linked to the asset it was done on.
- Spare parts inventory: what's in stock and what's running low.
- Inspection checklists and compliance records: proof that required checks were carried out.
Yes, but how the system was built matters more than the feature list.
Some products started as one type of tool and added the other later. They tend to keep two separate sets of records underneath, joined by a sync that can lag or break. Others were built as a single system from the start, with one record for each asset and one work order that serves both scheduling and maintenance.
When you evaluate a hybrid tool, ask:
- Is there one asset record, or two that get synced?
- Does a maintenance schedule create the job that a technician sees on their phone?
- Does the technician see the equipment's history before they arrive?
- Can a technician use the mobile side without being trained on the whole system?
If the answers are yes, the tool isn't a compromise. If a sync sits between the two halves, expect the same problems as buying two products.
FieldEx was built as one system from the start. Each asset has one record, and each job has one work order. The office and the technician both work from them.
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Every job links to the asset it is for. The technician can open its service history, past repairs and parts used. The asset details linked to the job can also be viewed offline.
Schedule servicing by date, by usage such as running hours, or both. When the service is due, FieldEx creates the work order. It reaches the technician like any other job.
Link a checklist answer to a repair job. If the technician fails that check, the repair job is created when the checklist is completed. It uses the template and steps you chose.
Stock is tracked down to the bin, including each technician's van. A part used on a job comes out of that bin. It is recorded against both the job and the asset.
Over time, FieldEx shows how often each asset fails, how long repairs take, and what it costs to keep running. That tells you when to stop repairing and replace.
For the full list of field service features, see What is FSM software? For asset and maintenance features, see What is CMMS software?
