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Digital twins and process excellence: A match made in heaven

Oct 12, 2023 | 3 min read

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John Adamek

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The reality is that this takes a lot more effort and brainpower to achieve without modern technology to support it.

Business processes can often be weighed down with steps, inefficiencies and bottlenecks.. Combine process excellence tools and methodologies with digital twins – more on this later – and you can make significant improvements to your business processes to maximize efficiency and productivity – and, as a result, your profits.

The ins and outs of process excellence

Process excellence is the practice of continuously improving your business processes so that they are as efficient, streamlined, and as free from issues as possible. It’s an increasingly important part of business process management. It’s the next step after process mining, which you can learn about in our blog on the subject.

After you’ve mined your processes and have an in-depth process map for each one, it might feel like you’ve done all the hard work. However, processes continue to evolve as new technology and offerings are added to the business, which means that new steps are added to your processes. Process excellence is the methodology for ensuring that you continue to optimize these processes as they grow and change with your business. Because, let’s face it, excellence is all about continuous improvement, it’s not just a one-time thing!

Embedding a culture of process excellence into your business, powered by the right technology, can bring a wealth of benefits. These include metrics, the ability to continuously improve, reduced risk of human error, increased employee satisfaction and productivity, increased agility and reduced unnecessary manual paperwork.

These benefits are all enabled and heightened by implementing a digital twin to drive continuous process excellence. You can take a deep dive into Process Excellence by downloading our eBook “Unlocking Process Excellence: A Journey Towards Operational Success”.

What is a digital twin – and how does it boost process excellence?

A digital twin is a virtual duplicate of your organization’s most important operations. It maps out the many interconnected business processes behind your day-to-day operations. It’s the next evolution of the old-school, boardroom-based process maps with hundreds of sticky notes that you find on whiteboards in meeting rooms or written down in a shared document. These traditional process maps are static and often lead to missed sub-processes or they don’t incorporate the intricacy of human intervention. But a digital twin maps out every single step with precision, mirroring the real world.

For business processes that all happen digitally, the process can be mapped in its entirety by process mining, and the digital twin is created from the results. For processes that involve some offline activities, we use a technique called the Monte Carlo simulation to build a digital twin. This is a statistical technique whereby, even if an organization has no digital data to ingest – such as when everything is done manually – we can still do our process mining and build our digital twin with a high-degree of accuracy.

The digital twin provides an accessible, virtual representation of each aspect of an end-to-end process, taking the guess work out of the equation. This means that it’s much easier to view and understand the extent of the process and flags any repeat or unnecessary processes, which you can then eliminate when working towards process excellence.

Digital twins not only improves processes, but provides additional opportunities for automation, like robotic process automation (RPA), intelligent automation and this happens much faster than with more traditional process mapping techniques.

Process excellence and digital twins work together to continually optimize your processes

The creation of digital twins supports your continuous process excellence efforts in a safe environment that allows testing of iterations before rolling them out to the wider business. By combining these two approaches, organizations can create more efficient, effective, and productive processes and operations.

If you would like to find out how you can unlock business benefits by optimizing your processes, guided by expertise developed through our decades of experience, book a meeting now.

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