The landscape of supply chain and warehouse management is undergoing a significant transformation due to the rise and, specifically, the inevitability of Digital and Industry 4.0 technologies. Companies are striving to enhance their operations and adapt to the ever-changing market conditions, economic realities, and customer behaviors, by using increasingly advanced technologies to improve efficiency, agility, and cost-effectiveness. By leveraging the full cyber-physical power of Industry 4.0, where the tangible world is in continuous, optimization-focused connection with its "binary” clone, Digital Twins are the key construct for enabling a predictive Warehouse Operating System.
Digital Twins are enhancing and highly accelerating the value impact of the increasingly diverse landscape of physical warehouse automation solutions. They are extremely intelligent mathematical and numeric models of assets, processes or facilities, always connected to their real counterparts; their scope is continuous, optimal control of all resources, operations and business outcomes, given their unique ability to “look into the future” — identifying and navigating any and all issues before they occur AND capturing and executing on opportunities the human mind would likely miss in the myriad of systems, data, and logic.
The key to understanding the concept of a Digital Twin (DT) lies in its name - “twin”. There are always two parts involved in this construct: one real and one virtual, a multi-dimensional, hyper-intelligent model of the ideal state of its physical counterpart, connected by a bi-directional flow of data and information. Speaking of data, Digital Twins work with data layers. We think primarily about operational data, which is one layer. We can then add financial data on the otherwise existing twin logic and start computing with precision highly desirable KPIs. Subsequently, we can further add sustainability data, and so forth. All this supports the main objective of a DT to provide real-time insights that allow for informed, effective decisions on saving costs, improving quality, or achieving greater efficiencies.
We invite you to read our point of view on this trending topic, and learn why we consider Digital Twins the Operating System for predictive Logistics.