How to gain unprecedented visibility with digital twins

A digital twin creates a virtual representation of a business and is used to simulate how processes will perform in reality and analyzes the behaviors and dynamics of the enterprise. 

This allows for accurate reporting of business results and trends. A digital twin of a business offers opportunities such as risk-free testing of new processes or process changes ahead of roll out and training employees in the use of new systems before they are implemented.

This concept of a digital twin of an organization (DTO) has often been compared to that of a navigational system that allows businesses to run through the various routes to their destination and assess them for efficacy before the journey begins. The DTO provides the basis for a holistic approach to test and evaluate scenarios before they are implemented to predict what might happen.

This makes DTOs critical for business transformation efforts and adds ease to the process of operational optimization. If an organization were to create a DTO for the supply chain, this would enable end-to-end-visibility so that anyone in the business can identify the location of supplies or orders, the route they are taking or when the journey will be complete. DTOs essentially offer the opportunity to run through solutions for potential problem scenarios.

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Global technology organization ABB set out to deploy DTO technology after realizing that it operated with an overly complex supply chain that featured a wide range of both internal and external orders. The business was already collecting real-time supply chain events and data but it needed to turn these insights into action.

ABB set out to implement a ‘data layer’ that would be overlayed on top of supply chain and logistical processes to enhance visibility over how it was functioning, using process mining as the technology to achieve this. The company was able to generate an end-to-end digital view of the supply chain which offered visibility over process errors, deviations inefficiencies and bottlenecks that could be acted on in real time.

With the implementation of this DTO, ABB have afforded themselves the ability to uncover critical business insights in a way that was previously impossible. Heymen Jansen, group vice-president and head of advanced process analytics at ABB, explained that the business now has visibility over all facets of the supply chain, such as price changes or delivery date changes.

We have also seen other organizations achieve success through the implementation of a DTO. For example, global telecommunications organization Ericsson implemented a DTO which captures, connects and standardizes all site data enabling automation and data analytics at a global scale. The DTO uses building information modelling to digitalize the construction of network sites, turning what used to be a manual, fragmented and non-standardized approach into an automated and data-driven one.

Further successes have been seen at Siemens in the production of its DTO system, which allows pharmaceutical organizations to run risk and cost-free trials, and tests for drugs in production. Siemens aided BioNTech with the implementation of a DTO that allowed it to develop a mRNA Covid-19 vaccine alongside Pfizer.

What are your thoughts on the visibility provided by DTOs? Let us know in the comments below.