Digital twins change the game
When implemented correctly, digital twins deliver significant ROI. This is why more industries are building digital twins into their core asset and operational management processes.
Oil & Gas
Plant & Process
Precincts & Facilities
Rail & Road
Key benefits of building on Nextspace
Beyond the benchmark benefits of digital twins, Nextspace offers world-leading technology in three complex areas we see as the foundations of the future of digital twins.
These specialities are our special sauce, our reasons for being, and our purpose.
Data interoperability
Futureproofing data
Federating data
Against the backdrop of the endless race of innovation — defined by disruptive technologies and rising pressure to accelerate speed-to-market — business leaders increasingly forsake anecdotal and reflexive decision-making in favor of evidence-based insights. And it’s paying off: a BARC study found that businesses that used big data were able to increase profits by 8 to 10% and decrease costs by another 10%. What’s more, research from McKinsey indicates that the extensive use of customer analytics can lift ROI by more than 130%.
Digital twins can be a cornerstone of a company’s digital strategy.
— EY
Common benefits of digital twins
A digital twin has many applications across the lifecycle of a product and may answer questions in real-time that couldn’t be answered before, providing kinds of value considered nearly inconceivable just a few years ago. Perhaps the question is not whether one should get started, but where one should start to get the biggest value in the shortest amount of time, and how one can stay ahead of the competition.
— Deloitte
50
% reduction
in time to market
25
% improvement
in product quality
15
% reduction
in maintenance downtime
7
% increase
in cost savings
The more data, and the better quality the data is, the more realistic and useful the digital twins become. To be successful, businesses need to stream mass data for complex analysis, employing algorithms and machine learning to extrapolate from relative real-time data to virtual reality within the digital twin.
— Unilever
6
% improved
resource allocation
4
% enhanced
supply chain agility & resilience
3
% increased
customer insight
Data interoperability
Nextspace makes data interoperability affordable and easy to achieve.
Data interoperability allows different information systems to talk and comprehend information passed to each other. Interoperability offers a range of substantial, documented benefits, and the cost of overcoming legacy data silos has remained high.
Organizations benefit from data interoperability through improved information sharing and collaboration, better insights and boosted data validity, and the ability to provide AI with large structured datasets.
Graph source: Accenture
30
% decrease
in administrative costs
30
% reduction
in risk exposure
20
% increase
in decision-making speed
20
% increase
in safety
Actionable intelligence
Faster access to the right data means more informed decisions
Enable Industry 4.0
Less than 50% of manufacturers have access to Industry 4.0 data
Reduction of risk
Reduction of time to find the right data, especially in hazardous situations
Improve data security
Enabling single-source governance and security protocols such as distributed ledgers
Retention of knowledge
Creates systems to capture, store and transfer expert knowledge
Revenue growth
Organizations with high interoperability generate higher revenues
Futureproofing, and avoiding obsolescence
Digital twins need to outlast their physical asset, presenting the challenge of keeping data accessible and usable—data flows with technologies and file formats yet to be created.
To ensure digital twins built on Nextspace are futureproofed, you can adjust your universal schema to connect both outdated ‘antique’ software as well as any future data formats. This feature also means you can embrace and evolve data standards at any time without having to start from scratch.
Past-proofing
Digital Twins are the logical answer to a 50+ year-old industry challenge: assets are constantly adjusted to changing client needs, but the data and documentation are often not updated. That leads to a discrepancy between as-built and as-documented and is a major risk. With many older employees retiring in the next few years, we will lose a substantial amount of know-how. A Digital Twin addresses this problem elegantly, gives us control over our assets and makes us attractive as an employer for younger generations.
— Christian Arndt, DuPont
In a time where most managers are focused on the next quarter, who really cares about the lifetime of an asset? We would argue, everyone.
Whilst what you do today will affect any asset down the line, you also inherit asset issues.
And therefore past data is potentially more important than future data because past data absolutely comes into play this quarter and the next.
In providing futureproofed interoperability for tomorrow’s technologies, Nextspace’s platform also helps organizations with yesterday’s data.
Futureproofing, applied to the past. For want of a better term, past-proofing.
Companies older than 5 years have mountains of data that they struggle to convert to useful information. Whilst newer data feeds have easier short-term interoperability, this older data is typically dumped in a “lake” or just stored in its silo and ignored. With the exponential increase in data created by digital transformations, this issue will only become worse in years to come.
Graph source: Statista
The same applies to the need for systems such as digital twins to capture institutional knowledge to address the issue of an aging retirement-ready workforce producing an unprecedented skills shortage in many sectors. Particularly at risk is the tacit or experiential knowledge needed to maintain high levels of performance in today's complex technological, scientific, and management fields.
