Enterprise Digital Twin

There are various use cases for an enterprise digital twin.

One use case is to understand the workload and identify bottlenecks within the operations department.

Maybe you are familiar with this scenario. You are the GM of a Freight Forwarder and your Operations Manager comes to you and says our LCL Export department is collapsing. There are too many jobs and they are doing overtime every day. The team is alright with the overtime pay but the OM is worried what would happen in case one of the operators falls sick. He is also not able to approve any leave. He requests for extra manpower.

Asking for additional manpower means checking budgets, checking revenue and GP, checking productivity levels of the staff, and speaking to sales if this additional job load is permanent or seasonal. If the case for more manpower is justified, we then need to make a business case to management.

What if you had a digital twin of your department which would actually show which department is stretched and to what point. And you could see this before your OM raises the alarm. Usually by the time operations raises issues to management, the house is already burning – at least that’s my experience.

The identification of bottlenecks and workload issues is therefore one use case of an enterprise digital twin.