From Virtual Models to Real-world Impact — Maximizing Value from Digital Twins

By Linda Dotts, Chief Partner Strategy Officer, SS&C Blue Prism

When it comes to digital innovation, digital twins are on the cusp of revolutionizing how businesses operate. These virtual models, working seamlessly alongside real-world counterparts, have become indispensable tools for evaluating strategies, testing innovations, and optimizing processes. To truly harness the potential of digital twins, businesses must ensure they work in harmony — integrating plans, innovations, and technologies without introducing unnecessary risk.

A company’s process-improvement team can use digital twins, also known as process and task mining, to help businesses visualize and understand how automations have changed over time. In situations where tiny margins count, this allows companies to improve processes, reduce costs and improve product quality. With intelligent automation, powered by a digital workforce, businesses can expedite operations and streamline activities with unprecedented efficiency.

The global digital twin market size is projected to grow from more than $11 billion in 2023 to more than $137 billion by 2030. While businesses can unlock new levels of productivity, efficiency, and innovation with digital twins, the key is to properly identify which processes should be automated in the first place.

Optimizing digital twins in action

Process and task mining serve as the maestros of the digital landscape, orchestrating transformative changes within organizations. While both technologies analyze and improve real-time business processes, they focus on different aspects and employ distinct methodologies. Understanding the nuances between these tools is critical for organizations seeking to leverage their full potential.

Process mining concentrates on the broader view of end-to-end business operations. It seeks to discover, monitor, and improve the entire sequence of activities and interactions within an organization, including the way tasks are connected and how data flows through the processes.

Task mining focuses primarily on how individual tasks are performed by users, including the specific steps they take and the applications they use, to capture their interactions with software and systems. By extracting these valuable data insights, businesses can refine them to improve specific processes and business productivity.

To understand the role of digital twins in a successful automation strategy, let’s take a closer look at the part played by process mining in helping to assess the eligibility of new processes for automation and provide an end-to-end, realistic view of combined process performance.

See the whole board at once

With the advancement of machine learning and intelligent automation, digital twins are now a staple in driving innovation and improving performance across most sectors, not least in the financial, healthcare, insurance, supply chain and telecom areas.

Process mining is hugely beneficial for capturing a picture of how processes are performing, with process visualizations providing an accurate workflow through each of the process stages, identifying any delays or bottlenecks along the way. Process mining also makes compliance easier by using audit trails to create a model of processes. They can then be monitored in real-time and alert organizations immediately to any issues.

Without these process mining techniques, business process improvement goals would be based on guesswork, or be extremely complex and time-consuming because in order to properly analyze process performance, you would have to perform manual data reviews and interviews with users. This approach would not only be a slow process, but one with a high margin of error.

Process mining generates granular process maps, flowcharts, and performance metrics for entire business operations. In a rapidly evolving landscape, this helps you stay on top of your automation and identify opportunities to improve with minimal effort.

One use case involves a Fortune 100 financial services firm which needed to monitor investor compliance onboarding. Relying on 16 full-time employees, only 15% of it could be monitored overall, which had a huge impact on the firm. When process mining was deployed, the firm was able to monitor 100% of transactions, resulting in roughly $2 million in savings annually.

Another example of the benefits of digital twins and process mining is in telecommunications — or any other sector where companies manage massive physical and digital footprints across the globe. With so much business activity, simple tasks such as resolving billing disputes and processing payments are ripe inefficiencies and error. Business analysis through process mining is ideal for preventing issues before they arise or become more challenging to tackle.

The result in both examples is a holistic 360-degree view of business processes, asset condition, and historical data. Process mining can also monitor people, processes and tasks within a business, instantly highlighting areas for optimization so automations can then be developed to integrate anything from artificial intelligence to software analytics.

The benefits of integrated automation

Combining digital twins and complementary advanced technologies can help businesses open up new levels of productivity, efficiency and innovation. However, realizing maximum value requires a strategic approach that emphasizes collaboration, integration and continuous improvement.

Utilizing a process intelligence platform can help you achieve tight integration between process mining, task mining and intelligent automation.

Adding business process management (BPM) capabilities will also help facilitate decision-making and deliver a unified workforce with the ability to monitor, respond and even predict future outcomes. These comprehensive and crucial capabilities are all integrated and delivered by digital workers.

Inefficient tasks have the potential to slow the progress of your business, hindering its growth and efficiency if they go unseen. Whether it’s data entry, document approvals or regulatory compliance, each process presents room for error, oversight and non-compliance to sneak in. Digital twins and digital workers play a crucial role in process improvement to help alleviate these challenges and spot automation opportunities. This paves the way for enhanced productivity and optimized processes to ultimately accelerate and scale the success of your business.