From technology to eco-system: Digital twin as a transformative tool

For us at Kongsberg Digital, it was amazing to see how much ground was covered by our thought leaders heading the panels. Insights into data-driven foundations and nuts-and-bolts discussions on how to drive value from Digital Twins at scale helped enhance everybody’s knowledge of the technology. Debates about achieving maximum value through unification of digital twin and machine learning and AI and what considerations should be made to combat cyber-attacks touched on aspects that merited more thought and focus. And with this, we could go further and consider how a digital twin could accommodate and reimagine how people work today in the heavy asset industry and transform the behaviour of a company before laying out how a digital twin can help reduce the carbon footprint of an organization through emission transparency, advanced predictive methodology and sophisticated data analytics.

VALUE

As the concept of a digital twin becomes clearer, the focus is shifting from exploring the technology to focusing on how to capture value from it across the asset lifecycle and across different areas, from predictive maintenance to safety, operational performance to fundamentally changing how people work. Obvious value indicators include accelerated return on investment, increased automation, improved predictive maintenance, and production process optimization.

Part of the value is of course in determining if the twin should be custom-made within the company, developed based on a close partnership with a partner, or a combination. In short, build or buy? A hybrid “build-buy” approach will bring operators the best of both worlds with a strong focus on the values the operator brings to the project coupled with the opportunity to leverage partner expertise to accelerate the journey and bring strength and maturity to the solution.

TIMING AND SCALING

Choosing a hybrid approach and taking advantage of partnerships will also let you get going quickly, because the time to get started is now. Identify a problem you want to solve, activate your partner ecosystem to create a digital roadmap with you, start small then scale, and use your partners and your own organization as it learns and matures to boost and accelerate your journey.

In addition to – or maybe as part of – the digital roadmap is the tangible, scalable business case that will accelerate value and ensure long-term adoption. Less than 10% of one-off projects are operationalized and keeping this sobering fact in mind will hopefully also drive the scaling process.

FLEXIBILITY AND INTEROPERABILITY

Stating that digital twin technology is data-driven is really a matter of course. But what does that really mean? Key to the process are flexibility and interoperability, two concepts that must be kept in mind when liberating data and removing silos. These factors should be taken into consideration, to avoid companies end up locked in a data lake that doesn’t integrate and offer the speed you need for adoption. Instead, consider enabling data platforms that are built on open standards as well as building a competent partner ecosystem to enable interoperability at pace.

DIGITAL TWIN AS GREEN DRIVER

With sustainability and decarbonisation becoming strategic topics on the agenda, digital twin technology can drive both. Integrating carbon emission data means that the digital twin can help companies reach their carbon reduction commitments. At the same time, advanced analytics and predictive capabilities mean that a digital twin can change behaviour: If a decision-maker can see the carbon emission impact of a decision before, say, changing production pressure, they can modify their decision to make it as sustainable as possible.

We now have a clearer picture of the definition of a digital twin; the considerations of build, buy or both; its driving value; and we realized that the technology is so transformative that scalability is a real factor.

But where to go from there? Considering the industry needs and trends, at Kongsberg Digital, we believe that an operational digital twin solution is becoming an industrial work surface that rests on four pillars: digitalization, scalability, collaboration, and decarbonization. Together, they lay out the means, the strategy, the tactic, and the reason why. That does not take the industrial work surface out of its digital twin-technology bubble but turns it into the ecosystem to support energy production in the 21st century.

Thanks to all who took part in the conference! It was an eye-opener and a great promise for the future of energy production.