There’s a storm brewing in the current market in terms of shifting regulatory landscape, supply chain issues, rise of AI, sustainability goals, and issues that we don’t know about yet. Business leaders like us often find ourselves in positions that require predictions, root-cause analysis, and decision support to stay at the forefront of innovation. That's where the Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO) steps in as a trusted ally. As a virtual mirror reflecting the entirety of an organization - its processes, people, products, assets, and even the data that drives it all - this digital doppelgänger plays a crucial role in uncovering bottlenecks, analyzing impacts, and providing insights. According to reports, the DTO market is expected to experience significant growth, reaching $183 billion in revenue by 2031 after surpassing a critical milestone in 2026.
Developing and expanding a DTO necessitates a structured three-phase approach –
However, before creating a blueprint, it is important to ask the right questions like– “What is the organization's vision behind creating a DTO?”, “Which DTO will offer the greatest value to the organization?”, “What data should be collected to build the model?”, etc. Addressing such questions gives clarity to leaders like us who are tasked with ensuring that all initiatives are aligned with our organization’s vision & goals. This eventually empowers us to measure and refine process performance, simulate, and predict changes before implementation, and optimize operations. At e-Zest – An Accion Labs Company – we play an instrumental role in enabling enterprises design and build their DTO.
A successful DTO should exhibit the following characteristics:
- Real-Time Representation: A DTO offers a dynamic, up-to-date view of an organization's processes and operations.
- Comprehensive Data Integration: It should seamlessly integrate data from disparate sources to provide a holistic view of the business.
- Simulation and Analysis: The ability to simulate and analyze process changes before implementation is crucial for informed decision-making.
- Multi-Dimensional View: A multi-faceted perspective enables deeper insights and better decision-making across the organization.
To effectively deploy DTOs, we must first understand our current business operations by gaining visibility into processes, identifying inefficiencies and areas for improvement. This understanding lays the groundwork for crafting a strategy focused on optimizing workflows, projecting performance outcomes, and ensuring compliance with internal policies. Whether it's overseeing individual machinery or refining entire production processes, clarity on the intended outcomes such as boosting efficiency, minimizing downtime, or elevating product quality is crucial. Additionally, it is important to evaluate your organizational readiness through scrutiny of existing infrastructure, IT frameworks, data management protocols, and workforce expertise to ensure successful DTOs implementation.
Upon interaction with organizational leaders who have successfully implemented DTOs across industries, we identified the following steps that can yield substantial outcomes.
- Process Modelling: Collaboratively craft diagrams that encapsulate your business context, integrating strategic goals, allocated resources, and critical assets into the visualization process. This ensures alignment with overarching business strategies.
- Process Mining & Conformance Checking: Employ process mining techniques to uncover areas for improvement and identify their root causes. Validate whether operational processes adhere to their designated design parameters. This is crucial for ensuring that your organization employs the best practices for process optimization.
- Visual Version Control: Emphasize the significance of visual version control, enabling seamless tracking of revisions and facilitating efficient collaboration among stakeholders. This ensures that process documentation remains accurate, approved, and audit ready.
- Review & Approval Cycles: Leverage the RACI framework to orchestrate review and approval cycles, ensuring timely updates to process documentation. By maintaining an approved and current repository, we can bolster regulatory compliance and operational readiness.
- Process Simulation: Prioritize informed decision-making by simulating potential process enhancements to gauge their anticipated impact and return on investment. This proactive approach mitigates risks associated with change and fosters a culture of data-driven decision-making.
- Comprehensive Dashboards & Reports: Empower stakeholders at all organizational levels with intuitive dashboards and comprehensive reports. These tools provide real-time insights into process performance metrics, encompassing productivity, cost analysis, output efficiency, and compliance adherence.
Effectively implementing DTOs provides deep insights into business operations, uncovering insights, guiding enhancements, and aligning procedures with standards and protocols for optimized performance. e-Zest – An Accion Labs Company – has leveraged the DTO methodology to develop an innovative digital renal operating system for a leading provider of medical & pharmaceutical devices. This transformed the patient journey, reduced operational complexity, increased business agility, and helped in aligning business processes with the larger organizational goals. However, the journey did not end with implementation—it evolved. Continuous optimization and vigilance are crucial to ensure value addition. By bridging the divide between present realities and potential outcomes, DTOs offer a dynamic platform for process improvement. Additionally, real-time monitoring helps in warding off potential inefficiencies before they become serious and harmful to an organization's growth. This proactive approach safeguards against stagnation, ensuring that your business remains competitive and responsive in an ever-changing landscape.
