Creating Digital Twins in Diverse Industries with Simio

In an offshore Oil and Gas facility near Norway’s coastlines, engineers struggled with optimizing the use of assets, increasing production, and ensuring the safety of operators within the field. The remote nature of the Oil and Gas facility meant decision-making was shared between both the off-shore team and stakeholders at the on-shore side of things. The inability of on-shore stakeholders to immediately gain insight into specific problems meant decision-making was delayed and complex problems took weeks to solve.

In an automotive facility in Stuttgart Germany, the automaker struggled to fulfill increased demand within specified timelines. The automaker also struggled with the need to improve product quality, to reduce cost, optimize its bill of resources, and enhance its production lines in order to compete with its peers in the automotive industry.

In the United States, a top restaurant holding corporation needed to reinvent its operational processes and kitchen layout to provide optimized services to its teeming customer base. The corporation also intended to solve the complex problems plaguing its ability to meet customer demand from its drive-through while ensuring each restaurant is adequately stocked to avoid stockouts and downtime.

The above symbolic scenarios highlight the fact that across every industry, enterprises have to deal with industry-specific challenges that relate to optimizing production or operational plans, ensuring safety, and delivering value-based services. In all three scenarios, stakeholders enlisted the assistance of a digital twin of their facilities to solve complex problems, to develop sophisticated plans, and to gain business insight in real-time.

The digital twin is fast becoming a powerful tool used by enterprises across every industry for asset management; optimize operational performances, process control, planning, and real-time monitoring. The innovative solutions the digital twin offers is why Gartner estimates that 75% of enterprises will make use of digital twins by 2022. Today, Simio Digital Twin Software offers businesses with a cutting edge digital twin solution to help you gain insight into complex processes and solve the challenges related to them.

Taking Advantage of the Digital Twin to Solve Industry-Specific Challenges using Simio

In the scenarios above, the digital twin representation of the Oil and Gas offshore facility enabled decision-makers and interested operators visualize the effects of specific actions to the overall facility operations. The digital twin also provided insight into how individual assets functioned in relation to the entire facility. Providing engineers in on-shore locations access to the off-shore facilities made it possible for optimization strategies to be developed and transferred to the off-shore operators for implementation.

Similarly, the automaker was able to leverage the digital twin to evaluate the effects of increased demand on its available resources and facility. The insight the digital twin provided ensured the automaker reduced its planning time by 30%, reduced operational cost by 15%, and eliminated 70% of its planning errors. For the restaurateur, the digital twin and the 3D visualization environment it provided ensured an optimized layout was developed and the digital twin representation was used to validate the layout plans and educate restaurant staff.

In the case of the restaurateur, CKE Holdings Inc. owners of Hardees and Carl’s Jr., Simio Software was used to create the digital twin used to optimize the layout plans and capacity planning strategies for these facilities. Today, Simio Software digital twin are employed in diverse industries to solve peculiar challenges and analyze complex industry-specific scenarios. Simio Digital Twin can be applied across the following industries:

●     Manufacturing Industry – The digital twin is used in solving diverse challenges to improve innovation, production quality, and develop strategies to optimize manufacturing operations. Some examples of these manufacturing operations Simio digital twin provides insight into include shop floor performance, predictive maintenance strategies, inventory and resources management, supply chain and logistics management.

●     Aerospace Industry – The aerospace industry is governed by diverse sets of regulations due to the sensitive nature of the industry and the aviation equipment it produces. Simio digital twin is employed to execute predictive analytics to gain foresight into how increased demand or material constraints, and shop floor factors can hamper production lines and productivity.

●     Healthcare – The digital twin is regularly deployed to analyze the ability of healthcare professionals to continuously deliver optimized care to patients. The virtual environment Simio digital twin provides is a powerful tool for improving personalized healthcare, developing operational strategies, optimizing capacity plans, and improving the overall performance of a healthcare facility through high-performing resource management.

●     Supply Chain and Logistics Industry – The logistics and transportation of materials, ingredients and resources is an integral operational process of most industrial endeavors. Simio digital twin provides the tools needed to gain insight into logistics and transportation networks to enhance shipment protection initiatives and speed up go-to-market and delivery timelines.

●     Smart City, Estate Planning and Management – Properly initiating and managing real-estate plans, running smart cities, and developing accurate city plans requires proper validation before physical implementations. The digital twin provides a virtual environment for estate planning and validating city layout plans. Simio digital twin can leverage the data smart city produces to enable building and housing management departments to understand the effects of the different constraints and variables that could affect the proper running of a city.

●     Defense Industry – The defense industry struggles with managing its supply chains, training staff remotely, and facility planning for its bases. The digital twin offers a cost-effective solution to solving these challenges due to the accuracy of the virtual representations of physical processes it mirrors. With Simio digital twin defense organizations can optimize facility plans and develop high-performing supply chains that ensure important deliveries are delivered on time.

First and foremost, the digital twin is a powerful business insight tool which mirrors the operations of physical assets, facilities, and their operations. This means you can rely on Simio Software to create digital twins of your industrial processes using the data from your IoT or smart frameworks for diverse applications.