Digital Twins Disruption

How do digital twins disrupt existing service business models?

Veronica Martinez, Cambridge Service Alliance 

Digital Twins are one of the most promising technologies that will change our futures. They pair physical and digital objects and enable a real time, dynamic and interactive communication between the two objects. What makes the Digital Twins utterly amazing for industrialists and consumers is the access to real-time digital models that can be used to operate, simulate, analyse, optimise and improve systems between the asset, provider, customers and consumers.

Digital Twins connect, aggregate and analyse your data coming from diverse sources (including CAD systems, MES software, ERP, assets’ sensors and actuators, etc.) and create a well-informed, real time communication with you.

The adoption of Digital Twins is rapidly increasing with important benefits for operational excellence and business outputs, for instance:

Digital Twins enables the creation of more services business– “It is Digital Twins that we've built in the installed base and then it's the applications that matter… create digital services for our customers. Over $5 billion of orders only this year” (Bloomberg Government Disclosure, FNDW 24^th May 2017).

Digital Twins supports Digital Worker Capabilities – ”It connects with field service technicians to dispatch and provides information for operations and maintenance. Workers submit the Operations & Maintenance (O&M) information back into the system, closing a full loop from problem identification to resolution” (ENP Newswire 13^th June 2017).

Digital Twins enables more informed bidding at short and long term (ENP Newswire 13^th June 2017).

At the University of Cambridge, Dr. Veronica Martinez and her industry Partners from the Cambridge Service Alliance, organised a successful workshop to debate “How Digital Twins Disrupt Existing Manufacturing and Service Business Models”. The workshop took place on the 21^st September at the Institute for Manufacturing. The atmosphere of this event was vibrant with the presentations and group discussions from participants such as IBM, Caterpillar, Siemens, Ocean Array Systems, JLR, BAE Systems, Atos and Perkins among others.

In this first Digital Twins workshop, we discussed and learnt from our speakers: "The value of Digital Twins - understanding revenue vs. overheads” and “What disruption digital twins will bring to our existing business models" and “How Digital Twins could be used for smart training and management purposes”.

Watch this space because the next Digital Twins Workshop is coming soon.  Read more about this project at https://www.ifm.eng.cam.ac.uk/people/vm338/