Salesforce Field Service for Machinery OEMs and Distributors

Field Service is not standalone, so a Service Cloud licence is required underneath it. Technicians and dispatchers are then €175 per user per month each at list. Coordinators who answer inbound requests need Field Service Plus at €230, because Dispatcher and Technician licences are not permitted for case management. The installed base lifecycle layer sits in the Asset Service Lifecycle Management add on at $75 per user. For 50 people, licences reach roughly €110,280 a year, or €202,000 with the installed base add on and Premier support.

Yes. The Asset object is standard, with serial number, install date, account and parent asset fields, so a serialised installed base can be held natively. What sits in the Asset Service Lifecycle Management add on at $75 per user per month is the lifecycle layer: work order quoting, service campaigns and coverage views. The interactive asset hierarchy is sold separately again. So the base record is included and the OEM working layer on top of it is not.

Yes in the data model. Assets support parent and child relationships, so a machine, its sub assemblies and its serialised components can be represented. The interactive hierarchy view and the asset coverage view are listed as available for purchase rather than included.

Yes, and well. It tracks stock across warehouses, depots and van locations, handles parts requests and transfers, and records what a technician consumed on a job. That inventory is built for your own technicians. A parts shop where customers order against their own machines is B2B Commerce, a separate product line, which is why integrators sell dedicated spare parts accelerators for it.

It can be built. The portal is Experience Cloud, licensed separately, and the pages that surface a customer's assets and service history are configured rather than shipped. In Makula Field Service the portal is part of the platform, and customers see their own machines because the machine record is what the product is organised around.

Seeing the parts is a portal build. Ordering them is B2B Commerce, a third product line, and the mapping from a machine's as built configuration to the parts that fit it does not exist by default in either. In Makula Field Service the portal is built around the machine record, so a customer opens their machine rather than searching a catalogue.

Field and layout changes take days to weeks, custom objects and automation take weeks, custom code takes months, and a rollout with deep ERP integration across sites commonly runs six to twelve months.

The longer pole is usually the installed base rather than the configuration. Every machine you have shipped needs to arrive with its serial number, as built configuration, customer and site, warranty and contract terms, and whatever service history exists. That history sits across the ERP, drawings, spreadsheets kept by service managers, and paper job sheets. Ask any partner to price the install base migration separately from the platform configuration.

No. Makula Field Service sits alongside your CRM. Sales continues in Salesforce and Makula Field Service runs after sales, so nothing changes for the sales organisation. Your ERP stays the system of record for booking invoices.

Three reasons. The workflows machinery OEMs need are already built rather than configured into a general platform. A single product does not carry the cost base of a CRM, a marketing cloud and a commerce cloud. And supporting one product that behaves the same way for every customer costs far less than supporting thousands of different implementations. The trade is that Makula Field Service is opinionated about how machine service works.