Equipment vendors and OEMs in industries such as HVAC and heavy & industrial equipment feel an increasing pressure in their respective markets to make their assets connected and start out on their (I)IoT journey by either retrofitting products with sensors and connectivity or by launching new connected product lines altogether.
When your company has an installed base of connected physical assets and is collecting the data they generate, you should be celebrating achieving an important milestone in your company’s digital transformation journey. But the journey is only just the beginning. Once your assets in the field appear online, there are still challenges you need to overcome to justify the investment and initiate real and immediate business value.
Creating business value from IoT investments usually requires closing the gap between the IoT solution and your line of business operations. One such case is using IoT data to improve field service operations, which can in turn lead to better customer service and better SLA monitoring and compliance. If you have the right tools, customer and field support for connected assets can be easy and cost-effective. Such a solution is provided through the combined power of Salesforce Field Service & Servicemax, two popular field service support software applications and Waylay Digital Twin, an application available on the Salesforce AppExchange, specifically built to expose data, status and performance metrics from connected assets within the Salesforce ecosystem.
Are you already using Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Field Service or ServiceMax?
Salesforce Case Management is a feature of the Salesforce Service Cloud enterprises utilize to record, track and resolve customer issues across sales, service and support. When Salesforce is already embedded into your business operations for customer support or for field service via Salesforce Field Service, Asset360 or ServiceMax, you are perfectly equipped to benefit from the Waylay Digital Twin app to connect IIoT asset solutions to your line of business applications.
Waylay Digital Twin is a Salesforce composite ISV app that gives Salesforce business users visibility into the status of connected assets. Under the hood, Waylay Digital Twin leverages the ultra-scalable Waylay PaaS automation technology.
Enterprises can deploy Waylay Digital Twin to bind Salesforce assets to their digital twin representation. In turn, this helps to set up monitoring rules inline with customer maintenance plan KPIs and SLAs. Dashboards provide reporting across the installed base of assets and Salesforce Flows help to translate device & analytics alarms into business processes such as the creation of customer cases, remote service and field service work orders.
Example case: improved customer & field support for connected refrigeration systems
An enterprise selling industrial refrigeration systems has an ongoing IIoT project with 1500 connected systems already deployed at various industrial customer sites across the country. Raw sensor data from the equipment is ingested via a cloud IIoT platform that forwards data to Waylay’s analytics platform in real-time.
The Salesforce asset managers have used Waylay Digital Twin to set-up a series of monitoring rules taking into account the business context and the customer contractual obligations. Those rules are evaluated against the incoming sensor data and allow equipment monitoring, assessing overall health in real-time, and analysing behaviour trends over time. Alarms raised into Salesforce are used to trigger customer cases for support.
Benefits of Waylay Digital Twin for Salesforce business users
By bridging the IIoT and the Salesforce environment, Waylay Digital Twin enables the IIoT team and the operations team to work together and benefit from increased convenience and flexibility:
- Salesforce business users get direct visibility into IIoT data and can set up their own monitoring and diagnostic rules, specific to the business context in which they operate.
- The operations team no longer needs to passively wait for customers to call and can pick up the issues when they emerge. Customers are happy with the faster response times and proactive support.
Salesforce service intervention cases are now created based on actual usage data from the refrigeration systems themselves, instead of periodicity-based. This results in a decrease of the number of truck rolls and saves time and money spent on unnecessary interventions.
The support team is now better qualified to reply to customer calls, as IIoT data is made available to them and they can perform better root-cause analysis before field interventions are scheduled. This results in reduced costs on visits, better technician utilization and better customer satisfaction.
This example shows the business value that resides in closing the gap between your IIoT solutions and line of business applications. Improving field support is one of the most common use cases, where immediate value for equipment OEMs and customers can be seen.