Integrating with a Maintenance Management System

Most organizations already run a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or field service management system. That system is the record of who the technicians are, what they are qualified to do, when they are on schedule, and what work has been raised. Connected Field Service can use it as the source of that information instead of asking you to maintain a second copy, and it can write back into it when an alarm dispatches somebody.

Connected Field Service integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. Microsoft Entra ID and Active Directory are also supported as worker sources, but they carry identity and contact details only, not skills, schedules, or work orders.

Information that can be Synchronized

The integration works in two directions.

• Reading from the maintenance system

  A worker source configured for Dynamics 365, Salesforce, or ServiceNow synchronizes on a period you set and imports:

  • Workers with their contact addresses.

  • Groups that the workers belong to. Each system's own grouping concepts are mapped onto Connected Field Service groups—resource categories, organizational units, characteristics, business units, teams, and territories in Dynamics 365; crews and territory characteristics in Salesforce; skills, locations, and work groups in ServiceNow.

  • The worker's calendar, so that availability follows the roster held in the maintenance system rather than a GENESIS schedule.

• Writing to the maintenance system

  A workflow template can include a work order activity—Dynamics Work Order, Salesforce Work Order, or ServiceNow Work Order—that raises a work order as an activity block. The activity returns the identifier of the work order it created so that later activities can quote it in a message.

Choosing Where Workers Are Defined

You do not have to choose one or the other. Connected Field Service can hold several worker sources at once, and a lookup can draw from all of them.

Approach	When to use it
Local source only	There is no maintenance system to integrate with, the worker list is small, or you are proving out a configuration. Worker information is defined in Workbench. Learn more
Imported source only	The maintenance system is authoritative. Workers, groups, and schedules are maintained there.
Both	Imported sources cover the permanent workforce, and a local source covers people the maintenance system does not know about, such as an integrator on call during commissioning.

What Stays in GENESIS

Some of a worker's record has no equivalent in the maintenance system, and stays in Connected Field Service even for imported workers:

• Alarm, area, and asset assignment

  Which alarms and which parts of the plant a worker is responsible for is expressed against the GENESIS alarm and asset models, so it is configured here. Learn more

• Acknowledge code

  The code that a worker enters when acknowledging an alarm from a message. Learn more

• Security name

  The GENESIS security identity that ties a worker to a MobileHMI session, which is what allows device health and location telemetry to be attributed to them. Learn more

Connecting

Each integration needs an application registered in the external system, with credentials that Connected Field Service uses to synchronize. The steps differ per system:

• ServiceNow—Activate Field Service Management and OAuth, register an OAuth API endpoint for external clients, and use the resulting client ID and secret. Learn more

• Dynamics 365—Register an application in Microsoft Entra ID with access to your Dynamics 365 instance, and authenticate with either a client secret or a certificate.

• Salesforce—Register a connected app in Salesforce and use its consumer key and secret.