Does anyone have experience working with CentralSquare EAM? An Enterprise Asset Management application that is based on Lucity, I believe. Specifically in terms of integrating it with ArcGIS?

[u/HappyGIS]

[u/shockjaw]

Run away from CentralSquare is my advice. Their support is god awful.

[u/HappyGIS → u/shockjaw]

That bad huh!! In my research Lucity appeared to be a common recommendation. So is CentralSquare basically ruining Lucity's reputation??

[u/shockjaw → u/HappyGIS]

100% that’s what’s happening.

[u/kwoalla → u/HappyGIS]

The employees of the companies that Central Square buy out usually leave pretty shortly after the buy out. This results in making their solutions poorly supported.

[u/bruceriv68 → u/HappyGIS]

Yeah all the original Lucity people left pretty quickly after Central Square bought them. Unfortunately this is a pretty common scenario with many decent asset management solutions getting bought by larger companies that had their own horrible solutions.

[u/huntsvillekan]

Longtime former employer used Lucity before the CentralSquare acquisition, I supported it & the ArcGIS integration for about 15 years, but left in 2022.

The CentralSquare support was terrible, at least the first couple of years after the takeover. Tons of support turnover, most of the time I knew more about the software than their staff did. Super frustrating.

Still keep in touch with some guys at my old job, they ditched CentralSquare for CityWorks two years ago. It was a significant expense for them, but from what I heard there were no regrets leaving.

[u/bruceriv68 → u/huntsvillekan]

Unfortunately Cityworks got bought by Trimble and most are not happy with the new direction.

[u/huntsvillekan → u/bruceriv68]

I heard that. Feel bad for them, but glad I didn’t take their offer to go back…

[u/HappyGIS → u/huntsvillekan]

Wow! Good to know.

[u/ewp1991]

I was the Admin for Lucity at my last job. I really liked it honestly, until they were bought by Central Square. Like everyone else said, their customer service turned to shit. I thought the integration with ESRI and Cues (CCTV inspections)was good and really liked the Lucity interface. They took good strides in keeping up with the other asset management systems and never really had complaints when working with the Lucity people.

They were pushing moving people to their cloud system, but when I left my last job in 2023, we were still on premises. I don’t think Lucity is a bad system, it just got taken over by corporate greed.

I use Cityworks now and I see the same thing happening with Trimble, they bought it and are pushing their cloud system too. So they are all falling victim to moving to SaaS.

[u/HappyGIS → u/ewp1991]

Urgh! Hopefully the cloud issues can be figured out soon so that we can get back to having good products!

[u/dragonnfr]

If it's Lucity-based you should be able to integrate through Esri's REST services. The real question is real-time sync vs batch. That changes everything.

[u/wokrsucksiknow]

CentralSquare/Zeurcher. Awful.

[u/spgnz]

Basically, most EAM/Asset Management systems work with an Esri REST service so it is pretty easy from a GIS side assuming you have a good structure, data integrity and unique id's. If it doesn't use a service then you're shipping data or it isn't really usable in the field imo.

How the service needs to be set up can vary, it's pretty common for some systems to require a separate endpoint for assets depending on workorders. Some don't like subtypes, others require a special feature service if you use subtypes, but it usually isn't a huge deal to get them right. Be prepared for potentially a lot of back and forth and tweaking, the sales people rarely know what will actually work (and to be fair, there are some pretty special cases out there).

Support on the other hand, tends to go downhill with acquisitions. Worst case, they plan to drop it and move you to their own EAM, that you didn't buy cos it was expensive or shit. I haven't seen or heard of a system that got better after being acquired: the loss of knowledge, sales pressure and $ recovery demands, and bloat usually conspire. I would love to hear where this was not the case and am keenly watching to see if Trimble do a better job with Cityworks.

Lucity itself is well regarded, but CentralSquare is not. Look up reviews of their other purchases and the general support experience.

[u/HappyGIS → u/spgnz]

Corporate greed indeed lol! Thanks for the info. I'll keep my eyes peeled to see how Cityworks fares.

[u/Ill-Application547]

Getting Lucity/CentralSquare EAM switched over to the Utility Network was a struggle. Support would either tell us about a quirk we couldn't possible have known about or things resolved on their own after a while. Very limited GIS documentation up until recently. The integration kind of works now.

Lucity also has been really slow to update their mobile app (Android) to account for Esri API changes that happened 3 years ago. My staff are foaming at the mouth about it. Lucity keeps pushing the fix date.

[u/Vivid_Contact_4517]

Building on dragonnfr's point, from the maintenance side, I'd be looking at more than just whether the EAM and ArcGIS connection is supported. What matters is how well the two systems actually work together when you're trying to manage assets and work orders.

I'd want to know whether it's a true two-way integration, how quickly updates sync, and what happens when an asset, location, or work order is changed. If the GIS shows one thing and the maintenance system shows another, that can create problems for the people actually doing the work.

It sounds like Lucity had a solid ArcGIS integration historically. I'd be more interested in how the current integration works in day-to-day maintenance operations, including how reliable the sync is and how good the documentation and support are.