The tooling provides you with a number of benefits, including:
Automatic generation of JBI descriptors
Dependency checking
Service assembly deployment
Because Fuse ESB only allows you to deploy service assemblies, you must do the following when using Maven tooling:
Set up a top-level project to build all of the service units and the final service assembly (see Setting up a Fuse ESB JBI project).
Create a project for each of your service units (see A service unit project).
Create a project for the service assembly (see A service assembly project).