What Are Digital Twins
A digital replica of your business process — a manufacturing line with processing equipment, a call center, a supply chain network with warehouses and vehicles. An ideal digital twin should accurately represent the physical world in the digital realm. In theory a true digital twin will have infinite data points or infinite resolution.
I can argue that digital twins existed on factory and service floors for ages. Creating a line diagram with machine capacity or adding a whiteboard to say how many callers are there — these are the crudest digital twins. These are extremely low resolution representations. With advancement in technology (digitization, IoT) the ability to capture more data more frequently has dramatically increased.
How Value Is Unlocked
- 1.Increase in frequency and quantity of data captured — far more accurate picture of the physical world than data on a whiteboard.
- 2.Improvement in accuracy of decision making — more accurate models predicting future behaviors.
- 3.Enhancement in speed of decision making — earlier simulations took days or weeks; now the only bottleneck is your imagination.
- 4.Enhanced transparency and democratization of data across teams — immediately creates alignment and reduces trust issues.
Does It Make Sense for Your Business?
Try to answer whether any of these 4 points can unlock incremental value. For example, today you collect data every 60 minutes and make decisions to optimize resource allocation. By implementing digital twins you might collect data every 5 minutes. Will making resource allocation decisions every 5 minutes give you additional business or reduce operating cost? If the answer isn't clear, then Digital Twins are probably not for your business at this point.