The connected digital twin transforms the way we manage and optimise industrial operations, making it a versatile tool for ongoing innovation and operational improvement. Make it your MVP, says Rashesh Mody, Executive Vice-President, Business Strategy at AVEVA.
From football and ice hockey to baseball and Olympic basketball, the most valuable player (MVP) trophy goes to a gamechanger who consistently delivers winning results. The distinction is well established in sport, but what if you could have an MVP in business?
With a superstar player on your team, you’d be able to optimize operations, delight customers and innovate on the fly—all while growing your operations sustainably.
The digital twin delivers all of these and more with the precision, adaptability, and continuous improvement needed to stay ahead in a competitive landscape.
It’s exactly what industrial enterprises need in an increasingly connected world. Doing business has become more challenging than ever. Staying competitive now requires balancing fragmented supply chains, geopolitical tensions and regulatory oversight with environmental sustainability.
Elite performance with connected datasets
The digital twin serves as a continuous feedback loop in this scenario, connecting all parts of the modern industrial enterprise and providing real-time insights on all operational assets and processes.
In other words, it’s an industrial MVP:
- Managing industrial operations and enterprise data
- Visualising information in context, and
- Predicting the best decision.
Data is the lifeblood of the modern industrial enterprise. The digital twin brings together all the possible data sets and information from engineering and operations, including 1D, 2D and 3D data, and enhances it with first-principles modelling or/and analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). These new technologies are the ‘brain’ of the digital twin and can reveal insights to solve organisational challenges or forecast how assets or processes will behave given a set of variables. With this new MVP, then, companies can predict when downtime could occur, understand how to rationalize resource use and manage risk.
Across the industrial world, the majority (58%) of leaders across say they lack access to reliable, real-time data and insights when making key business decisions, according to the AVEVA Industrial Intelligence Index[1]. Across multiple industries on four continents, executives report that just 20% of their workforces, on average, has self-serve access to real-time data and key insights.
The AI-driven digital twin closes that insight gap. Whether it is engineering new assets or improving operational efficiency, there are applications across the industrial spectrum. In nearly every case, workers can understand more about the machines they work with and about their own productivity, and act to improve efficiency, value and sustainability.
The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), one of the world’s leading energy producers, is working to maximise value from its reserves and optimise its operations to drive sustainable innovation. As part of its digital transformation efforts, the leading energy major integrated more than 10 million tags across over 120 dashboards into a single-window interface it calls the Panorama Unified Operations Centre. The technology uses real-time data to unlock more value from field to fuelling station. At a single glance, teams can see integrated, real-time information—including operational data—from across the organisation’s operations and distribution network. With this insight, ADNOC has improved the speed and quality of its decision-making, while optimised operations have delivered overall savings of between $60 million and $100 million.
Bring connected teams together to maximise value
But there’s a way to raise the game, and that’s through teamwork. Even the best player depends on their team. Likewise, industrial companies can elevate their performance by linking up with internal and external stakeholders in the cloud—hybrid or otherwise. When backed by an agnostic interoperable system, a digital twin can fold in data from across the business value chain, bringing together suppliers, customers and other partners around a golden data thread.
The first remote-operated offshore platform in the Caspian Sea uses just this kind of integrated, cloud-accessible digital twin. Operated by longtime partners KBR and bp, the model pulls together design, scan, and contextual data in one place, allowing remote teams to plan maintenance and enhance safety measures—in this case, even before the plant went into operation. Remote data access also shortens time to decisions, so even offshore maintenance now takes place onshore, reducing costs and carbon emissions. The results reveal improvement opportunities for other use cases and enable both companies to maximise their investments.
As we know, staying alert to new developments and opportunities ensures you’re at the top of your game. It’s something elite athletes are familiar with: they swiftly adapt to new conditions and onboard feedback to enhance their performance.
When infused with AI, a digital twin continuously monitors and simulates real-world conditions, allowing companies to quickly adapt to changes or issues as they arise. Businesses can pivot on the fly, ensuring they remain effective and competitive even in a rapidly changing market.
But the digital twin’s full potential will only be realized as technology develops. When backed by agnostic, interoperable software solutions, a digital twin can be augmented and extended to take advantage of new opportunities. In a future where humans and machines work together—what’s being referred to as Industry 5.0—the connected digital twin could form the basis of advanced virtual environments like the industrial metaverse. It could be tapped in training applications to help customers understand products or processes. It could even be used to create fully autonomous industrial systems that can self-optimise and self-correct, pushing the boundaries of efficiency and innovation even further.
The connected digital twin: the MVP of industrial operations
The journey to peak performance begins with a strong foundation. Data provides the materials to build that foundation, and data technologies such as AI-driven digital twins and open digital ecosystems can build industrial competitiveness. Along the way, practical challenges like integration issues, investment readiness and technical barriers will need to be addressed to avoid impeding progress.
Industrial businesses already understand the advantages of a data-driven approach. Half of all respondents in the industrial intelligence survey cited higher innovation and customer satisfaction (51%), great agility in responding to challenges (50%), increased operational efficiency (48%) and better sustainability outcomes (46%) among the top business benefits of onboarding transformative digital technologies.
The connected digital twin and connected workers put those goals within reach as organisations look to navigate today’s challenges and bat for the opportunities of tomorrow. It’s time to elevate your game and bring in the MVP.
[1] https://events.aveva.com/aveva-iii-report-2024
Image Credit: AVEVA
