Guest Post by Prasant Agarwalt: Imagining digital twins beyond manufacturing

The digital twin technology has matured over the previous few years. Yet, the commercial deployments are in the nascent stage with enormous value waiting to be unlocked by picking up the right areas for deployment. Armored with the Internet of Things and Machine Learning, digital technology has the potential to transform the way many businesses deliver services to their customers.

The potential of digital twin applications is immense in the retail industry. By timing stock-outs automatically, the SKUs reordering can be optimized to earn much higher RoI per square foot of retail space by tracking inventory throughout the supply chain. The big insights can be drawn using the granular real-time data from customer movement and purchase behavior. Add to it the numerous possibility to build consumer’s patterns of interest by integrating social media journeys. The proposition for digital twins becomes significantly valuable as it brings precision to the market segmentation approach and focuses on the consumer’s exact needs at that point in time. Adding the IoT powered smart innovation is the perfect low-hanging fruit for the retail industry to increase the potential of a drastic reduction in pilferage and improving overall processing time resulting in better cash flow management.

The challenge is a massive amount of data crunching to reach any meaningful insight. This is where machine intelligence coupling can unlock significant potential when coupled with digital twin used for data accumulation.

The sprawling resorts can use their property’s digital twin to help their guests seamlessly navigate and explore various attractions. By placing a handy customized device in all the rooms for guests, immensely valuable insights can be unlocked. It makes a great business proposition as the businesses can nudge customers to their key touchpoints and increase delight and service opportunities. It also helps create marketing opportunities to help guests try premium upgrades for a short period, which they can use in future stays.

The guests’ delight can be exponentially improved by using their expected destination within the resort and managing the service queue to reduce the waiting times. It can also replace the typical static in-room menu and use visual digital food and beverage menu to trigger and increase the likelihood of customer orders during their stays.

Digital twins offer immense potentials for Healthcare, ranging from patient safety, experience to operational efficiency. The large hospitals manage 100s of nursing and paramedic staff movement and constant movement of medicines and other surgical material. By adopting the premise’s digital twin and integrating with requirement management, patient care delivery can be made very efficient. In addition, by attaching all the physical machines to the digital twin system, significant savings can be made on idle equipment power consumption by correctly aligning the device operation to the patient care timings.
The more complex and sophisticated use of digital twins is happening by creating a replica of the patient’s organ and body structure. The leading players in this space are working on a mission to develop a virtual organ to replace the defected human body part easily. Imagine having virtual eyes or virtual heart saving you from the hassles of going through painful medical procedures and lead a lively life.Know how Softnautics IoT and Machine Learning mission can enable you to solve your business problem making the optimum use of the right combination of technology.