Introduction

‍

The March 2022 release of the Waylay Digital Twin App for Salesforce provides support for custom rules. Custom rules go beyond the library of standard rule use cases that are shipped with the App. 

Custom rules enable the Domain Expert to create his own custom rule logic directly on the Waylay Platform. With the Waylay Digital Twin App extensions of the March release, we can now expose these custom rules in the Salesforce Org such that Asset Managers can instantiate custom rules for their Assets.

‍

There can be various reasons why a domain expert desires to build custom rules:

1. The logic requires a particular complex formula to be applied to an asset parameter.
2. The logic requires the asset parameters to be transformed before evaluating them.
3. The logic depends on a Machine Learning algorithm.
4. The logic requires fetching data from external sources.
5. The domain expert wants to restrict the Salesforce user in terms of what this user is allowed to configure.

‍

The Waylay Digital Twin App for Salesforce supports the discovery of custom rules, published by the domain expert on the Waylay Platform. Waylay Digital Twin will present the custom rule configurable settings to the Salesforce User. Only those configuration settings that the Domain Expert allows, will be exposed in the Salesforce UI.

‍

Waylay Digital Twin Standard Use Cases versus Custom Use Cases

‍

The Waylay Digital Twin App for Salesforce ships with a library of asset monitoring use cases (see https://docs-salesforce.waylay.io/#/userguide/usecases ). We call them ‘standard’ use cases.

You can consider these as configurable rule patterns that you can tune (e.g. set threshold values) for particular asset types (e.g. brand A vs brand B). Each of the use cases comes with a particular no-code UI that guides the Salesforce user on how to configure them. A big advantage of this library is that Salesforce users can immediately set up IoT monitoring rules without the need to spend development time and resources.

‍

For example, the image below shows the UI for an ‘Out-of-Range’ use case. In this case, the use case has been configured for a particular parameter ‘Pressure’ and a particular (unacceptable) pressure range. A configured use case is called a ‘Rule Template’ and is ready to be applied to the assets of a particular account.

‍

‍

Waylay has built its library of use cases based on its experience of working with customers over the years. The library covers a broad set of use cases that allows to express and automate heuristics for monitoring asset performance. 

In some cases, the library of standard use cases is not rich enough to express the rule logic that the domain expert wants. That is why we have introduced support for custom rules.

‍

The essential idea is the following: domain experts build advanced rules within the Waylay platform. Those rules can be used within Salesforce, potentially with a number of configuration options, but without exposing the Salesforce user to the full complexity of the rules. The Salesforce user still decides the set of assets these rule templates should be applied to, as this can depend on machine model, customer, SLA, geography, etc.

‍

Let’s take a scenario where the domain expert has built and published the below ML-powered rule in the Waylay Platform. This rule uses a TensorFlow algorithm that predicts the future machine failure probability, stores it in the Waylay Platform time-series database, and compares it to a configurable threshold before raising an alarm.

‍

‍

The Salesforce user will be presented with a drop-down list of available custom rules that have been published by the domain expert on the Waylay Platform.

‍

‍

Once the Salesforce user selects a particular custom use case, (s)he will be presented with a list of configurable settings as defined by the domain expert:

‍

‍

In the above example, the domain expert allows the Salesforce user to select

• The Waylay Digital Twin Type
• The Waylay Digital Twin Type Parameter
• The Alarm Threshold

But nothing more than this.

‍

Once the Rule Template record has been created, the Salesforce user can assign this custom rule template to a set of Assets, just like for the standard rule use cases.

‍

‍

‍

Conclusion

‍

Waylay Digital Twin comes with a broad set of standard rule use cases for IoT asset monitoring. With the March 2022 software release, we go one step beyond that. We now allow data scientists and domain experts to create even more advanced data processing algorithms in the Waylay platform, yet provide the flexibility for asset managers to configure and assign those advanced rules to specific assets from within Salesforce through the Digital Twin app user interface.

‍