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Comprehending the Waylay Digital Twin for Salesforce architecture and functionality

Waylay has recently launched a new ISV app on the Salesforce AppExchange, Waylay Digital Twin. This app brings connected asset data, performance and status visibility into the Salesforce ecosystem. In a previous blog post, we have introduced the basics of Waylay Digital Twin and discussed the audience it addresses as well as the benefits it provides. If you have missed it, it is worthwhile to review that post before reading on.

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Waylay Digital Twin Architecture

Observing the picture above, the first notice is that Waylay Digital Twin is a composite app: it consists of the Waylay Digital Twin app hosted within Salesforce and uses the Waylay PaaS platform under the hood. The Waylay PaaS platform is hosted by Waylay, off-core, i.e. outside of the Salesforce environment.

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The sensor data, collected by the connected assets, flows through AZURE IoT or AWS IoT to the Waylay PaaS platform, where it is processed and relevant events are pushed as alarms to the Salesforce environment – more on that below. The key takeaway is that the raw sensor data are not all sent to Salesforce. Rather, preprocessing takes place on the Waylay PaaS platform and only relevant events, e.g. the detection of anomalies, are pushed into Salesforce.

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Utilizing the Waylay Digital Twin app

Let us take one step back and create an overview of the 4 key steps in using the application.

Firstly, Salesforce administrators can configure IoT hub credentials into their Salesforce environment. These credentials are pushed to the underlying Waylay PaaS environment and allow subscription to IoT data streams. Currently, Waylay Digital Twin supports both AWS and AZURE out-of-the-box. Other platforms can be supported via a professional service engagement.

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Next, users can build digital twin models. The digital twin associates Salesforce assets with IoT objects. For simple assets, this can be a one-to-one mapping, for more complex assets this can be a one-to-many mapping. Building the digital twin is critical as the monitoring rules – as described below – can be defined against the Salesforce assets based on the business context, while via the digital twin model, the rules can be executed against the associated digital twin assets. The digital twin model can be provisioned in bulk or can be configured manually e.g. when a technical installer is on site.

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Once the digital twin model is available, asset managers can build and associate monitoring rules with Salesforce assets. Waylay Digital Twin supports a no-code approach based on use-case-driven templates. This makes it easy and intuitive to create adequately sophisticated monitoring rules. Once the rules have been defined, they are pushed to the underlying Waylay PaaS platform for execution and evaluation of the incoming sensor data.

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Upon the occurrence of specific events, the Waylay PaaS platform will create custom alarms in the Waylay Digital Twin app. Based on these alarms, Salesforce reports and dashboards can be built to provide insights and KPIs about the health and performance of the assets. In addition, Salesforce Flows can be leveraged to transform these alarms into actionable business results, e.g. cases, work orders or opportunities can be created in an automated way which eventually increases efficiency or generates new revenue streams (read our previous blog posts: 7 ways to improve field service with IoT asset visibility or Understanding Waylay Digital Twin for Salesforce)

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In conclusion

Waylay Digital Twin is a composite app with the app itself hosted in your Salesforce environment and the Waylay PaaS platform hosted in the Waylay environment, off-core. This architecture has the benefit of high scalability as raw IoT data are not ingested into Salesforce, while it keeps the user experience within the Salesforce ecosystem. Next, the Waylay PaaS platform acts as a middleware layer between IoT platforms and the Salesforce environment and has out-of-the-box connectors towards multiple IoT platforms.

Additionally, Salesforce business users can associate Salesforce assets to physical objects via a digital twin model. They are able to consume digital twin asset data and define monitoring rules which take the business context -available in Salesforce- into account.

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Finally, the combination of Waylay Digital Twin Alarms and Salesforce Flows allows for a myriad of use cases that leverage the near-real time insights, status and performance data that connected assets provide.

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