These pressures drive a need for futureproofed data and experience. Added to them are two related trends:
Digital transformation and workplace automation, ML and AI also drive a global need to transition human skillsets.
72% of IT budgets spent on existing IT issues, leaving only 28% on investment in transformation.
The inevitability of obsolescence
Digital twin obsolescence occurs when the lifetime of technologies and data streams required to keep the virtual twin operable are significantly shorter than real world assets and systems being mirrored.
There are many types of obsolescence with digital twins most affected by technical and functional obsolescence.
... obsolescence is inevitable in the long term ...
— Christian Arndt, DuPont
Unlike wine and cheese, software does not get better with age. Software obsolescence is not going away.
— Chris Romeo, Security Journey
A hidden cost
The cost of obsolescence is often referred to as a ‘hidden’ cost. This is because it tends to manifest as an unquantified frustration or obstacle, slowing down or putting additional pressure on teams, and resulting in a pivot where the obsolete data source is simply omitted going forward.
Obsolescence is less likely to result in a critical failure like the crashing of a 23 year old Windows 3.1 system shutdown of Orly airport, Paris.
The issue with a system that old is that people don't like to do maintenance work. Furthermore, we are starting to lose the expertise [to deal] with that type of operating system.
— Alexandre Fiacre, the secretary general of France's UNSA-IESSA air traffic controller union
Fiacre compared the challenges of running the Windows 3.1-supported DECOR to the issues faced by NASA with its Voyager program, which was launched in 1977. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, the two robotic probes that are used by NASA to study the outer solar system, rely on 250 kHz central processing units made by General Electric.
These 40 year-old computers are less powerful than today's pocket calculators, and use out-of-date programming languages like FORTRAN, which means that, with the impending retirement of the last engineer from the original Voyager mission, NASA will soon be recruiting a new expert on 1970s computer programming.
This hidden cost is more prevalent than people realise.
In December 2014, airspace over London was closed for 36 minutes and some fifty flights were canceled following a computer failure that was later blamed on 50-year-old software.32
50 years may seem like an extreme timeframe to be concerned about, but it’s certainly not that long in terms of the lifetime of most assets.
Federation
Discussion tends to revolve around the creation of a single digital twin. But the inevitable future is one requiring federation – interoperability between individual digital twins. Not just for smart cities but within organizations and even within complex assets.
Nextspace’s interoperability cornerstone treats separate twins in the same way as separate file formats, putting the holy grail of federated twins within reach.
Federated digital twins, are individual digital twins connected across data fields, assets, organizations and sectoral boundaries. Most platforms remain focused on the challenge of creating a single twin, and therefore lack the technical ability to easily federate separate twins.
Interconnected digital twins will provide a better understanding of the complexities of interdependent systems, leading to better decision-making and interventions. According to the UK’s vision for Cyber-Physical Infrastructure, “semantic interoperability” is necessary for the ecosystem of connected digital twins to grow. Sharing data across organizational and sectoral boundaries can lead to minimized costs and friction within the ecosystem as it grows.
Companies are building 'digital twins' up and down their supply chains to create a complete, real-time picture of what's happening in their business and how they can improve it.
— MIT Sloan Management Review
The article goes on to explain that while digital twins have been adopted across many industries, they remain underutilized in supply chain management. The technology can be complex, especially when adopted across multiple facility types and locations.
McKinsey sees digital twins as “the foundation of the enterprise metaverse,” creating a “digital version of your end-to-end supply chain, from raw materials to delivery [that] continuously replicates in real time.”
Nextspace’s interoperability cornerstone treats separate twins in the same way as separate file formats, putting the holy grail of federated twins within reach.
The benefits of connecting digital twins go beyond just creating a fancy picture of what's happening. Connections between digital twins provide a systems view that demonstrates the quantifiable benefits of societal well-being, particularly in complex areas such as green space and air quality. Integrating data from natural systems with that from the built environment can ensure that ecological and geo-physical limits are not surpassed. By focusing on the connections between processes, technology, and organizations, companies can unlock more value from current assets.
Connected digital twins provide a better understanding of interdependent systems and lead to better decision-making and interventions.
Organizations can benefit from sharing data across organizational and sectoral boundaries, and a common framework for data sharing can lead to minimized costs and friction within the ecosystem.
The true potential of digital twins lies in the connections between them, leading to quantifiable benefits for societal well-being and unlocking more value from current assets.
