Digital Twin of an Organisation
If it is said “twin“, each of us will probably picture two identical human beings in terms of their verbal and non-verbal behaviour or appearance. Some of us even believe in a mysterious bond that exists between human twins. Such a bond might manifest itself through the fact that anything happening to one of the twins will immediately influence the other one even though he/she is miles away.
What still stays unproven between human twins becomes true in case of a digital twin of an organisation. That is why, according to Gartner, the process twin belongs to the list of the ten most important strategic technologies. This technology answers the frequent question of managers: “How to reach the maximal efficiency?”
What digital twin actually is?
Digital twin is a full virtual model that is “fed” by data that an organisation produces every day. Millions of 1 and 0 circulate in its bloodstream. Fast and clearly, it discovers production and non-production processes and all available data concerning products and services. Each employee has a chance to view this data in a unique way.
On top of that, it enables to focus on each of the functional units of an organisation, analyse them and look for options for optimization. The fundamental functions of the digital process twin are:
- Process performance and impact analysis
- Detection of compliance with the standardized process
- Tools enabling automation
- Prediction of process load
Digital twin does not represent a static copy of an organisation. As the world develops, it produces new data and its twin develops at the same time. Everything is accessible, clear and visualized in real time. The time of manual report creation is now gone.
Digital process twin is completely new
Our experience says that production organisations often try very hard to optimize their production. Most of them are true professionals in optimization. In the production field, the digital twin is nothing new though. It has been used in factories for physical problem detection and prediction of their impact for more than ten years. This technology is one of the responses to the succession of the Internet of Things (IoT).
However, the neglected processes are those that precede or follow the production process. This means that in the non-production world, there still are big gaps. A huge number of office workers still spend their time by doing repetitive activities that would be worth automating. Overloading human resources in this way represents dissatisfaction on their side and high operational costs.
An organisation hides a huge knotty ball of processes. Moreover, very often the left-hand does not know what the right one is doing. Processes of various departments do not follow each other and they contain a large number of bottlenecks. Daily, it is dealt with disputes and consequence solving. In order to unknot the ball, process mining tool might be a big help. This field of data science deals with the reconstruction of real events from log files. These logs are generated by systems used for company management and might be a perfect tool to understand how people in the company work every day.
The rise of digital twins
As well as artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science find their way into various IT systems used by companies, the digital twin of an organisation also gets into public awareness. Digital twin tool uses already mentioned technologies in order to perform its function. Process mining is a clear trend boosted by companies that hunt for maximal efficiency. Gartner predicts that 50% of companies will be using the services of the Digital Twin by 2020.