Find equipment faster with Physical Location and Service Areas in the Field Mobile App
Physical Location and Service Areas is an enhancement to installed equipment that records where a piece of equipment sits in a building and which spaces it serves, so technicians can walk straight to the right unit.
Available inCore
Feature type
Enhancement
Industry
All business types
Roles
AdministratorsTechnicians
Region
All regions
What's changing
Before this enhancement, an installed equipment record told you what a unit was but not where to find it, so technicians walked large sites asking staff and checking mechanical rooms to locate the right unit. Now each equipment record and equipment system can carry a Physical Location, a nested description of where the unit sits that goes up to five levels deep, and one or more Service Areas, the spaces inside the building that the unit serves. Technicians create and assign these values in the Field Mobile App during normal service work, filter equipment systems by service area, drop a Global Positioning System (GPS) pin on a satellite map for outdoor units, and mark existing equipment attachments as location attachments so floor plans and door label photos open right from the record. Physical Location and Service Areas work offline, and changes sync when the device reconnects.
Workflow comparison — before & after
← Before
✓ After
1.A site contact reports that the produce aisle is not cooling.
1.A site contact reports that the produce aisle is not cooling.
2.The technician opens the location record in the Field Mobile App and sees a list of refrigeration equipment with no indication of where any of it sits.
2.The technician filters equipment systems by the Produce Aisle service area and opens the refrigeration system that serves it.
3.The technician asks store staff, checks two mechanical rooms, and goes up to the roof to identify which unit serves that aisle.
3.Inside the system, equipment is grouped by physical location, so the technician sees Back Mechanical Room > Produce Rack Evaporator 2.
4.The technician starts diagnosing 20 to 30 minutes after arriving on site.
4.For an outdoor unit, the technician opens the satellite map from the equipment record and walks to the saved pin. For an indoor unit, the technician opens a location attachment such as a floor plan or a door label photo.
5.The technician walks straight to the unit and starts diagnosing.
⚠ Time that should go to the repair goes to hunting for the unit, and a technician who is new to the site has no reference to work from.
✓ Time on site shifts from searching to repairing, and every technician who arrives after this one inherits the same reference.
How it works for your industry
Residential Service and Replacement
- A property with a detached garage workshop and a crawl space gets a two level physical location so the technician knows whether the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) air handler is in the attic or the crawl space before arriving.
- A technician replacing a condenser drops a Global Positioning System (GPS) pin on the satellite map at the side yard unit, so the next visit does not start with a walk around the property.
- A technician photographs the electrical panel door label and marks it as a location attachment, giving the next technician the shutoff location without a phone call.
Commercial Service and Replacement
- A grocery store assigns service areas such as Produce Aisle, Dairy Wall, and Frozen Foods to its refrigeration systems, so a report of warm cases points at one system instead of twelve.
- A multi floor office building uses a four level physical location, for example Building A > Floor 3 > East Mechanical Room > Rack 2, so a technician new to the site can find the unit without an escort.
- A technician performing preventive maintenance (PM) on rooftop units (RTUs) drops a pin on each unit during the first visit, turning one PM round into a permanent map of the roof.
Residential Construction
- A production builder records physical locations as homes are completed, so the service team inherits a labeled equipment map instead of starting from scratch.
- A technician on a multi unit build assigns each air handler to the unit it serves, which keeps warranty visits pointed at the correct dwelling.
- Marked up floor plans uploaded during closeout are flagged as location attachments and stay with the equipment record for the life of the property.
Commercial Construction
- A general contractor turnover package includes mechanical drawings, which the commissioning technician marks as location attachments so the service team gets them with the equipment.
- Equipment installed across several buildings on one campus gets a physical location that starts with the building, so service calls route to the right structure.
- Service areas recorded during commissioning tell the service team which tenant spaces each unit serves, which supports triage when several spaces report problems at the same time.
Roofing and Exteriors
- A technician drops a Global Positioning System (GPS) pin on each rooftop unit on a large commercial roof, so the next crew reaches the right unit without walking the whole roof.
- Photos of roof hatch access and ladder placement are marked as location attachments, giving crews the safe route before they arrive.
- Physical locations that name the roof section, for example North Roof > Section C, keep repair history tied to a place on the building rather than a unit number alone.
How to prepare
01
Have an administrator reach out to Support or your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to have Physical Location and Service Areas and any prerequisite configurations enabled. This feature is off by default.
02
Grant the new permission to the technician roles that should build this data. The permission is Enable Editing Equipment Physical Locations And Service Areas. It is a new permission. It controls whether a technician can create and edit physical locations and service areas on both equipment records and equipment system records. Its default is off for all existing technician roles. Technicians without it can still see physical location and service area values and can view the map pin, but cannot change them.
03
Confirm the technical prerequisites: equipment systems are in use at the locations you want to map, and technicians are on a Field Mobile App version that includes this enhancement.
04
Agree on naming before technicians start. Location and area names must be unique within a hierarchy level and can go up to five levels deep. A shared naming pattern keeps one building from ending up with three spellings of the same mechanical room.
05
Train technicians on two behaviors that differ from what they may expect. Selecting a parent level in the hierarchy does not select the levels beneath it, so every level a technician wants recorded must be selected on its own. Filtering by a parent level may not return equipment held on a level beneath it. The map uses standard Google Maps gestures for pan, zoom, and pin placement.
06
Bookmark any Knowledge Base articles or Academy videos for team training.