Why

The Motivation

There are many reasons to invest in digital twins. In general, it’s about securing the future of your organisation. Digital twins give you the opportunity to maximise the benefits of modern technology to improve day-to-day performance across your systems, processes, and assets. This allows you to learn from your operations and make precise investments that take your organisation to the next level. Digital twins can also prevent knowledge drain because algorithms can capture that knowledge and learn quickly. Challenges such as increasing complexity in the world of sustainability, high energy prices, new legislation, public inquiries, an aging workforce, and stakeholder management are all easier to solve with the support of digital twins. Transparent reporting is also simpler, and based on real-time data. With digital twins, better decision making is at your fingertips.

Faster innovation with less risk

Digital twins allow you to develop and test innovations in a digital environment. This makes it possible to create a vast amount of slightly different adjustments and evaluate them digitally. This results in rapid innovation, cost reduction, and minimising impact on valuable physical objects (e.g. expensive assets, nature, animals or human beings).

Digital twins can help you avoid common challenges, including:

High operational costs and risks

Monitoring real-world systems helps you gain insights into deviations and incidents. It can help predict them, and even trigger self-repairing actions to improve the physical twin. This results in faster system recovery and lower maintenance costs and risk of failure by postponing unnecessary preventive maintenance.

Complexity

The challenges in the world get more complex every day. For example, climate change, circularity, food and water shortages, housing, social cohesion, energy transition, and mobility all affect each other, resulting in even more complexity. Digital twins support monitoring, visualising, and simulating the impact these challenges have, and how they can be dealt with.

Disruptive business models and customer experience

Digital twins give businesses new abilities to develop disruptive products and services. For example, by making a digital twin of an indoor shop, and its products and customers, you can completely remove registers from the shop. The digital twin knows what products customers put in their bags and triggers the payment system to ensure the customers’ bank accounts are charged accordingly.

Aging workforce

The working population is aging, resulting in less capacity to do more complex work. Younger generations have grown up with technologies such as social media, smartphones, tablets and also a new kind of schooling that includes fewer hours of classical teaching with more focus on problem solving and collaboration. The challenge is to capture insights from experienced colleagues and make these accessible for younger generations in an efficient and a modern and attractive way. Digital twins can help here by creating a digital representation of key processes and actions relevant to different physical systems and assets, so that knowledge stays in the business – even as key staff members leave.

Automation

Digital twin technologies bring possibilities to further automate tasks and processes. By running more tasks (semi-) autonomously, it can have positive effects on safety, performance, accuracy, and continuity.