The next evolution in virtual twins? Getting someone else to do it!

As technological, environmental, and geopolitical trends collide, today’s businesses face an unprecedented barrage of transformative imperatives. It's not a matter of piecemeal change here and there, of upgrading “just” that factory, or redesigning “just” that product. To borrow a phrase, adapting to today’s change means doing everything, everywhere, all at once.

?I’ve seen first-hand how virtual twins are uniquely placed to respond to this multidimensional challenge, providing holistic solutions that can simulate everything from the micro to the macro scale. Businesses agree – according to 麦肯锡 , 70% of C-Suite executives are exploring or investing in virtual twins.

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Yet despite this, difficulties remain. When I polled LinkedIn about this last month ; a full 44% of you said that a lack of the right skillsets was hindering virtual twin implementation (although encouragingly, 29% of respondents reported no difficulties!).

I get it. While the history of virtual twins goes all the way back to NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration ’s 1960s Apollo programs , they are still relative newcomers in today’s business environments, and it can take time to develop the expertise to effectively develop, deploy and operate them in-house.

But then again, why do businesses think they need to run them in-house at all?

That’s why I’m so excited about what my 达索系统 colleague Michel Tellier and team are doing with Virtual Twin as a Service (VTaaS), where they’re not just providing customers with software, but also deploying, running and optimizing that software for them.

I think of #servitization a bit like organizing a wedding: you could do everything yourself. But a professional caterer already has the equipment, recipes, and know-how needed to deliver five-star table service –?where in-laws don’t go hungry, and cake comes out after the champagne –?allowing you to refocus your time and energy on the rather more important parts of the day!

Metaphors aside, if we want to see how effective service-based approaches can be, we need look back no further than COVID-19. For many companies, this was a commercial as well as a humanitarian catastrophe, where every day spent locked down was a day closer to bankruptcy.

So, when restrictions began to ease, these companies were unsurprisingly eager to throw open their doors to customers. But in the rush to return to business-as-usual, it was critical that public health was not compromised.

Among those navigating that transition was LA CITE DE LA MUSIQUE - PHILHARMONIE DE PARIS armonie de paris, who operate the Pierre Boulez Symphonic Hall outside of Paris?– that is, a large, enclosed space full of hundreds of people (and their pathogens). To assess these risks and identify solutions, they turned to virtual twins .

By taking a service-based approach, Dassault Systèmes was able to provide not just the underlying technology, but also the expertise and assets needed to build and run a virtual twin that could simulate air flow in the hall, and use the resulting data to inform remedial actions?– like reducing the air injected by the ventilation system. This ensured that when the Pierre Boulez hall re-opened, it did so safely.

Ultimately, what this service-based approach provided was not a series of tools and techniques, or even insights, but value – the ability to effectively drive business in the right direction at pace.

At the end of the day, it’s value that we really want. When we hire a wedding caterer, we’re not paying for a chef or for food: we’re paying for satisfied guests. Likewise, NASA didn’t set out to build a virtual twin: it set out to win the space race.

?So did La Philharmonie de Paris really want a virtual twin? Did they even, ultimately, want the insights that the twin would provide? No. They wanted a way to safely re-open to the public. Everything else was instrumental to that goal.

?That’s what (as we discussed in our Manufacturing Industries Trends Guide ) servitization provides: a shortcut to the value you actually need. It’s no different, at heart, to what has happened over the last decades in IT. Few businesses now manage their own IT infrastructure, or their own on-site servers. They outsource that management to the experts and focus on where their own strengths lie.

?VTaaS is this, and more. Because what’s really exciting about VTaaS is the scope: it aims to revolutionize not just one element of a business, like IT, but everything from simulating molecules in product formulation, to redesigning intercontinental supply chains.

?It’s a true revolution, and I’m thrilled to have a front-row seat.

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#VTaaS #VirtualTwin #DigitalTransformation #XaaS