Article based on the content of our webinar from Oct.2025:
Have you ever submitted an influence idea on SAP's portal and received only four votes because your requirement was too specific?
Have you ever thought "I just need one button to automate this" but that button simply doesn't exist?
Or felt that all the data is already in SAP FSM, yet it still takes several clicks to do what the end-users want to achieve ?
If you've worked with SAP Field Service Management, chances are you've been there. And this is completely normal, by the way.
Why SAP FSM can't cover everything out of the box
SAP Field Service Management is a powerful SaaS solution. Because it is cloud-hosted, customers benefit from fast deployment, automatic upgrades, and no infrastructure management.
Similarly to any SaaS product, and even if FSM is highly specialized in its niche, it is designed to serve the broadest possible audience within that niche, and while the product team work hard to cover as many requirements as possible, by essence they cannot match every organization's specific processes : it is simply not a custom solution.
Microsoft 365 Outlook, the reference email client for enterprises, has exactly the same dynamic, and they have created an add-in store where organizations can extend the product with capabilities that make sense for their specific workflows.
FSM works the same way, only their "add-in" concept is call "extensions".
What are FSM extensions?
FSM extensions are user interfaces embedded directly inside SAP Field Service Management. Think of them as additional tabs, panels, or sidebars that appear natively within FSM screens, designed and developed independently, but integrated seamlessly into the product.
Concretely, an extension does three things :
- First, it appears in one of the standard locations within FSM that SAP has specifically designated for this purpose (around 20 different placement options exist across the application), so it looks and feels like part of the product.
- Second, because it runs inside an active FSM session, it has access to the logged-in user, their permissions, and all the data associated with the current object being viewed, whether that's the service call, the activity, or the technician record. No separate login required.
- Third, it can query the FSM database, create or update records, and call external APIs, which means the scope of what you can build is quite broad.
Does this create technical debt?
This is the first question that always comes up. The short answer is no, and it matters to explain why.
Extensions use standard, officially supported SAP extensibility mechanisms. They do not modify any FSM standard code. When a new FSM release goes out, which happens quarterly, extensions are completely unaffected. This is what "clean core" actually means in practice: you get the benefits of a standard SaaS product while still fitting it precisely to your business processes.
Extensions also inherit the FSM authentication and authorization model, so users need a valid FSM session to access them, and permissions are enforced at the platform level.
And because they can be built on SAP BTP or on any other platform of your choice, there is no technology lock-in.
Public extensions vs. tailored extensions
There are two types of extensions worth distinguishing.
Public extensions are published on the SAP FSM Extension Directory, a marketplace accessible to any FSM customer. These cover use cases that are broadly applicable across many organizations: the kind of feature that a large number of customers would benefit from, without any dependency on specific custom fields or proprietary logic.
Tailored extensions, on the other hand, are built for a specific customer's specific needs and are not published in the directory. They address highly particular requirements: custom fields, proprietary business rules, workflows tied to one company's processes. This is where bespoke development makes the most sense.
How to install an extension from the SAP extension directory
Installing a public extension takes less than five minutes.
- From your FSM home screen, navigate to Foundational Services, then go to Extensions > Directory.
- You can search by provider or keyword, browse screenshots and changelog information, and review pricing and support details before committing.
- Once you click Install, a short wizard walks you through accepting the terms and choosing where the extension should appear within FSM. After that, it is live on your tenant immediately.
What can an extension actually do? A live example
During our recent webinar, we demonstrated building a custom extension from scratch, starting with a blank HTML page, and progressively adding capabilities to show what is realistically achievable.
We started by reading context from the active FSM session. In just a few lines of code, the extension retrieved the username of the currently logged-in user without requiring any separate credentials. We then added a button that changed the session language to German, which showed that extensions can not only read data but also trigger actions and updates within FSM.
For the next step, we retrieved the activity location from the FSM database and called WeatherAPI.com to display a five-day weather forecast for that location. From there, the extension identified the first rain-free day and used FSM's standard scheduling API to reschedule the activity automatically.
Finally, we connected to Mistral AI. A free-text note left by a call center agent was passed to the API, which reformatted it into four structured, actionable tasks for the field technician. The result was saved back to the activity remarks and converted into a dynamic smartform checklist, visible on the technician's mobile device.
One important note on architecture: all of this runs entirely within the user's browser. The extension code is loaded once from the hosting server, and from that point, all data exchanges happen directly between the browser and the respective APIs. No customer data transits through a third-party server.
Extensions already available
Beyond demos, here are three extensions we developed for real customers and that are available on the SAP FSM Extension Directory.
1. Attachment Manager addresses a common frustration for back-office agents and team leaders: attachments in FSM can be scattered across service call level, activity level, and checklist level. This extension consolidates them all in a single tab at service call level, with the ability to categorize attachments (including marking some as private), mass download, and immediate image preview.
2. Smartform Manager came from a concrete customer need: technicians were submitting checklists with acronyms and spelling errors before they were sent to end customers, and there was no easy way to catch this before delivery. The extension adds a management layer where team leaders can filter all checklist instances by template, responsible, or status, preview their content, run an approval workflow, and reopen a checklist if it needs corrections.
3. Skill Manager fills a gap in FSM's standard interface: while you can assign skills to technicians, there is no overview screen showing all technicians and all skills at once. The extension provides exactly that, a matrix view where expired or soon-to-expire certifications are highlighted visually, and where proof documents such as certificates can be attached directly to the skill record.
When does it make sense to build an extension?
The clearest cases are the following :
- when a feature you need is not on the SAP product roadmap and you cannot afford to wait
- when you want to avoid building a complex integration in your ERP to handle something that FSM could manage internally
- or when a third-party tool covers part of your process and you want to surface it inside FSM rather than asking users to switch applications.
Extensions are also worth considering as a lightweight temporary solution while a longer-term fix is developed, or simply to experiment with new capabilities like AI without taking any risk on the FSM core system.
None of the four-vote influence idea, the missing button, the too many clicks have to be dead ends. Extensions are the mechanism FSM provides precisely for these situations. The Extension Directory already contains solutions to problems you may have assumed were unsolvable within FSM. It is worth spending fifteen minutes browsing it before concluding that a workaround or a heavy ERP integration is the only path forward.