TURBOCHARGE

The digital twin market is on the rise. Possible use cases are expanding across a range of industries as enterprises harness the technology to simulate, monitor and trial assets and procedures. Gartner analysts expect the market for digital twin technology to reach €167 billion ($183bn) in revenue by 2031. But what are digital twins? And how can they help businesses transform their enterprise?

DIGITAL TWINS ARE A VIRTUAL REPLICA OF REAL-WORLD PROCESSES OR FUNCTIONS.

hey enable an insightful simulation of a process, where users run scenarios to understand the impact of different decisions and circumstances. Digital twins quantify the impact of decisions in real time, providing information on effectiveness, performance and possible future outcomes.

By testing multiple ‘what if?’ scenarios within a virtual environment, businesses can determine the best course of action and transfer the learnings obtained in the digital setting to the real world. This provides several commercial advantages, such as increased frequency and speed of scenario planning, accelerated learning, better and faster decision-making, and, ultimately, improved organisational outcomes.

How digital twins can help business leaders

To date, digital twin technology has typically been used in the industrial, aerospace and manufacturing sectors. However, more and more companies are recognising the value of incorporating digital twins into organisations' non-physical systems.

Business Process Simulation

(BPS) enables organisations to build twins of their whole organisation. Monitoring processes and predicting future challenges enables businesses to make strategic decisions and take proactive measures. Having seen the simulated outcomes of decisions, utilising a digital twin, a business can then execute potential changes –or not – in the real world. For example, BPS can be used to forecast staffing requirements and will show an organisation how to improve efficiency in a business most effectively.

In an increasingly unpredictable economic environment, companies must remain flexible with their strategic plans. To navigate this, advanced forecast models must be used to understand how today’s changes will impact future outcomes.

For example, many companies are experiencing labour shortages and increased expenses due to macroeconomic factors. By creating a digital twin of the organisation, businesses can explore how to address the future challenges of staff shortages and rising operational costs optimally or even prevent them.

BPS uses ‘what if?’ scenarios to evaluate the as-is process of a business and identify where challenges, such as insufficient capacity, may arise in the future. BPS can then ensure that resources are concentrated on process improvements and transformations that solve and prevent upcoming issues. It can determine how changes throughout a business may affect its processes and, in turn, business objectives by connecting various processes across teams and departments, while connecting them to commercial KPIs.

Importantly, users are not restricted to historical values or statistical distributions when creating scenarios. Instead, digital twins can serve as a test of future expectations and policies to help determine how prospective changes will impact each step in the process. Using BPS, decision-makers can explore any number of scenarios, decisions and their consequences.

Consider forecasting capacity requirements of an order-to-cash process. It is critical to forecast new orders received by an orderto-cash process and its influence on new orders is critical. These may be the orders in a sales funnel, marketing activities or opportunities in the lead-to-order process. Modelling the structure of these and how the scenario inputs affect case volumes allows BPS to forecast future case volumes and suggest proactive interventions.

BPS digital twins are the best representations of a process with the most current information from live data sources. Incorporating the underlying process structure allows forward-looking simulations that are actionable beyond historical information.

The future of digital twin technology

An increasing number of companies across more and more industries are recognising the value of incorporating digital twins into their non-physical systems. By using BPS and digital twins of processes, enterprises can turbocharge their process excellence. By using forward- looking simulations, what is discovered in a virtual environment can be applied to the real world. The resulting agility enables enterprises to determine the best course of action, maximising the return on investment with transformation initiatives and empowering continuous improvements.

Source: Silico