“Leaders are building intelligent digital twins to create living models of factories, supply chains, product lifecycles, and more. Bringing together data and intelligence to represent the physical world in a digital space will unlock new opportunities to operate, collaborate, and innovate,” says Emmanuel Libeau, Senior Manager and Data Practice Lead at Accenture Luxembourg.
Image Credits: Kaori Anne Jolliffe / Silicon Luxembourg
Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 identifies technology trends that will have the greatest impact in the next three years. ‘Mirrored World’ – meaning the rise of digital twin technologies – emerges as one of the top five trends to watch out for.
According to Emmanuel Libeau (Senior Manager and Data Practice Lead at Accenture Luxembourg), an increasing number of real-world entities today already have a digital counterpart. This virtualized ‘mirror’ of their physical assets (machines, tools…) gathers data sets that characterize these entities in the digital world.
By entities, Libeau means both natural and legal persons, but also connected objects – a vehicle on the road, a package in a warehouse and more globally, the Internet of Things – all things that are now part of our daily lives.
The data expert draws three observations from this new reality. Firstly, the volume of data collected by these connected machines, tools and objects is growing exponentially.
Secondly, these objects are increasingly interconnected and interoperable. As such, they offer a relatively holistic, granular, and precise 360° view of these entities, allowing a very fine modeling of their complexity and behavior.
Thirdly, a factor that is becoming increasingly important: instantaneousness, i.e., the availability of data in real time, and therefore the possibility of knowing the status and state of the object instantly.
“The Mirrored World creates the possibility to model not only individuals and entities, but also entire ecosystems, as well as their interactions,” he notes. “Companies can set up sensors on their factory machines and analyze the collected data in real time, in order to, for example, optimize energy consumption or the temperature of these machines.”
Data maturity
Libeau sees an evolution in the maturity of companies with regard to the data they collect: “Many companies have been collecting and accumulating data in their databases for years or even decades, without really having exploited it; either they didn’t have a use case, or the technology didn’t exist to be able to exploit it,” he acknowledges. “Today, the technology is there, and the use cases are flourishing all over the world. Our Luxembourg clients are now telling us that they would like to take advantage of this evolution.”
The implementation of a ‘mirroring’ approach involves two phases: the first consists of identifying the value to be derived from the data and any gaps that need to be filled in order to maximize this value through a proof of concept and experimentation. This knowledge can then be used to create new products or to approach new markets.
Key role for startups
“However, at this stage, the quality of the data itself remains limited,” says Libeau. “The data is not yet fully structured; a number of structural and data quality capabilities are missing or incomplete.”
Companies can bridge this gap by enriching their data capabilities (with data governance, data management, tooling, seamless data integration across systems…) and also by embedding Data Quality ‘by design’ in their business processes. In some cases, this will also drive the need for cultural change to adopt a ‘data driven’ mindset. And it can take time. Therefore, it is in the interest of large companies to partner with startups as soon as they need to implement digital, and data driven use cases. “Because they have agility, startups can bring speed to larger companies when developing digital products and channels. In return, they benefit from the large customer base and strong reputation of their partner,” says Libeau.
The impact will also be beneficial for the Luxembourg economy as a whole: “Startups have an important role to play in innovative sectors where Luxembourg is strongly positioned, such as finance and aerospace,” he says. “There is real value to be gained in combining the agility and capacity for technological innovation of startups with the unique and differentiating know-how that Luxembourg is renowned for on the world market in these sectors.”
