Digital Twins Packing a One-Two Punch, Survey Shows

Digital twins have moved from the concept stage to practical deployments. At the same time, business leaders are still just beginning to grasp to potential implications of this emerging approach to managing and organizing their operations.

That’s the word from a survey of more than 1,000 enterprises released by Capgemini, focusing on organizations with ongoing digital twin initiatives. These efforts couldn’t come at a better time, as most business leaders feel their organizations are falling behind with major industry challenges, such as servitization, sustainability, and regulatory compliance. Capgemini’s research shows that fewer than half of organizations feel they are able to meet these market demands. Organizations are looking to this technology as a way to address these challenges.

See also: In 2022 and Beyond, the World Will Embrace Digital Twins

The study finds that, on average, organizations working on this technology “have seen a 15% improvement in key sales and operational metrics and an improvement upwards of 25% in system performance,” the report’s authors note. “Increasingly aware of the potential gain, organizations plan to increase the deployment of digital twins by 36% on average over the next five years. They also provide a unique opportunity to reconcile profitable growth and sustainability. Organizations have realized an average improvement of 16% in sustainability owing to the use of digital twins.”

At the same time, only 13% excel in key areas of deployment and transformation identified by the survey’s authors. Frontrunners in digital twin implementations are seeing at least 65% higher benefits through increased sales, improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and improved sustainability.

In addition, the report’s authors note, digital twins enable new business models. “Through advanced digital twins, organizations can employ Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models.”

Digital twins are the next level of intelligent enterprises, the authors state. “While technologies such as AI, cloud, 5G, and edge computing are key catalysts of this journey, digital twins are at the core of the transformation. A digital twin can optimize the design and operate and serve phases of any system – be it a product, its related services, a production line, infrastructure, a logistic network, or even a system of systems. It enables collaboration all along the system’s life cycle and across ecosystems, thereby optimizing operations and even helping organizations reinvent their business models.”