More Than A Replica: 6 Ways Effective Digital Twins Impact Enterprise Operations with Data Intelligence

A digital twin is often described as a digital replica of a physical system or asset. Over 70% of companies have adopted digital twins as part of their digital transformation strategy in just the past year. Meanwhile, businesses continue to seek more ways to extract value from strategic technology like digital twins. What many organizations have yet to discover is that digital twins are much more than a virtual replica. Digital twins are one of the essential ways to deliver data intelligence into the hands of an organization’s leadership team and end customers.

An effective digital twin solution offers a multifaceted approach to generating data insights that offer organizations new capabilities such as:

• Real-time representation. An effective digital twin solution extracts real-time status information from the physical system or asset. This enables the operations team to see and understand the system's actions or processes and their most recent status updates. It also provides the ability to filter and select the most useful alerts among a massive number of constant system alerts to display to system operators and reduces their mental strain during day-to-day operations. 

• Historical representation. An effective digital twin solution should be able to roll back in time and let users see what happened in the past. This helps operators and asset manufacturers gain a better understanding of their operations using data intelligence. These include understanding how many products were made last month, how many errors occurred when the last changes were made, and who made changes to the system.

• Future predictions. An effective digital twin solution is capable of utilizing existing and past data to provide predictions for future performance. It will help teams on the ground foresee crucial events such as when the physical asset is going to fail, or when a component needs to be serviced, or when consumables need to be reordered. This enables teams to act proactively to allocate resources and save valuable time for the organization.

• In-depth analysis. An effective digital twin solution should offer in-depth analyses of the physical asset or system. Typically, the original raw data from these assets can be messy and noisy to work with. The digital twin needs to be able to process and transform this data to derive insights using physical or AI-based models. The depth of the analyses can directly impact the quality of data intelligence and subsequent business decisions made.

• Big Data analytics. When it comes to digital twins, it often represents a single system or asset, but for an organization, it’s even more important to have visibility and analytics for their entire fleet of systems and assets. That’s where big data comes in. Being able to accumulate, aggregate and synthesize raw data from each of the fleet’s physical assets, an effective digital twin solution offers organizations unprecedented visibility and transparency into the performance and utilization of all their assets. This is an essential step to making better data-driven decisions for company operations and revenue opportunities. 

• Data intelligence. Perhaps the most significant of them all is the ability for digital twin solutions to offer data intelligence across the organization. Data intelligence is made up of operational intelligence, performance intelligence and business intelligence. These three aspects are not only largely responsible for making key business decisions at an organization but are also reliant on the amount of insight different teams are able to get from their datasets. Having an effective digital solution means these team members have data insights they can trust to make informed decisions and help the organization continue to evolve in a data-driven environment to meet the demands of an ever-changing market landscape.

It is crucial for businesses to keep all these factors in mind in order to ensure that their digital twin solution is delivering real value to them and their customers. The takeaway from these benefits provided by digital twin solutions is that companies need to uncover ways to design and implement a digital twin solution that aligns with their specific needs. The shift towards a more digital and data-driven way of managing and improving operations is already happening in many organizations, especially in the industrial sector. To learn more about how to empower your organization with digital twin solutions, browse through our use case selection.