Digital twins - guaranteeing success for smart process optimization
Today, before companies manufacture products or execute processes, they are often first developed, tested and optimized in the virtual world - as so-called digital twins. The aim is to use the analysis of these digital images to increase product and process performance and thus boost a company's overall efficiency.
What are digital twins?
Digital twins are a virtual representation of a product or system and have been used in the manufacturing industry for years. They help companies understand, predict and optimize the performance of a system or process. A digital twin is mapped from real-time data and therefore makes it possible to digitally visualize a real product, system or process in its entirety, uncover its weak points and make data-based operational and strategic decisions based on the analysis. The goal is to ensure optimal performance in the physical world, gain better insights into production, improve customer service, and thus increase the efficiency of the entire company. Thanks to immense technological advances, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT), digital twins have now become a valuable decision-making tool for companies across a wide range of industries. In particular, their ability to provide answers to questions about how business processes work and the potential impact of process changes and optimization make digital twins a valuable tool in digital transformation.
The benefits of digital twins
Digital process twins support both the visualization of the actual state of processes and the identification of possible target states via process simulation and their evaluation. The digital twin captures and analyzes the large volumes of data generated during the use of IT systems and production facilities in order to obtain usable insights for sound decision-making. Companies in a wide range of industries benefit from the use of this data and the various advantages of digital twins:
- Opening of new business opportunities
- Optimization and control of processes
- Increase of lead times
- Improving the efficiency of products and production systems
- Faster and more targeted identification of faults, bottlenecks and error-prone processes
- Deeper understanding of customers and processes
- Recording of current operating conditions and forecasts of future conditions and events
Designing more effective processes with digital process twins
Digital twins should not be reduced to just their capabilities around physical products. In 2018, the leading market research company Gartner introduced the concept "Digital Twin of an Organization" (DTO) and brought together Business Process Management (BPM) with digital twins. In business process management, we therefore speak of digital process twins (DTOs). With the help of digital process maps and simulations, they identify resource bottlenecks, faulty process execution, wasted time and idle time and communicate these to process owners. Based on this, various scenarios can then be modeled, selected and implemented. As they help to optimize not only physical objects but also processes, digital process twins ultimately increase the overall effectiveness of a company and significantly support digital transformation.
360-degree view: How digital twins ensure maximum process transparency
Compared to business process management in the past, process managers today no longer have to analyze their processes with stopwatches and workplace observation. Instead, the digital process twins are intelligently enriched with data and simulated. Companies can run through different simulations and identify optimization potential in their processes. In this way, digital twins help companies to move much more quickly from the as-is analysis of processes through the target simulation of future processes to implementation and to answer questions about future processes, the necessary resources and systems for them, and the costs. This not only facilitates strategic decisions by the company management, but also ensures an enormous increase in process transparency. The interaction of the following components provides optimal support for the entire lifecycle of processes:
- Modeling and simulation engine
- Low-code process execution platform
- Process mining tool
- Risk simulation
Digital twins: sustainable added value in all process phases
Digital twins help organizations to become more efficient over the entire process lifecycle in the long term. Those who use digital twins throughout the entire BPM lifecycle benefit from their added value in every phase and thus make the digital transformation much more efficient. With the BPM Suite BIC Platform, you cover all process phases within a uniform platform and can use digital twins at any time to accelerate your digital transformation.
A bright future ahead for digital twins
A digital reinvention can currently be observed in many, mostly asset-intensive industries. Existing operating models are being fundamentally changed and require an integrated physical and digital view of production and processes. The concept of the digital twin can significantly support this reorientation: As they are continuously fed with existing data, they can always learn new capabilities and skills and thus continuously provide new insights for product improvements or process optimizations. The combination of digital twins with Internet-of-things (IoT) technology offers companies ideal optimization opportunities. This enables companies to make their ongoing operations more effective, improve products or processes, and thus increase overall efficiency.
All-in-one for a smart digital transformation
With the BIC Platform, you get the best out of your processes. Through the flexible use of our modules, you achieve a holistic, highly effective digital transformation in your company.
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