Digital Twin, Fueled by the Growth of IoT, is Regarded as a Tool to Gain Competitive Advantage

Digital twin is a virtual and dynamic digital representation of a product or process. Representing a physical asset in a virtual model helps users to better understand the system, monitor the performance in real time and even predict the problems before they can occur, thereby prevent downtime. Many industries find it as a new revenue stream and by changing the way their business operates they can plan for future using simulations.

The concept of a digital twin has been under discussion for many years, but was considered expensive due to high connectivity and hardware cost. With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) and data analytics, digital twins have become cost effective to implement and is even more efficient, making it as one of the top technologies sorted out.

Companies find various use cases to utilize digital twin as there will be billions of connected devices in next few years, thereby billions of digital twins can be represented. These digital representation of real devices will lead to new opportunities like remote periodic checkup and maintenance of all devices, new product development based on user preference, service upgrade, safety and better customer experience. 

Sensors play an important role in digital twins where they gather real time information about the structure, working condition and other environmental factors. These components are connected to either on premise setup or cloud based system, that process all the data which is analyzed against business requirements where analytics play a major role. The comparison analysis can help in concluding the working condition of the system or process and to take necessary actions on time. With the data collected and digital modeling such as computer-aided design (CAD), a digital twin can be created for billions of the connected devices.

Companies are under pressure to develop products faster at high quality and more efficiently and bring them to market. The success factor just not stop with it – they have to provide innovative services to support the aftermarket sales. Dependency on the traditional product development and after sales support delays the entire process and adds more cost.

Digital Twins allows companies to trace their products throughout their life cycle. In addition to product performance and maintenance it also provides opportunity to the companies to understand customer’s needs and improve customer experience. The companies or vendor can inspect and monitor which part of the product needs replacement considering the safety or operational efficiency, without being in proximity to the products. This helps them in the decision-making process that is associated with physical products.

To get a competitive advantage, companies look at digital twin as the opportunity to understand the customer needs, improve the existing products or services and to develop new products, thereby enhancing the customer experience. Not just in Smart cities and Factory 4.0, digital twin concept has penetrated health care in telemedicine technology to create personalized solutions to anticipate and prevent disease.

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