Digital Twin

This new trend is intended to drive current progress even further, but in some places is itself still partly in research. But why do digital twins seem to be indispensable in many corporate areas and what opportunities does this technology offer for logistics and intralogistics, for example?

The added value seems great, but despite this, digital twins have yet to find widespread application. Rainer Schulz, Managing Director of Sysmat, is following the development closely and knows: "With digital twins, decisive steps can be taken toward more digitization. An important component for the advancement of Industry 4.0."

A wide variety of studies show that, depending on the type, size and complexity, at least one in six corporate projects fails on average. In the future, digital project twins should remedy this situation and ensure more project successes, as the Bearingpoint analysis "Data-driven project management instead of gut feeling" showed. 

Digital project twins focus on execution and map all processes passing through a project integratively. They thus offer an end-to-end solution for building a digital product model. The goal is to gain a 360-degree view of the project or project portfolios. This makes it possible to react proactively to unexpected developments. On this basis, complex and non-standardized services can be handled efficiently in the future.

Realization competence

"Market forecasts in the area of digital twins are at growth rates of over 30 percent per year, and investments can be worthwhile not only for manufacturing companies, but especially for projecting companies. Digital project twins will improve realization competence as well as cost and schedule adherence. In addition, other success dimensions will also be increasingly taken into account in companies with them. In order to increase profitability, more comprehensive and reliable data on performance, scope, quality, risks and resources must be included in a holistic project view in addition to the success dimensions of cost and time".Frank Tiefenbeck, Partner at Bearingpoint, emphasizes.

An important requirement of digital project twins is the management and processing of project data. This requires tools that can manage and process any form of enterprise data and integrate it with data from many different sources. "A digital project twin can, for example, provide information about the customer's needs, how price-sensitive he is, and with which service providers or suppliers collaboration would be possible. However, in order for a digital project twin to provide a holistic view, a high degree of process integration must be ensured, starting with the initiation of a project, through the preparation of the quotation and implementation, right up to acceptance.emphasizes Frank Tiefenbeck.

Not yet holistic

At the moment, digital twins of an entire industrial plant are still proving too complex and economically unviable, which is why the technology is mostly only used in individual projects or phases of planning and implementation. But even on such a small scale, the opportunities offered by this technology and its strong impact on the future of industry are becoming apparent. "With its real-time data and great transparency, digital twins can save not only time but also costs for companies in the future. Further research in this field may bring some more progress in a few years."explains Rainer Schulz. As a visual test object, constant decision-making aid or maintenance support for the real plant, nothing stands in the way of the digital twin's future.