Diagnostic Tests, AI/ML support and Salesforce Experience Cloud Support

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This blog post highlights the main features of the Waylay Digital Twin R2.0, released in August 2021. The new release of the Waylay Digital Twin App enables customers to:

  • Validate asset health status remotely.
  • Execute proprietary AI/ML algorithms and build rules to process their outcomes
  • Create deep asset performance dashboards

In short, the new release of Waylay Digital Twin allows remote service agents to perform diagnostics tests for quick asset health validation, which speeds up case and work order handling. Data scientists to bring their own AI/ML algorithms and let asset managers create rules to process and act on the algorithms’ output. Allows end customers to view deep asset performance dashboards with a unified customer experience through Salesforce Experience Cloud.

In case you are looking for an introduction to Waylay Digital Twin and its architecture, you may want to read the following blog posts first:

Asset health validation for remote service agents using Waylay Diagnostic tests

The new Waylay Digital Twin release supports the concept of diagnostic tests. They are quick on-demand conditional data validation tests that are executed on the last data sample received from a connected asset. The asset manager can define them and remote service agents can execute them on an asset, e.g. while handling a case or a work order.

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Often they are used as ‘asset health checks’ that automate the assessment of whether the reported parameter values are acceptable or not. If not, a recommended action is presented to the service agent. In that sense diagnostics tests offer the following benefits:

  1. Diagnostics tests standardize the live assessment of asset performance in Salesforce Service Cloud. They implement the best practices of the asset experts leading to improvements in the first time right service support benchmark. Consistent use of the same diagnostic tests across all the support channels enables compliance, consistent customer support experience, and a systematic approach to continuous improvement of those diagnostic tests.
  2. Diagnostic tests guide inexperienced service agents or agents with lower technical skills through an automated triaging of the connected asset, without the need to perform a technical deep dive in the asset’s parameters. They remove the guesswork out of the equation.
  3. They are real-time, significantly speeding up the handling of a case or a work order in Salesforce. This leads to significant improvements in the average handling time service support benchmark. 
  4. Diagnostic tests strive for completeness. Without a successful diagnostic test, a support or maintenance activity should never be closed. By integrating diagnostics tests as a mandatory step in the support flows and procedures, service teams can rely on them to give an asset a complete clean bill of health before putting it back into service. No tests will be forgotten.

They can deflect calls by exposing diagnostics tests to end customers via self-service portals, interactive voice response systems or virtual assistants (e.g. Einstein bots).

A typical scenario can be the following:

  1. A preventive case was created by a Waylay proactive rule, e.g. The asset is overheating. A filter replacement is needed.
  2. A field visit is scheduled and a maintenance engineer replaces the bad filter on-site
  3. Using the Salesforce Field Service Mobile App, the field engineer runs a flow that launches the health check diagnostic test.
  4. The health check assesses the temperature readings and considers them within spec. The filter replacement successfully resolved the overheating issue.
  5. At the same time, the health check also assesses the health of the asset battery. During the maintenance activity, the battery got damaged and the health check fails. The field engineer is notified that a battery replacement is recommended.
  6. The maintenance engineer replaces the battery and re-runs the health check diagnostic test.
  7. This time, the diagnostic test gives the asset a clean bill of health. The maintenance engineer can now close the work order.

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All diagnostics results are saved in Salesforce as Waylay Diagnostic Result records. This allows a full historical diagnostic view on an asset:

  • Who performed the diagnostic test and when?
  • Was the result successful or did it fail and if it failed, what was the reason?
  • How many diagnostics tests did it take before the issue was resolved? 
  • What was the average handling time of the case/work order with versus without the diagnostics tests?
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By using Salesforce native reporting capabilities on Waylay Diagnostic Results, asset managers can deduce how effective they are and how much cost savings they generate.
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AI/ML-powered rules for advanced predictive asset monitoring

The Waylay Platform has a long-standing history of enabling data scientists to bring their own algorithms to the Waylay Platform. Specifically, the Waylay Platform provides support for

  • Expert heuristics using complex math formulas on IoT device parameter values.
  • Serving pre-trained Python/Tensorflow ML models for time series parameter analysis on the Waylay Platform.
  • ML models hosted on public cloud AI platforms like AzureML/AWS Sagemaker.

The Waylay Platform empowers data scientists and expert engineers to operationalize their domain expertise quickly and efficiently via the Waylay’s Platform low-code user interface.

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Typical AI/ML use cases from different market segments for which the Waylay Platform is being used today:

  • Building Management: e.g. forecast the future energy consumption and energy cost of a building based on past history
  • Manufacturing: e.g. Unsupervised anomaly detection of temperature outliers indicating an unbalanced production process
  • Utilities: e.g. Predict & identify future component failure by classification of sensor readings
  • Retail: e.g. Smart cameras detecting shelves with out-of-stock goods

The outcome of these expert algorithms and models can be used by Salesforce business users in the Waylay Digital Twin app, e.g. to:

  • Visualize the current and historical model prediction values
  • Create Waylay Digital Twin Rules on the outcome of the algorithms, e.g. define a conditional rule that uses a sensitivity threshold on the outcome of the ML algorithm prediction before raising a case or work order

The Waylay Digital Twin App empowers the Salesforce asset managers to apply domain expert logic to assets from within the Salesforce ecosystem. It allows them to control

  • Which ‘smart’ monitoring algorithms are available to which customers’ assets depending on their support contract.
  • When to enable these ‘smart’ monitoring algorithms depending on the customer life cycle, e.g. when the warranty period starts.
  • How sensitive these ‘smart’ algorithms have to be depending on the support level entitlement of a customer

In this sense, the data scientist can focus on performance optimization of the AI/ML algorithms, while the Waylay Digital Twin App allows the Asset Manager to apply these algorithms in the right way depending on the business context of the connected assets.
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Enable deep asset visibility on customer-facing experience cloud dashboards

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Salesforce Experience Cloud (previously called Community Cloud) allows you to publish End Customer facing asset performance dashboards to enable self-service support.

Such a self service portal can deflect help desk support calls by empowering end customers with: 

  • An overview of their assets current and historical performance
  • A means of triggering Waylay Diagnostic Rules on their assets to self-diagnose and self-repair them
  • A drill down overview of the asset parameters and asset alarms
  • An overview of which predictive and preventive cases have been created and for which of them a maintenance activity has been scheduled
  • etc

This new release of the Waylay Digital Twin app provides support for Salesforce Experience Cloud portals. Concretely:

  • Waylay’s LWC widgets have been made Experience Cloud compatible
  • Waylay Read Only permission can be assigned to community cloud user or community cloud plus user profiles

Conclusion

This new major release of the Waylay Digital Twin App provides new capabilities for several different stakeholders in a customer’s connected asset organization:

  • Remote service agents: diagnostics tests for quick asset health validation, which speeds up case and work order handling
  • Data scientists: bring your own AI/ML algorithms and let asset managers create rules to process and act on the algorithms’ output
  • End customers: offer deep asset performance dashboards with a unified customer experience through Salesforce Experience Cloud

Check out our updated product documentation if you want to learn more.