Unlocking the Future: Digital Twins as the Crystal Ball of Innovation

Imagine foreseeing business outcomes before making decisions—testing innovative ideas, strategising backwards from desired results. This is now a reality ─ even without a crystal ball. Enter digital twins: virtual replicas optimising industries such as manufacturing, aerospace, and more. These twins extend to life sciences, retail, energy, and beyond, transforming decision-making. They mimic everything from customer service to eco-initiatives, driving the need for businesses to understand their purpose, deployment, and practical usage.

Elevate decision-making

Digital twins can encompass anything from specific components such as a Rolls-Royce jet engine to intricate business networks or even entire nations, as seen with Singapore. What sets digital twins apart is their ability to operate in real-time, drawing insights from live data streams. As data richness increases, so does the twin’s accuracy in mirroring reality, weaving together data strands into a cohesive narrative, highlighting opportunities and risks.

Digital twins are inquisitive problem-solvers, simulating scenarios and predicting outcomes. They go beyond objects, representing ecosystems and entities like individuals, processes, and systems. For instance, envision a digital twin mimicking customer profiles, stores, online sales, and supply chains. It anticipates results of choices, aiding informed decisions and yielding an average 15% enhancement across sales, engagement, cost reduction, efficiency, and more, as seen in adopting organisations.

Mitigate decision-risks

Every year, businesses lose 3% of their profits due to suboptimal everyday operational decisions, spanning equipment runtimes to vendor selections, according to Gartner. Digital twins serve as decision risk mitigators, offering insights into potential outcomes for various choices. In one instance, a digital twin was employed to assist a leading health insurer in informed decision-making, enhancing member experiences while reducing contact centre costs. This encompassed staffing adjustments, digital tool selection, and targeted member outreach. The twin precisely mirrors the real-world contact centre using real-time data, conducting virtual tests that yield grounded results. As the contact centre evolves, the adaptable twin provides valuable insights, optimising query routing and reducing complexity for the health insurer.

Unfetter from real-world limitations

Digital twins liberate businesses from real-world constraints such as time, resources, and terrain, empowering them to expedite decision-making processes. They offer the ability to fast-forward, evaluating the long-term impact of volume growth on processes and equipment. For instance, a digital twin aided a cellular carrier in safeguarding its mobile network against performance decline caused by environmental changes. By simulating factors such as tree growth and temperature fluctuations, the twin allowed proactive planning for optimal network performance.

Merge realities in the metaverse

Digital twins, combining data from processes, individuals, and systems, synergise with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), shaping the enterprise metaverse foundation. This evolution interlinks digital twins, gradually forming a virtual company ecosystem—customers, employees, supply chains, and infrastructure. AI and ML-powered metaverse tackles challenges, makes informed decisions, and translates them into reality. A case in point is a fast-food chain using a digital twin to enhance its “farm-to-fork” sustainability. Modelling supplier and production scenarios, it refines supplier selection. This journey may encompass weather, labour, and other forecasts across the operational realm.

Push the envelope with digital data

Digital twins transcend factories to encompass people, processes, and objects through digital data. Their flexibility finds use in various business scenarios to:

• Streamline operations such as contact centres through simulated interactions for staffing precision.

• Elevate customer experiences by optimising journeys via twin simulations.

• Accelerate informed market entry, refining products, predicting impacts, and exploring monetisation.

• Enhance supply chain sustainability by linking various twin components for optimised projections.

• Strengthen ESG compliance by aiding emissions modelling and impact assessment.

Make digital twins a priority

Gartner predicts that the digital twin market will reach a projected revenue of $183 billion by 2031. The prime avenue of growth involves composite digital twins. To maintain a competitive edge, product leaders should prioritise fostering ecosystems and curating collections of readily deployable functions and industry-specific templates.

As businesses reap the benefits of insights and cost-savings facilitated by digital twins, they will likely uncover new use cases that can seamlessly integrate with their initial efforts. Much like interlocking blocks, these additional applications will enhance a company's capabilities. Digital twins are on the cusp of becoming indispensable tools. Enterprises that embrace these systems today will gain the ability to peer into the future, enabling smarter decisions, enhanced operations, and a proactive identification of opportunities ahead of rivals. Embarking on the journey of transforming data into digital twins now can help organisations propel their businesses into expansive virtual realms.

Chander Damodaran

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Chander Damodaran is Global Chief Technology Officer at Brillio.