Industry 4.0 and the digital twin

Manufacturing meets its match

​As manufacturing processes become increasingly digital, the digital twin is now within reach. By providing companies with a complete digital footprint of products, the digital twin enables companies to detect physical issues sooner, predict outcomes more accurately, and build better products.

There can be no turning back. Manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly digital. As this trend unfolds, many companies often struggle to determine what they should be doing to drive and deliver real value both operationally and strategically. Indeed, digital solutions may promise significant value for an organization—value that could never have been realized prior to the advent of connected, smart technologies. Of particular fascination of late seems to be the notion of a digital twin: a near-real-time digital image of a physical object or process that helps optimize business performance.

Until recently, the digital twin—and the massive amounts of data it processes—often remained elusive to enterprises due to limitations in digital technology capabilities as well as prohibitive computing, storage, and bandwidth costs. Such obstacles, however, have diminished dramatically in recent years.¹ Significantly lower costs and improved power and capabilities have led to exponential changes that can enable leaders to combine information technology (IT) and operations technology (OT) to enable the creation and use of a digital twin. Read more

Aaron Parrot and Lane Warshaw - Deloitte - 12 May 2017