Success Factors of an Enterprise-Wide Digital Twin Strategy

Abstract

While many companies have embarked on their digital transformation journeys implementing different forms of "Digital Twins" to cover specific business processes and challenges, their main challenge has been integrating these disparate Digital Twin projects into one single combined view to create significant new value and competitive advantage for the business. To be effective, the Digital Twin needs to be capable of supporting the entire asset lifecycle from the early phases of a capital project to operations and maintenance up to asset retirement, leveraging the same data in a platform able to support the end-to-end process. This paper looks at several approaches, which large owner operators at different levels of organizational information management maturity have used to build their Enterprise Scale Digital Twin strategies. It uses the lessons learned to highlight the successes and failures of these strategies and recommended approaches going forward. The results observed, identify that whilst there is a reasonably standard roadmap for approaching the development of Digital Twins most customers begin at different points along that journey. It also highlights that the end goal may not be the same across an Enterprise and that by taking the development of a Digital Twin as a series of incremental steps, independent of the starting point, serves to accelerate the journey by driving an increase in the organizational maturity in terms of People, Process and Technology and an improvement in data quality. One of the key components in any strategy was the ability to manage the information standard for the Digital Twin at an Enterprise level, for both greenfield and brownfield organizations and assets. The paper concludes the benefits of technical and commercial scalability and the requirements to get a solid manageable and trustworthy core of information should be at the heart of any Enterprise-wide Digital Twin strategy. This is contrary to the common approach of building a single detailed Proof of Concept (PoC) addressing as many use cases as possible and then templatizing that as an approach to repeat around the Enterprise, which often leads to failure on additional deployments where the maturity and challenges are different.