Integrating Process and Physical Digital Twins

⇨ Digital twins will eventually end up becoming the foundational systems for running supply chains.

⇨ Digital twins in supply chain context are a combination of physical and process digital twins.

⇨ Creatively integrating these two types of twins across the supply chain is an imperative to build true, and realistic end-to-end supply chain digital twin.

Terms like Asset management and asset analytics have primarily been associated with monitoring the condition of equipment used on shop floors and other critical infrastructures like energy and utility. While that is one critical role asset analytics can help play, it is the ability to leverage the data generated by assets across the shop floor, including people who probably are your most important asset. This capability of leveraging the data captured from the floor to replicate asset conditions and processes drives manufacturing digital twin offerings like SAP IoT, Azure Digital Twins, and AWS IoT TwinMaker. While we generally assign the term digital twins to these platforms, a comprehensive digital twin platform can be further broken down into a combination of a physical, digital twin, and process digital twin. And this is the reason why this topic helps tie our upcoming research reports, Process Automation in Supply Chain and Inventory Management and Optimization. In this article, we will explore what these two terms mean and why there is a need to integrate these across the supply chain.