Digital mirrors will let businesses see the future

The ability to test ‘what if’ scenarios with digital twin technology is a major breakthrough that many businesses will come to depend on, according to Accenture’s Denis Hannigan.

Businesses know that the tsunami of data flowing through their IT systems can be tapped for insights and inform better decision making. What’s less understood is how it can be modelled and made to run ‘what if’ scenarios and mitigate some of the risks around new plans and strategies. By modelling the physical world in a digital format, they can make mistakes virtually to ensure they get it right in the real world.  

So called ‘digital twins’ and even earlier forms of scenario planning have been around a while – NASA modelling of different ways to bring the stricken Apollo 13 back to earth is a famous example – but what’s changed is the opportunity to test broader business scenarios in a digital mirror. It’s already commonplace in product development, manufacturing processes and supply chains, where the common thread is replacing risk with a high degree of certainty.

Real world examples 

Using digital twins in product development means a greater proportion of design can take place in simulation, delaying physical manufacturing until the last moment, saving time and money. Any product, even medicine, can be refined virtually to be more effective. Oklahoma State University and Ansys, for example, developed digital twins of human lungs to simulate drug delivery for different patients. By experimenting with multiple  factors, they found a method that could increase drug delivery accuracy by up to 90 percent.

In manufacturing, Ericsson and Vodafone are working with an electric vehicle manufacturer, e.GO, on a factory of the future. Machines connect over a 5G network, sending data to a network  operations centre that powers a digital twin of the factory. The twin is used to enable just-in-time processes and smart tools that empower human workers with data-driven intelligence.

The pandemic provides a recent supply chain example, where the rapid adoption of digital twins helped optimise the path to market for Covid-19 vaccines. In Ireland, the life science sector had already been going down the same road. Accenture has worked closely with the sector, building digital twins for clinical and commercial use, and improving capacity utilisation in complex supply chain networks. 

The appetite in Ireland for mirroring, however, extends far beyond any one sector. According to a recent Accenture survey, 38 percent of executives in Ireland expect their organisation’s investment in intelligent digital twins to increase over the next three years; a further 78 percent maintain that digital twins are becoming essential to their organisation’s ability to collaborate in strategic partnerships. 

Evolution of analytics 

Businesses looking for insights from data to help address challenges is nothing new. Part of the appeal of digital twin technology is that it’s evolution rather than revolution, a natural next step in business intelligence (BI) and therefore much easier to assimilate into an organisation. It’s the latest stop on a journey, from descriptive through predictive to prescriptive analytics.

The first iteration of BI was using historic and current data to provide descriptive insights about the business. Predictive analytics moved it on from hindsight to foresight, making predictions about the future, using machine learning to analyse most likely scenarios. Digital twins enable the next stage, prescriptive analytics, where models are able to show what multiple actions might lead to.

We are at a point where data will be used not just to inform strategies, but to steer businesses to optimum outcomes. Deploying a digital twin as a particular part of a process, or to solve a specific question, will lead to faster, smarter businesses.

Certainty in an uncertain world 

Adoption will be widespread because digital twins accelerate what many businesses have been trying to do. They are already looking to make data and intelligence the primary orchestrator of their business; they want to use it to increase real-time agility, to overhaul innovation processes, and make it an enabler for new ecosystems and partnerships.

Digital twins are a way to realise these ambitions with smart models that executive groups can use for scenario planning. Digital representations can give them something tangible to hang their business decisions on.  This is already a clear focus for Irish businesses, according to the research, with 90 percent agreeing that their organisation requires a central intelligence hub to model people, processes and assets for insights.

Significant strides have been made in the core technologies that are the enablers. Data is the fuel that feeds it; cloud brings the compute capacity not just to host it, but to apply a broad range of machine learning and AI tools to build models and process it. At the same time, organisations have been growing their internal competencies or forging partnerships with companies like Accenture to have the skills that will be needed.

Still a work in progress, the promise of the mirrored world is a tantalising prospect, a way for strategies and ideas to be thoroughly tested before they are executed. As Irish businesses emerge from a period of unprecedented uncertainty, it’s not hard to understand the appeal of a technology than can help mitigate risk.

Denis Hannigan is Applied Intelligence lead for Accenture in Ireland. 

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