Equipment Email to Ticket in TheWorxHub™

See how you can use emails from connected equipment to automatically create work requests in TheWorxHub™.

Hi Everyone, Kyle here. I'm excited to talk to you about our Equipment Email to Ticket System. This new module takes the emails that you get from connected equipment such, as your building automation system and converts those into work requests in TheWorxHub.

A common example from our clients includes a train building automation system alert when a supply fan fails. Similar examples we've heard from Honeywell, Schneider and others. Emerging on the market now are ZURN connected plumbing fixtures, like a faucet that can let you when the water is left on. We've got a number of clients with a wide range of AKCP sensor probe temperature sensors on medication fridges, or for air pressure, differential monitoring or in-line water temperature sensors.

It's really a diverse set of use cases. There's thousands of devices available on the market or in your buildings that can send an email when they need attention. I want to call out that we're specifically talking about equipment emails, when a device sends an email alert. This module does not allow for staff to type out an email freeform and have it converted to a ticket.

So why do we build this? Through serving our clients, we uncovered that nearly 60% are getting email alerts from equipment in their inbox, with a large portion receiving multiple device email alerts. In nearly all cases, there is a strong case for tracking these alerts as work orders in TheWorxHub.

You might not find this surprising, but nearly 80% of work generated from alerts that landed in someone's inbox was never captured in TheWorxHub. The work gets done often immediately but no record is ever logged in TheWorxHub. So this is problematic for two reasons. The first is compliance. Let's say you're a mission compliant hospital, and the surveyor wants to see the humidity logs for your hospital.

The city sees alerts from your sensor logs. You can't prove you took corrective action. The other is budget accountability. If your team is continually responding to alerts, but there's no evidence of the work or time spent, it's going to be a lot more difficult come budget time to get that extra head count that you need. So how does it work?

First, contact your DSI rep to confirm your emails will work and to get licensed and set up. Having some sample emails handy will really help. We build some parsing rules in the back end to identify the description of the problem, the asset, the additional details. We do this for each unique email format. Like if you have an email or cell from TRANE and one from a MONIT sensor, we have to configure to parsing rules. Next, you've got to configure your sensor thresholds.

You're building automation system or other sensors will have a place to specify condition thresholds as well as the email distribution list for alerts. We'll give you a unique email to send to your instance of TheWorxHub. So often there's multiple alert thresholds. It's a best practice to configure TheWorxHub to only receive emails that require action or effort constituting a work order.

A common email alert we like to filter out is a return to normal state email. It's like the coast is clear. We don't really want those. Alternatively, if you don't have access to the configuration part of your sensor, you can set up an auto forward rule in your email inbox to relay the emails to TheWorxHub. Your devices or the sensors monitoring them will typically have some sort of unique I.D., be it in equipment name, ID, IP, or some other identifying info from the sending system.

We can map that ID against an asset in TheWorxHub, so such that when the request comes in it will automatically link it to that asset and the resulting work order will inherit the location of that asset.

One thing to know is the inbound requests land in your pending request dashboard, where it can be viewed and accepted or rejected for testing scenarios or false alarms. That's about all we need to cover.

Thanks for watching. To get set up with this, you can email Steve McTigue at do solutions dot com at Steve Dot McTigue at Dude Solutions dot com or call our main toll free number 866-989-3833. And tell them you want to talk about equipment email ticket for TheWorxHub. Thanks again.