Between geopolitical conflicts, natural disasters and tariffs, manufacturers are dealing with plenty of uncertainty right now. The good news: digital twins can make it possible to do next-level scenario planning and risk mitigation.
Here’s a look at how, plus a quick overview of what it takes to integrate a digital twin into your organization’s workflow.
What Are Digital Twins? (Spoiler: You’re Probably Already Using Them)
Digital twins are digital representations of real-world things. When you watch your Uber driver approach your location on your phone map, that’s a digital twin.
But digital twins can also be much simpler. Any dashboard your organization uses that incorporates real-time data, from website visitors to the location of workers, is a digital twin.
For most manufacturers, the biggest leap isn’t going from zero digital twins to one or more. Instead, it’s embracing these two mindsets:
- Thinking beyond what’s practical for your organization right now to what can be transformative in a year and beyond. Yes, digital twins can give you real-time visibility of your factory floor. But what about predictive analytics that let you anticipate supply chain disruptions? Most manufacturers, especially those at mid-sized firms, don’t have the time day to day to engage in that kind of transformation thinking.
- Digital twins don’t have to have great visual fidelity to be useful. More important than visual fidelity is a high rate of digital–real-world interactions. When building with limited resources especially, it’s crucial to invest in building and maintaining the right parts of a digital twin.
I’ll address both in the following sections.
How Manufacturers Can Use Digital Twins to Navigate Uncertainty
The first step to thinking long term is understanding what digital twins are capable of. In the manufacturing space, it’s possible to bring in real-time data that models suppliers, logistics, costs, lead times, contract terms, regulatory requirements and more.
You can then build a digital twin that can do things like:
- Run “what if” scenarios for, say, new trade restrictions or tariffs.
- Locate single points of failure.
- Identify hidden dependencies.
- Use real-time risk assessments to optimize inventory levels.
- Simulate alternative sourcing strategies, including their financial impact.
- Anticipate and prevent supply chain interruptions.
- Improve decision making via automated audits and continuous supplier performance monitoring.
Any of these capabilities would reduce the risk presented by uncertainties beyond a manufacturer’s control by enabling them to prepare for a variety of situations much more confidently.
Crucially, none of these use cases requires visual fidelity to work. The value they offer comes from sourcing and collating diverse data sets to reveal insights with direct implications for your organization that would have otherwise been buried.
That’s the end game. Digital twins have huge potential for manufacturing firms. Now let’s take a high-level look at how to incorporate them into your existing ways of working.
How to Integrate Digital Twins into Existing Manufacturing Workflows
This is a human challenge as much as a technical challenge. While you will need a robust data foundation on the technical side, including the data itself and supporting architecture, you’ll also need to get buy-in from leadership on how to approach building a digital twin.
My recommendation is to lead with a “think big, start small” approach. Getting leaders on board often requires both a long-term vision (“think big”) and a plan for building something that adds value in the short term (“start small”). Once you find something that works, you can scale.
Another key consideration for champions of digital twins: you’ll likely have to educate and sell the vision internally. That will almost certainly mean refocusing executives’ attention from the common perception of digital twins (high visual fidelity) toward a more practical application (creating new value).
In other words, you’ll have to guide the conversation from “How do we make this look perfect” toward “How do we get this to provide valuable information.”
Are You Transformation-Ready?
Nearly every manufacturer can improve their operations and better navigate uncertainty with digital twins. But not every manufacturer is ready to build a digital twin. The biggest technical prerequisite is information architecture: do you have the data and data infrastructure to support a digital recreation of the systems you rely on?
If not, the question to ask is how you get there.
Manufacturers who prioritize these questions will be the ones best able to navigate the uncertainty that lies ahead.
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Jason Hehman is the Vertical Lead for Industry 4.0 and a Client Partner at TXI, who has dedicated over two decades to pioneering digital solutions that drive transformational impact. He is committed to leveraging the power of IoT, digital transformation and smart manufacturing to fuel growth and unlock new value in the industrial sector. His approach is driven by passion for understanding consumer behavior and translating those insights into strategies and products that enhance user experience and satisfaction. He’s an expert in ideation and execution, guiding clients through every step of the digital transformation process.