How to successfully implement your digital twin

Following on from my previous blog, explaining how our Infinity Loop methodology helps drive continuous innovation, I wanted to share an approach to digital twins that can provide the most value to your organisation.

Dictated by increasingly complex and uncertain business environments, the need for digital transformation has never been greater. But embarking on transformation projects isn’t as easy as just pressing ‘go’. For many organisations, figuring out where to begin is a challenge of its own.

As a result, a lot of these initiatives start with tentative investments in localised pilot projects. These projects often involve adding sensors to key assets to collect and monitor data in search of valuable new insights. But there’s a flaw to this approach: it lacks a real understanding or consideration of the final impact – things like what the end-to-end performance will look like and what the cost impacts will be.

The inevitable outcome is that these projects fail to live up to their potential and, although they provide some insights, they don’t deliver nearly as much value as they could.

So, what does a better approach look like?

Taking digital twins to the next level

Instead of using sensors to create digital twins of individual assets, forward-thinking companies are looking to gain insights into the impacts of wider strategic changes.

By applying predictive digital twins to things like supply chains and full end-to-end processes (rather than isolated machines or production lines), business leaders can iteratively test and experiment with process changes in virtual environments.

This means they can see how a new supply chain strategy might work, for instance, without incurring any risk or disrupting business as usual.

With this level of insight, it becomes possible to foresee the overall business impact of almost every decision before it’s made. For businesses that want to replace low-impact digital deployments with truly valuable applications of digital technology – those that can optimise operational performance and drive continuous improvements – this approach is key.

The Royal HaskoningDHV approach

Since 1996, we’ve been designing, developing and delivering digital twins for clients in multiple sectors. Our mission is to empower our customers with predictive technologies that deliver the highest levels of insight and foresight and enable truly connected decision making.

In doing so, we help them to identify and fill gaps in digital capabilities, make ongoing operational improvements, and drive continuous innovation at a speed that previously wasn’t possible.

Creating connected digital twin ecosystems is at the heart of our continuous innovation strategy. We develop each digital twin as a response to a clear business question presented by our clients. And, where feasible, we connect these individual twins together in ecosystems to provide added value. For instance, by connecting production line twins to supply chain twins, or real-time monitoring twins with predictive process twins.

This approach is key to achieving true digital agility: the point when all assets – both machines and people – are connected to drive constant, positive self-disruption. With this connectivity, you can see how your assets and processes work right now, how they should ideally work, and how they would work under different conditions. In essence, everything you need to make the right next step.

Want to learn more?

With the predictive powers of simulation and machine learning, digital twin technologies can play an important role in simplifying, automating and enhancing decision making at all business levels – whether your focus is on an individual asset, a process or the enterprise as a whole.

To learn more about how our predictive digital twins can help your organisation innovate at speed, visit our website.