Sustainability & Business Continuity: A Powerful Partnership

How enterprise-wide digital twins are revolutionizing business and sustainability risk management.

Traditionally, business continuity plans were focused almost entirely on risk management and operational resilience. Their main goal was to ensure that critical functions could continue or quickly resume during disruptions like natural disasters, equipment failures, cyberattacks and other operational crises. These plans were generally reactive – that is, prioritizing ways to ‘react & contain’ to these crises as they arose rather than proactively designing for resilience.

Aspects of sustainability have shown to impact continuity in recent years and have gained more scrutiny by decision-makers. Aspects such as increased exposure to environmental risks, resource constraints, price volatility, investor expectations on decarbonization and waste minimization and circularity.

The latest evolution in crafting business continuity plans is the usage of digital twins, enabling companies to predict and simulate scenarios related to both those traditional, operational risks and the increasingly-recognizable sustainability risks. This convergence of both sets of risks has led to next-generation continuity planning, which not only focuses on business survival rates but actively reduces environmental impacts over time.

Digital twins are fast becoming so much more than the simulation of a product as it is developed, such as 3D modelling and designing products for optimized manufacturing. With the power of integrated & networked manufacturing assets, linked with organization-wide ERP systems and, now, AI-based elements that autonomously represent entire functions in near real-time, digital twins are fast becoming a tool to optimize an entire product's life, from concept to disposal. Leading aerospace & automotive OEMs are using their powerful positions, capabilities and expertise to help decarbonize these emissions-critical sectors.

Are digital twins now truly enterprise-wide?

Yes. One of the key enablers for realizing sustainability ambitions will be the use of digital tools — such as enterprise-level digital twins — to monitor and reduce the risks of environmental impacts throughout the life of products. That means understanding the emissions impact of direct, internal processes within an enterprise as well as purchased services, resources and supporting activities from across its supply chain. These are also known as scope 1, 2 & 3 emissions.

By providing an enterprise-level, digital twin of all these operations, aerospace & automotive OEMs are now able to simulate how their products & services are used, the way they need to support them and their environmental impact. This means that OEMs can now model the environmental impact of their products in service as well as various elements of the supporting activities, such as energy consumption at sites like maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) facilities, inventory stores, or even general office blocks.?These capabilities have been well-established for a number of years and are truly enterprise-wide and getting better all the time.

How enterprise digital twins enhance continuity plans

Crucially, aerospace and automotive OEMs can then use the digital twin solution to test different scenarios and plot potential routes to decarbonize activities and products. This approach also allows them to optimize the delicate balance of through-life costs while maintaining essential deliverables such as asset availability. Digital twins are especially useful to aerospace programs, where long product lifecycles are particularly well-suited to being modelled in this way, giving a clear visual illustration of business decisions over a long period of time and providing a deeper understanding of the sustainability impact. For example, a digital twin can now identify the optimal global location for specific types of inventory, while balancing manufacturing costs, logistical costs and corresponding energy/carbon emissions to get the inventory there and then deployed when needed – all while taking into account risks from tariffs, supply chain disruptions and natural disasters.

OEMs are now able to explore constraints around many types of risk scenarios. For example, how energy supply affects operational output; How the amount of fuel storage facilities in a certain region affects distribution routes for their products; Or, how adverse weather events affect their supply of rare-earth metals. This ability to explore such a vast array of factors is very powerful as it can get into the complexity of aerospace & automotive enterprises. OEMs can interrogate digital twins to find out what might happen if a storage facility floods or if an MRO facility is affected by a forest fire. Understanding how to de-risk these types of situations is one of the most powerful aspects of enterprise-wide digital twins.

What is next for these powerful tools?

Building-in international standards and best practice would be the next, natural step for enterprise digital twins. Once a truly representative, enterprise-level digital twin is established for an organization, one that is providing valuable insights through, perhaps machine learning, or autonomous decision-making, can the stakeholders really begin to target areas beyond prediction and prevention and move to the ultimate end-game: Self-sufficiency – where an organization’s exposure to risks is as low as possible. Some may even say immune to certain risks.

For example, using model-based AI to enable organizations to understand how to optimize circularity in their operations, identify opportunities for energy reclamation or implement material recycling at specific stages can go a long way to insulating and immunizing their operations against continuity risks. Digital twins can facilitate this by:

·???????? Implementing circular economy models: AI-based digital twins can feed designers with information about manufacturability and operations, enabling them to design products that reduce waste, reuse materials, and reclaim energy, which decreases reliance on finite resources

·???????? More localized sourcing to reduce logistics risks and carbon footprints and closing resource loops.

What will be the challenges?

These next steps are not without their challenges. These will involve, first-and-foremost, information exchange systems as common infrastructure beyond the organization and its partners and supply chain. Successful implementations of circular economies at the enterprise-level often demonstrate how transparency is required between organizations, not only in a bilateral manner but also multi-lateral (‘value networks’). This is in contrast with conventional value chains and shows the distinctive features of value networks as an essential part of implementing circular economies within a product’s lifecycle.

This is why digital twins are instrumental to future business value networks – they can integrate multi-lateral stakeholders across a complex product lifecycle and overcome obstacles in clarity, goals and communication. By overcoming these, motivation of participants across the entire value network can be understood and aligned, whether these be in cost reductions, improving the value of resources, capacity building, implementing standards, having sustainable supply chains, meeting regulatory requirements or solving environmental issues.

Closing remarks:

Enterprise-level digital twins are reshaping business continuity plans by opening up the possibility of sustainable practices. In this way, organizations ensure they aren’t just capable of bouncing back from disruptions but are also operating in ways that protect them from risks, reduce their environmental impact, reduce costs, and build long-term resilience. Digital twins continue to enable a shift in continuity planning, from crisis management to a proactive, strategic approach that safeguards both business and sustainable futures.