Helium at Dreamforce with Salesforce IoT
This week, the Helium team joined 170,000 attendees at Dreamforce 2017. Through an exclusive invitation as a Salesforce IoT preferred technology partner, we’ve been showing off the new Helium Salesforce Channel integration as part of the IoT Grove located in Moscone West. During this busy week, we’ve had the opportunity to demo to a variety of users — technology architects, sales and service managers as well as hobbyists and engineers — and the reception to what we’ve put together has been exceptional.
The story we hear again and again is how do companies get data off their machines, environments, assets, or cold-chains and into Salesforce to better improve their operations, lower costs and increase sales? Here’s a detailed version of this problem:
To see how we are approaching this, take a look at this following slides:
Phil installs Helium-powered climate and door sensors in these distribution centers which monitor temperature and humidity, and whether the door is shut. Our integration is seamless and completely automatic. Here’s what Salesforce can do with the data coming off Helium.
- When the temperature is too high, Salesforce IoT Cloud automatically creates a Transport Work Order to ship the perishable goods to the nearest climate controlled Bisby distribution center
- When the warehouse is too hot to hold perishable goods, Salesforce marks the Warehouse asset as “not receiving perishable goods” and redirects the supply chain away from the warehouse
- When the door is detected as open, Salesforce creates a Maintenance Work Order to alert a technician or employee to shut the door to prevent losses
Actions happen automatically and are made possible by Helium’s connectivity solution. By connecting a Helium Atom Module to the sensor, the entire stack instantly becomes wireless and secure. Helium uses a hardware root-of-trust to sign and secure transmissions to the Helium Element, our Gateway with enough range to cover an entire distribution center, allowing encrypted, secure sensor data to flow to Salesforce.
We’ll start with connecting Helium to Salesforce.
Our first focus is security. By creating a Connected App for Helium on Salesforce and using a security token, we can establish a key and secret to create the connection.
Next we’ll create a Platform Event and assign Custom Fields and Relationships to define the structure that sensor data will be delivered. Examples of custom fields can be device ID, timestamp, temperature, and the temperature reading itself — like 56℉.
Once we’ve defined the data structure, our Helium Atom can start making API calls to an endpoint in Salesforce.
Finally, we associate an account (the temperature) to the platform event so we can create our Orchestration.
In Salesforce IoT Explorer, Orchestrations area simple way to visualize changes in state as temperature and door sensor data flow in from Helium. When the temperatures are within an acceptable level, the state remains as Normal. Once the temperature is above a threshold for a determined amount of time, the state changes to High Temperatures Detected. The same goes for the Door sensor: closed is Normal and when the door is detected as open, it changes its state.
Helium’s integration with Salesforce doesn’t stop there. Once the data is in Salesforce, anything is possible. As part of this implementation we’ve integrated with Service Cloud to create Field Service Appointments, and created cases in the Service Console. You can even send sensor data into Einstein to predict when is the best time to up-sell new products or services.
What’s Next?
This is just the beginning of how companies using Salesforce can easily add sensor data from connected devices to their applications. We’ll be rolling out more examples and documentation on the Helium Developer Site in the coming weeks.
- If you’re interested in talking with our team about how to take advantage of this integration, get in touch.
- Want to prototype your own solution on top of Helium and Salesforce? Purchase a Helium Starter Kit from Mouser and drop us a line at chat.helium.com.
