Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO): The Definitive Guide for 2022

A DTO (Digital Twin of an Organization) is a high-powered digital model of any organization. To increase your organization’s overall productivity, DTO guides you to focus on your organization’s strategic objectives and internal processes.

Digital Twin of an Organization involves the following:

1. The Previous data performance.
2. Proper understanding of current business goals, business models and processes.
3. Great support for intelligent business decision making.
4. Detailed transaction-level situational process analysis.
5. Performance KPI indicators with target levels.

Why DTO:

A DTO provides a virtual model of complete businesses instead of hardware, which enables business leaders to analyze and tweak business processes as needed.

Here are a few reasons why an organization need to build a DTO:

1. Most important and critical in business operations is the increase in Customer Experience.
2. To boost business operation efficiency, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used
3. You should change according to the changes going on in the world
4. Mergers and acquisitions shape large organizations, and the complex IT landscape needs to be managed.
5. As the competition is getting global and intense these days, the only fittest one will survive
6. To automate individual tasks and process steps, Robotic process automation and Hyper-automation are taken into use.

What can we do with DTO:

Digital Twin of an Organization enables the dynamic virtual representation of an organization in its operational context.

The employees, processes, data and assets exist in the physical world. With DTO, We can represent them all digitally, which in turn enables the Enhanced coordination among employees in an organization and Identification of an organization’s inefficiencies and weaknesses.

We can use DTO as a platform to train our employees on work operations and new practices.

We can do predictive analysis about risks and costs of adopting new processes and outcomes of changes in process, product or service.

Market share of DTO in 2020 and estimated market share by 2026:

In 2020, according to the research, the global digital twin market size was valued at $3 billion. Now, the market share is estimated to reach +/- $48 billion by 2026.

What is a Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO)?

The digital twin is storage for information, such as performance KPIs, process insights, and transaction-level data analysis of the current situation.

Digital Twin is a virtual model that simulates the physical components and behaviours of IoT devices (IoT devices are the nonstandard computing devices that connect wirelessly to a network and have the ability to transmit data) function throughout all phases of its life-cycle. A digital twin is created using sensors to collect comprehensive real-time data from real-world elements. That data is then used to create a digital duplicate that can help teams better understand and analyze real-world systems.

The digital organization helps you align both new and current employees with the company goals and operations. If a new employee joins the organization, a digital organization should provide an understanding of business operations, performance goals and overall strategy statements. For the existing employees, the digital organization should provide up-to-date information about the latest strategy, direction, and agreed on business models.

Why do we need a DTO:

Digital Twins have become more mainstream, and it’s become increasingly clear that anything can have a digital twin. The capabilities of digital twins have become more and more advanced. More industries are creating these models to help improve Performance which in turn leads to better outcomes. Using digital twin in an organization can support the implementation of changes or new initiatives. When fully implemented, it provides a full twin in the context of operations. The data used in DTO models can be consistently updated, which gives businesses real-time information on how the organization is functioning, utilizing resources, responding to changes and meeting customer needs.

Benefits of Digital twins of an organization:

1. Digital twins help to highlight operational inefficiencies. They allow for an extension of the lifespan of equipment and devices due to improved maintenance and optimization.
2. Due to many benefits, more and more businesses have begun utilizing digital twin cloud services in order to model and simulate infrastructural assets throughout their life-cycle.
3. Digital twin services have become more advanced, and they have become more user friendly and effective
4. Digital twins what we have today allows advanced digital simulations and models that can be read by themselves.
5. DTO’s increased insights, easy to understand data and user-friendly dashboards which can be used by the teams without any need of the experts.

How and Why business should develop a DTO:

To develop a Virtual representation of the organization, the first thing to do is to create DTO. Once it is created, teams can easily analyze and interpret data to learn more about systems and processes

Key components of DTO that should be kept in mind while implementing a DTO:

1. Destination
2. Map
3. Performance
4. Situation
5. Decision

Popular Digital twin of an organization software vendors:

Here is a list of DTO vendors

Companies:

1. Arrayworks Inc.
2. MAVIM
3. MyInvenio
4. Ortelius

The digital twin of an organization vs Process Mining and Task Mining:

What is process mining:

Process mining provides automatically-generated visualizations of the actual business processes in the form of dynamic flowcharts.

Process mining starts from event data. The event log becomes the input for process mining. An event log views a process from a particular angle. Each event in the log refers to:

A particular process instance

An activity

A timestamp

What is task mining:

Task mining is a process of collecting data from a step-by-step workflow of the users, using detecting systems they interact with.

Task mining works by:

Capture desktop data (clicks, scrolls, screenshots)

Collect words, numbers and additional texts on user’s screens using optical character recognition

Cluster actions into meaningful activities, by giving them “lables”

Process mining VS Task mining:

1. Users can integrate process mining and task mining by creating a digital twin of an organization, which will increase the capabilities of the solution.
2. Businesses can simulate hypothetical processes to observe the behaviour with the given change or compare them with the existing mining processes.
3. Users should keep in mind that DTO, process mining and task mining are all emerging fields only. These fields are not well defined in terms of the benefits they provide.

Which businesses will benefit most from DTOs?

A business type which require process analysis and monitoring can get benefited from DTO

Businesses that support simulation approaches for improving products, services and processes can also get benefited from DTO

Digital twin applications/use case by Industry:

Manufacturing

1. Product development
2. Self-driving car development

Healthcare

1. Improving operational efficiency of healthcare operations
2. Improving personalized care

Supply Chain

1. Enhancing shipment protection
2. Creating a logistic network

Retails

Customer modelling & simulations

10 Use cases for creating a Digital Twin of your organization:

1. Value-Oriented Program and Portfolio Management
2. Demand-oriented value creation networks
3. Procedural and Work Instructions
4. Enterprise Performance and Cost Optimization
5. Digital Transformation
6. Customer Experience Management
7. Operationalization of Business Events
8. Operationalization of Business Capabilities
9. Business Process Outsourcing
10. Mergers and Acquisitions

AI in DTOs:

AI and the digital twin contribute to one another in functionality in a mutual way. For DTo’s, supporting AI can have the following:

Benefits

1. DTO model is a virtual representation of a process that can go through numerous repetitions and scenarios.
2. The simulated data produced by a DTO model can be used to train an AI model which will enable:

A. Creating virtual test scenarios to test a future solution and optimize the results.

B. Predicting output of cases which may be rare in a normal testing environment

C. Discovering patterns in workflow data.

Challenges

1. AI models used in business today are mostly based on supervised machine learning, where the model learns from labeled examples.
2. Unsupervised machine learning predicts outcome, as a cluster or a group, by discovering underlying structures or patterns in unlabeled data.
3. Challenges of implementing unsupervised machine learning are:

A. Training times become longer for employees

B. There will be a risky factor of inaccurate results

C. Due to the high volume of training data, computational complexity may arise

D. To validate output, the human intervention must be there

Future of DTOs:

1. Simulating a whole Organization is a most complex system. A DTO involves and solves it.
2. Decrease in costs may lead more businesses to implement AI in different aspects of workflow, as interest in AI is increasing, which in turn leads to advances in AI and machine learning.
3. Top businesses with a 9/10 ranking factor have an ongoing investment in AI
4. With increased AI capabilities, DTO’s can grow more popular among businesses.
5. Progress may be slow as the problem of optimizing an organization is far more complex than any problem AI systems have solved in the past.
6. AI models have performed excellently in simpler, better-defined problems than process optimization so far.
7. Even though we expect more businesses to adopt DTO software, we cannot expect transformational AI systems that can manage organizations in the short or medium term.