Scheduling and dispatch
Who goes, when and in what order, with each technician's workload and geography visible at a glance.
Field service
The problem isn't the field. It's the trip back
Managing teams that work off-site has one specific difficulty: what happens at the installation only reaches the company if someone carries it back. And that's where the data gets lost.
Who this page is for
For anyone looking for a tool for a team that works at the customer's site: maintainers, installers, technical support services, multi-service companies. And for anyone comparing categories — FSM, CMMS, work order management — who needs to know whether they're the same thing under different names or not.
What every field team has in common
The sector doesn't matter: the symptoms are the same.
- The technician knows what happened and the office finds out two days later.
- Hours and materials get written down from memory, always underestimated.
- The customer asks about the status of their issue and someone has to call the technician.
- Travel eats into margin and nobody measures it.
- And when there's no signal, everything above gets worse.
What an FSM covers
The pieces you'll find in any product in this category.
Field application
The technician receives the job, carries it out and logs it where it happens. It's the central piece of the category.
Evidence and sign-off
Photos, checks and customer sign-off attached to the job, not sitting in someone's phone camera roll.
Visibility for the customer
Letting them see the status without calling. It's what reduces a technical service's administrative workload the most.
From the job to the invoice
Hours and materials logged in the field flow through to billing without being typed in twice.
Materials in the van
Each technician's mobile stockroom, which is where stock gets out of control the moment you have more than three of them.
FSM and CMMS: where they part ways
They overlap far more than the names suggest. An FSM is organized around the intervention and the technician: schedule, dispatch, execute, bill. A CMMS is organized around the asset: what the equipment is, what's been done to it, how often it needs checking and how much it has cost so far. If your business is installing or repairing equipment you won't maintain afterward, a pure FSM is enough. If you maintain installations over time — recurring contracts, preventive plans, per-machine history — you need the asset at the center, and what you need is a CMMS that also handles the field part well. GMAO CLOUD is exactly that: asset management with the field application included, not two connected products.
Shall we look at it with your way of working?
Leave your details and we will get in touch to see whether we fit. No commitment, no lock-in period.
The real test is coverage
Almost every tool in this category claims to work offline, and in practice that means very different things: from saving the form you were filling in, to running the entire database on the device. It's worth asking about it precisely in any demo, because that's where the difference shows up most. In GMAO CLOUD, the technicians' app stores work orders, assets and documents on the device itself, and every action taken without signal goes into a queue that empties on its own once the connection is back; if something fails to sync, it's flagged with the reason instead of disappearing. The customer app, on the other hand, doesn't work offline, and we say that too.
The technician's day is decided in the morning
In field service, the difference between a profitable operation and one that isn't rarely comes down to execution speed: it comes down to how many jobs fit in a day. And that's decided by scheduling, not by the technician. A well-built day groups by zone, chains nearby visits together and leaves room for urgent work exactly when it statistically comes in, which in almost every operation is the first hour. A badly-built day sends someone across the province and back twice. What makes the first possible isn't an algorithm: it's being able to see, at the same time, what's pending by zone, what's scheduled for the coming weeks and where everyone is, and deciding with that in front of you. When that information is scattered across three places, scheduling happens out of habit, and habit is expensive.
Fixing it on the first visit
The indicator that best sums up the health of a field operation is what proportion of jobs close without a return visit. When it's low, the cause is almost never the technician. It's that they went out not knowing what they were walking into, because the alert didn't describe the problem; or without the part, because nobody knew which model the equipment was; or without access, because nobody notified the site; or without the history, because it was in a filing cabinet. Every second visit costs a full trip and doesn't show up on any expense line, which makes it the most expensive and most invisible inefficiency there is. The good news is its four causes are solved with information, not with a template: a well-taken alert, an inventory with model and serial number, an access contact and a history at hand solve most of it.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between this and a classic CMMS?
Less than the terminology suggests. Field maintenance and plant maintenance share the same core — assets, work orders, preventive plans, history — and differ in emphasis: in the field, travel and the technician's app are the center; in a plant, availability and downtime are. A product that covers both is normal, and the useful question isn't what it's called but whether the part that matters most to you is well handled.
Is FSM the same as a CMMS?
No, though they overlap. An FSM is organized around the intervention and the technician; a CMMS around the asset and its history. If you maintain installations over time, you need the asset at the center, with the field part included.
What should I ask about offline functionality?
Exactly what gets saved on the device, which actions can be done without signal, and what happens if something fails to sync. "Works offline" means very different things depending on the product.
Does it work for installers who don't do recurring maintenance?
Yes, although in that case the asset and preventive side is used less. If the work is one-off and you never go back to the equipment, much of a CMMS's value goes unused.
Does what's logged in the field reach billing?
Hours and materials are charged to the work order and can be sent to the ERP through the available integrations, instead of being typed in again.
Try it with one of your interventions
In the demo we walk through an entire field job, including working without coverage.