Digital twin technology is one of the most disruptive technologies changing the way businesses operate. But, what is meant by digital twin? In its simplest definition, a digital twin is a virtual version of a physical object, process, or system. The physical twin has a digital counterpart, and it uses real data from the real world to recreate its physical twin in real time.
Digital twin technology has been widely adopted by today’s organizations to visualize systems, predict problems, enhance performance, and increase innovation speed. From smart manufacturing and supply chains to infrastructure and healthcare systems, the digital twin approach has quickly evolved becoming one of the most valuable business assets. They are no longer taking guesswork out of business; they are simulating, forecasting, and optimizing.
As industries move toward smarter ways of operating, digital twin services are being developed by dedicated companies that provide technologies and platforms for virtually modelling, monitoring, and maintaining their physical assets. Their evolution extends beyond increasing efficiency. They scale innovation. Armed with understanding of models, enterprises can lead the way in a world of intelligent digitalization.
Understanding Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS)
An upcoming model known as Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) enables businesses to engage an outsourced partner for the development, deployment, and management of digital twins, rather than developing these capacities internally. With this approach, organizations are able to depend on the appropriate digital twin companies to provide the required scalable and secure capabilities; rather than developing the required infrastructure internally, DTaaS enables organizations to provide infrastructure-as-a-service.
DTaaS is impactful because it injects agility into enterprises by minimizing investment in upfront costs and speeding up time to deployment. It allows organizations to deploy digital twin technology as a service without investing heavily in their own internal research and development, licensing software, or hiring digital talent. DTaaS covers every aspect of the deployment, whether it is integrating previously captured data, model visualization, or analytics and provided externally through the cloud.
Because DTOOS or DTaaS platforms are a service-based offering and are continually updated and maintained by the DTOOS/DTaaS vendors, this is a good model for business looking to capitalize on the benefits of a digital twin while benefitting from flexibility and faster time to value to the business. Contemporarily, businesses within various sectors, such as energy, automotive, retail and smart cities are now obtaining and using digital twin as a service platforms to enable operational visibility and predictive insights.
By leveraging the capabilities of digital twin software, organizations now have access to state-of-the-art solution tools and capabilities with AI driven simulation tools and real-time monitoring capabilities—making the parlance of DTaaS a newer way to consider digital strategies in the modern world.
How Digital Twin Services Transform Operations Across Industries
Digital twin services are powerful because they can be relevant across industries. Digital twin services are transforming how businesses operate across asset-oriented sectors (manufacturing, logistics) and data-driven fields (healthcare, finance).
In manufacturing, digital twin models allow businesses to simulate production lines for looking up bottlenecks, laying out the best use of resources, and even planned downtime. In healthcare, hospitals are using them to model human organs to prescribe patient-specific treatments. In urban planning, municipalities are creating digital twins of cities to manage infrastructure, utilities, and many other physical entities when needed. The possibilities are incredible.
These services help democratize sustainability initiatives by minimizing waste, energy consumption, and unnecessary downtime of systems. Businesses can also run digital tests of scenarios prior to physical tests leading to more rapid innovation cycles and much less risk on the physical end.
Also, digital twin software organizations can create customized versions of the software tailored to a business’ needs. This could be simulations if a new HVAC system would meet criteria of temperature and humidity within a specific layout of a occupied space, or optimizing how stored pallets in a warehouse could help save space, keeping in mind models of END consumer demand through digital twins of contingent variables like financial risks within a supply chain.
The most current iteration of digital twin services is the integration of IOT, AI, and analytics. This gives businesses the option of being predictive rather than reactive—turning business planning into reasonably informed decisional, by way of new planning—enhancing customer experiences, and creating employee efficiencies.
Role of Digital Twin Software Companies in Enterprise Growth
The engine of the Digital Twin Revolution is the ecosystem of Digital Twin software companies. These companies develop sophisticated platforms that deliver Digital Twin capabilities to organizations around the world.
These companies do something that is unique in the market – they combine data engineering, machine learning, simulation and visualization into an integrated solution. They can either provide a commercial off-the-shelf platform, or a custom-built solution, but ensure the Digital Twin model supports enterprise objectives.
Companies that have years of experience with Digital Twin can provide a solution that has the following:
- Scalable architecture
- Security
- Integration with existing enterprise services (e.g. ERP, CRM, IoT, etc.), to name a few.
The companies can help lead enterprises with pre-built user-friendly dashboards, APIs and AI-enhanced analysis. Organizations don’t need to be overwhelmed with complexity.
The leading digital twin software companies will also provide maintenance and upgrades for both the platform, and the cloud services, so businesses will be future-ready. The number of Digital Twin companies from Siemens to GE Digital—and to newer emerging small software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies—are growing rapidly.
These organizations can be seen as more than just a software vendor—is essential in the Digital Twin revolution in helping businesses decide how to not only digitize their assets, but to extract value in the form of data, insights, and simulations.
Virtual Replicas for Smarter Insights
Every successful digital twin project includes a thorough digital twin model at its core. The model is an accurate and dynamic virtual equivalent of a physical asset or system enhanced by real-time data and analytics.
A digital twin model can be simple (3D views) or immensely complex (AI-enabled behavioral simulations). For instance, a retail supply chain can create a digital twin model allowing for the simulation of customer journeys or store layouts; the energy sector can model/state wind turbine behavior; and in the logistics business, there are thousands of combinatorial options for supply chain optimization models.
Digital twin models allow businesses to visualize what makes a system behave under varying conditions without changing the action or effect of the physical world. With this visualization capability, the decision-maker can lower uncertainty, emphasize trajectory, enhance testing, and increase the speed of innovation.
A solid digital twin model can support predictive decision-making; modeling “what if” options; and pinpointing failure locations. Together, they provided a new perspective from which to visualize and understand the system. Your digital twin model also transforms passive data into active data visualizations and intelligence.
Digital twin software companies can help develop an organization’s digital twin model. They can utilize your CAD data, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to enhance organizational workflow performance. Used effectively, digital twin models will improve productivity, reduce costs, and provide organizational continuous process improvement.
Conclusion
Digital transformation is no longer a choice and when it comes to digital twin technologies, it leads this change. Their ability to simulate, monitor, and optimize complex systems gives value to modern day businesses.
Digital twin as a service, and custom delivered digital twin models mean enterprises have scalable solutions to fit their digital maturity. With assistance from the best digital twin software service providers, even the most traditional industries can leapfrog into the future.
By adopting digital twin services, organisations can increase efficiency, lower operational risks, and create additional revenue streams. They can also innovate at speed and adapt to market changes even faster.
As digital twin technology develops over the years, expect intelligent and immersive digital twin technology to become fundamental for your organisation’s business strategy. If you are an organisation wanting to succeed in a data driven world, the time is now to leverage digital twins and partner with the right provider for an effective journey.
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Author Bio
Rupal Agarwal
Chief Strategy Officer
Dr. Rupal’s “Everything is possible” attitude helps achieve the impossible. Dr. Rupal Agarwal has worked with 300+ companies from various sectors, since 2012, to custom-build SOPs, push their limits and improve performance efficiency. Rupal & her team have remarkable success stories of helping companies scale 10X with business process standardization.