Digital twins have become doubly important to organizations.
In the past, digital twins were used to improve the performance of single assets, such as wind turbines or jet engines. These days, they connect not just one asset, but systems of assets and devices or even entire organizations. As they combine more and more assets with information about processes and people, their ability to help solve complex problems is also increasing.
Some of the advantages by using a digital twin, include:
- Virtual representation of a virtual ecosystem map of assets across operations and business processes using accessible, real-time data flowing across connected systems helps automate workflows, mitigate risks, and drive greater sustainability.
- Data intelligence allows for constant monitoring of any entity, system, or device, shared to interactive dashboards in real time. This thread of corresponding data allows organizations to overcome data and organizational silos to truly understand how well their operations are performing.
- Secure components of digital twins can be shared with various stakeholders in the ecosystem, enabling better collaboration and communication, regardless of location.
The new line of digital twin technology features sensors to collect real-time data about a physical item, which is used to create a virtual duplicate of the item.
The digital duplicate can be optimized, manipulated, and analyzed to test different scenarios in a risk-free environment. Digital twins also integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to bring together data, algorithms, and context.
Digital twin technology goes a long way in helping organization get new answers to new questions as well as test new ideas and uncover problems before they happen.
Additionally, digital twins are now monitoring items remotely.
The fact that large, successful organizations have turned to digital twin technology says a lot. Coca-Cola, for example, has managed to stay ahead of supply chain challenges by using digital twin technology for improved resilience and risk management.
Coca-Cola operates from 18 plants worldwide, shipping to about 1,000 locations in 170 countries. Early in 2021, Coca-Cola built a digital twin of their manufacturing network to support business continuity planning and network optimization.
By digitizing the network, Coca-Cola can now bring all the data into a single model, test out different scenarios, and be better equipped to react.
Using a digital twin also removes human bias from the analytics and the decision-making and reveals new opportunities for continuity of supply.
Want to learn more? Tonex offers Fundamentals of Digital Twins, a 2-day course that covers the key principles of digital twins and how it relates to integration of digital engineering, modeling and simulations, AI/ML, 3D and integration for service and product-related data and systems.
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.