What Is Digital Twin?
Types of Digital Twins
Digital twins come in many forms and varying complexities, but can be distilled across four physical areas:
Product
Captures product lifecycle from origin through operating in customer’s end environment and decommissioning.
Process
Representations of manufacturing operations and production activities to create products and services.
People
Deliver task information to workers and/or capture data to improve process efficiency.
Places
Virtualize a place—like a factory or workstation—to gain insight into the complex workings within the environment and engage with it.
What Can Digital Twin Do?
Digital Twin to Improve Service and Uptime
With PTC as a partner, Howden is using technologies like augmented reality and IoT to demonstrate the power of immersive experiences. One of Howden’s goals is to use digital twin technology to reduce business risk for their customers by improving the uptime of deployed products.
Digital Twin of Place, Process, and People
The emerging technologies of spatial computing and analytics are enabling a digital twin of place. With both a bird’s eye and detailed view of a factory floor enabled by integrating multiple sets of data, spatial analysis offers visibility into movements within a space, and can make data-driven recommendations on how to improve processes and performance. See how in this video from the PTC Reality Lab.
Dive Deeper With Digital Twin
As industrial enterprises generate increasing volumes of data about the physical world, they are mapping this data back to the IT systems that define their products, processes, people, and places to enhance the digital thread. Digital twins are quickly proving to be a key strategic accelerator for digital transformation and the means in which to unlock the value of data across the enterprise.
In the State of Digital Twin 2022, we explore how digital twins are impacting businesses today across engineering, manufacturing, and service. While noting a digital twin strategy does come with specific challenges, we outline the potential significant benefits of the initiative.
Applications of Digital Twin
The applications with digital twin are still emerging. With the technology comes the capability for real-time feedback – and even predictive monitoring and insights. This has the potential to expose new revenue opportunities, such as enhanced service delivery. Outcomes of these use cases are increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, driven by improved asset uptime, and faster time-to-resolution.
As we examine all the opportunities for PTC and our customers, there are three distinct areas where digital twin will make a difference: Engineering, Manufacturing, and Maintenance and Service. Explore each area in more detail below.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Twin Technology?
Industrial companies are starting to scratch the surface of digital twin benefits. Below is a round-up of potential benefits across use cases.
- Enhance supply chain agility and resilience
- Reduce product time to market
- Enable new business models (i.e., product as a service)
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Improve product quality
- Drive operational efficiency
- Improve productivity
- Inform sustainability efforts
Digital Twin Insights
Digital twins have enormous potential for the industrial enterprise. They can inform improvements to the next generation of a product, help identify bottlenecks in processes and support service technician to a faster repair. As you explore the right use cases and applications for your company, check out our thought leaders on specific digital twin topics.