The GIS feature’s unique global identifier serves as a cross reference between the systems. When a feature is synchronized from the GIS system its global identifier is stored on the asset location entity as a unique GIS identifier. The ongoing synchronization process relies on this cross reference to uniquely identify assets to update when changes are made to their corresponding features in the GIS system.

Asset synchronization is implemented at the feature class level, not layers within a feature class, allowing assets to move between layers of the same class. Moving a feature to another class causes it to be deleted from the original feature class and added as a new feature of the new class with a newly assigned global identifier. In this situation, the next synchronization process would detect the original global identifier as being deleted and the a new feature as being added thus losing the ability to correlate them as the same feature. It is therefore not recommended to move assets between feature classes in the GIS system if retaining the cross reference is important for reporting or any other business purposes.

Similarly, when a user creates a new work location using the GIS Map Viewer, a corresponding new feature of “Work Location” class is created in the GIS system. The unique global identifier of the new feature is captured as a GIS identifier of the new work location entity for cross reference.