This blog is part of a series of blog posts on Waylay Digital Twin, a new Waylay product offering available on the Salesforce AppExchange. In this series of blog posts, we are focusing on Waylay’s views on field service optimization leveraging connected assets and how Waylay Digital Twin empowers companies to take advantage of that.

In this blog post, we will provide you with a Waylay Digital Twin introduction and answer some basic questions:

1. What is Waylay Digital Twin?
2. Who is it for?
3. What are the benefits that Waylay Digital Twin brings to Salesforce users?

In the follow-up posts, we will dive deeper into the architecture and the functionality of the software application as well as highlight some use cases.

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As IoT is maturing, there is an increasing focus on use cases and business value rather than technology. Connected assets enable more effective field service, consumption based contracts and new outcome-based business models – more on this topic is in our previous and first blog post.

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What is Waylay Digital Twin?

Against the background of this evolution towards improved field service, Waylay has developed a new product offering called Waylay Digital Twin. Waylay Digital Twin is a Salesforce ISV app available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

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Waylay Digital Twin brings connected asset data, asset performance and asset health visibility within the Salesforce ecosystem such it can be readily consumed by Salesforce business users in order to reap business benefits as mentioned in our first blog. Rather than having the IoT data siloed into a disconnected IoT platform, Waylay Digital Twin breaks these barriers and connects IoT back to your central Salesforce line-of-business applications. The term ‘digital twin’ refers to the concept of a digital representation of a physical asset where sensor data of connected assets are leveraged within the customer support and field service context.

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For whom have we built Waylay Digital Twin?

This question is twofold, i.e. it has a dimension related to the specific users within a company that can benefit from Waylay Digital Twin as well as a dimension related to the type of companies that can benefit most from the application.

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The users

Essentially, any Salesforce business user who can improve work efficiency through near real-time asset visibility will greatly benefit from Waylay Digital Twin.

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• Customer support agents are empowered to provide remote support and remote troubleshooting for customers by leveraging visibility into asset data, alarms and diagnostics.This is particularly relevant in the context of COVID-19 where remote service delivery is increasingly important.

• Field support technicians can benefit from root cause analysis and alarm history information to expedite (first time) repair and problem resolution time. Moreover, condition-based and predictive maintenance lead to efficiency gains compared to recurring maintenance based on a fixed time schedule.

• Sales people can benefit from Waylay Digital Twin to create new consumption-based revenue models, where assets are billed based on their usage and actual consumption volumes.

• Operations people can benefit from detailed reports and dashboards that reflect the overall health of the installed base of assets and equipment.

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The companies

Waylay Digital Twin is vertical agnostic, meaning that any company with connected assets can benefit from the solutions it provides, whether in the context of manufacturing, connected buildings, equipment OEMs, etc.

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The only prerequisite is an installed base of connected assets. Waylay Digital Twin integrates out-of-the-box with AZURE event hub and AWS IoT. Other integrations such as e.g. MQTT broker or a proprietary IoT platform can be supported on a project basis.

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Waylay Digital Twin primarily focuses on customers that utilize Salesforce for their day-to-day business. Particularly relevant in this context are Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Field Service, Asset360 and Servicemax.

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The benefits

Gaining direct visibility into connected asset status and health results into numerous business benefits: both cost and efficiency gains as well as new revenue opportunities.

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Waylay Digital Twin does not merely provide visibility into connected assets, it also allows Salesforce business users to actively create asset monitoring rules that define when alarms should be raised, taking the business context into account, such as e.g. the customer contracts or entitlements. Salesforce users can then also define business flows on top of these alarms to trigger back-end business processes.

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Finally, Waylay Digital Twin integrates with existing IoT deployments in a scalable and productized manner. Rather than building inflexible, difficult to scale and maintain custom code, the application provides an out-of-the-box integration solution leveraging Waylay’s ultra-scalable PaaS platform under the hood.

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Read our next blog in this blog series: Introducing Waylay Digital Twin Architecture

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