See how Willow can help you cut costs, save energy, and operate your buildings more efficiently and sustainably.
Fast onboarding and deployment unlocks immediate value, accelerating customer success and driving faster returns on investment. At Willow, our Deployment & Activation (D&A) team engage early, lighting up spatial, static and live data in the knowledge graph as a secure Single Tenant instance is stood up. The environment is tailored to generate insights and automate actions, with role-based access for users. Let’s walk through the step by step journey as a new building is onboarded in Willow and made ready for daily use.
The first stage of onboarding is all about partnering with your IT and OT teams to gather data for setting up the Willow environment.
We start working with your IT team to identify users for your Willow instance so that your Admins can define and manage their roles for fine-grained access control. Additionally, we enable secure and seamless user access with Single Sign On (SSO). Your IT team also plays a key role in preparing for live data connectivity. Depending on your environment, this may involve provisioning a Virtual Machine or installing a Willow-provided Physical Edge Device on site. Understanding the IT network configuration and open ports and allow-listing Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs) ensures that the infrastructure is in place before data begins to flow.
As this is happening, Willow works with your Real Estate and Facilities (OT) team. Target use cases are informed by your Activate Pack subscriptions. Willow D&A collects architectural drawings, single line diagrams and documents to digitally represent the design and operations of the building. Identifying third party systems for data integration with connectors involves collecting credentials and API documents. These inputs help us break down data silos and bring everything together in one environment.
With prerequisites in place, we spin up a set of dedicated Azure services for your single-tenant Willow instance. A link is provided for Admins to set up authentication and authorization with RBAC controls to provision end users with groups, roles, permissions and assignments. From there, the Willow D&A team utilizes GenAI-driven sub-graph generation and Twin Lifecycle Management tools to hydrate your Willow Knowledge Graph.
This marks the starting point for your digital twins. Twins and their relationships represent all aspects of your physical systems. These range from Air Handling Units and components like supply fans and coils for HVAC, to water metering systems modeling IoT sensors and utility bills. As information begins to flow, you start to see the first representations of your facilities, and the broader context of how your building operates.
By the end of this stage, your platform is ready to support data connections, and you have a working view of your building that continuously grows richer over time.
Now that your Willow instance is provisioned, our D&A team begins configuring and deploying data connectors that link third-party services and systems to the platform. Willow has a large and growing library of ready-to-go connectors that work with a wide range of IT, OT, and IoT systems. If you need a new connector that isn’t in our library, Willow collaborates with your IT and OT teams to define requirements, gather API documentation, and move through development, testing, and validation. Meanwhile, deployment of existing connectors continues in parallel.
Once you deploy data connectors and establish connectivity, Willow securely brings real-time data streams from HVAC, lighting, metering, and other operational systems into the platform. Previously collected spatial and static data describes each asset and its location within your space, represented through 3D visualizations and stored in your Willow Knowledge Graph. Willow’s AI Skills activate automatically, continuously monitoring assets, spotting inefficiencies, flagging anomalies, and generating real-time, actionable insights.
As insights go live, end-users are able to start reviewing impact assessments to drive intelligent action, remediation and automation. KPIs like Avoidable Cost help identify the greatest opportunities for energy and cost savings. Users can action insights with automatically generated tickets. When integrating with your existing CMMS system, Willow sends Service Requests and establishes a bi-directional sync to track completed work orders and insight resolution.
Our D&A team confirms that Willow Copilot is connecting successfully to your data. Now, Willow Copilot is able to answer questions for facility managers monitoring insights, technicians diagnosing and resolving issues, and CIOs reviewing trends to guide capital planning decisions.
Each stage of Willow’s onboarding and deployment process builds momentum, helping you go from Data to Insights to Actions. As Willow comes online, you can sign up for bootcamp training and education sessions. Willow offers ongoing auditing services to periodically check connectors, verify user access, review insights, and help you maximize ROI. The result is a long-term foundation that delivers meaningful outcomes for your teams and facilities year after year.