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.
Most software in this space started as one type of tool and added the other later. Older maintenance systems are often too heavy for technicians to use on site, so the records end up patchy. Many field service tools push you into fixed templates built for one trade.
FieldEx was built as a single system to avoid both problems. One asset record and one work order serve the office and the person on site.
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FieldEx doesn't need a separate template for each type of equipment. The same system tracks a generator, a vehicle, a chiller or a coffee machine. Assets can be organized in layers, so a technician can log a repair against one sub-part while the main machine keeps its own service timeline. You can also rename fields, lists and module labels to match how your team already talks, and set up your own work order types with their own steps. For example, you can let only a supervisor mark a job "Approved". None of this needs consultants or custom development.
Schedule servicing by the calendar and usage (running hours, kilometres or cycles), so whichever comes first triggers the next job. A monthly filter change and an hours-based generator service work the same way, on one asset or a whole fleet. If a service runs late past a limit you set, FieldEx bases the next one on the date the work was actually done. You don't end up with a list of missed dates that never clears.
Certificates and inspections that repeat get their own layer, set up against each asset. Set the frequency once and FieldEx creates the dated records. You can add reminders before due dates, attach a checklist the inspector has to complete, and upload the certificate straight to the asset. When it's due again, the next record is already there.
Checklist answers can do more than record pass or fail. Link an answer to a repair job, and a failed check creates that job when the checklist is completed, using the template and steps you chose. One inspection can raise several jobs. Nobody has to retype anything.
You can mix these freely:
- Manual: pick the technician yourself, or drag across an empty slot on their row in the scheduler.
- Round-robin: give a job to a group and FieldEx spreads the work evenly across its members.
- Rule-based: match each new job to the right person by skill, working hours, leave, location or service area, and current workload, then notify them.
A small team can run on manual and round-robin. A larger operation can let rules route the routine jobs and keep manual control for the exceptions.
On Android or iOS, technicians see their jobs, open the asset and its history, complete checklists, log parts, take photos and collect signatures. Job-related asset information and edits work offline and sync once the technician is back online, so a basement plant room or a remote site still gets recorded. A few functions, such as inventory transfers, do need a connection.
FieldEx tracks response and resolution times with warnings at both "At Risk" and "Violation" stages. The timers follow your business-hours calendar and pause outside working hours, so a job raised on Friday evening isn't marked late for sitting overnight. You choose which SLA applies to which jobs.
Build digital forms to capture what your contracts and regulations require, such as machine readings, safety steps and verification checks. Require more than one signature, for example from the technician and the client's on-site supervisor, before a job can close. Completion certificates, service reports and sign-offs then come out as PDFs with your own logo, colors and layout, showing the details, photos and signatures you choose.
Customers get a branded web portal where they can raise requests, check live job status and view the maintenance history on their equipment. Requests land in FieldEx as live jobs, ready to schedule. Each site can also carry a QR code. A customer scans it, fills in a short form, and a job is created automatically from the template you set.
Stock is tracked by location (a warehouse or depot), zone and bin, including personal bins for technician vans. Parts move from bin to bin, to a technician, or straight onto a job. You always know where a part is and which job used it. Each bin, including a van bin, can carry a reorder and understock level, so low stock is flagged before a technician runs out on site.
From real job records, FieldEx works out how long each asset runs between failures (MTBF) and how long repairs take (MTTR). It also shows failure rate, downtime, total repair time and utilization. When leadership wants wider reporting, asset and job data feeds into Microsoft Power BI through built-in connectors.
Each asset carries its repair and maintenance cost alongside its book value and remaining useful life. When a machine has cost more to keep running than it is worth, the numbers make that clear, so you can make the replace decision with evidence and show a customer why.
A machine and its sub-parts are tracked as linked records, each with its own warranty dates. Before anyone bills for a repair, a technician can see whether the failed part is still under warranty, so a compressor still covered by the manufacturer gets claimed instead of charged to the customer or absorbed by you.
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