‘Engagement is critical in the implementation of change’
“The advancement in technology must be seen as a means for the long-time worker to share their knowledge and simplify processes for the next generation of workers. This will drive efficiency in the workforce as a whole.”
The concept of a Digital Twin—the exact digital replica of a plant’s physical asset—has become among the most intriguing and potentially game-changing concepts in the manufacturing’s Digital Age. Unlocking that potential and overcoming the challenges involved in training and security inherent in realizing that potential, is among the most important next steps along the road to an interconnected manufacturing operation.
Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president of supply chain and manufacturing for SAP, understands the role the Digital Twin can play within the plant’s four walls as well as its impact elsewhere in the supply chain. He and his team focused on understanding the needs of both a Chief Operating Office and a Chief Supply Chain Officer in creating and launching SAP’s Industry 4.0 solution portfolio. He has more than 18 years of experience at SAP in work ranging from development to product and solution management and go-to-market functions.
CFE Media talked with Thalbauer about the Digital Twin as a concept, its potential on the plant floor, and how to get all parts of your manufacturing team to embrace this new technology:
CFE Media: To start with, how would you define the Digital Twin? What is it designed to do?
Thalbauer: A digital twin establishes a direct connection between the physical asset and its designed, manufactured, and deployed digital representation. The paired physical asset and the digital representation of it can be said to be connected.
A network of digital twins (NDT) brings many of these pairings together in a common network – with further connections made to business applications, business processes, and business networks of partners involved throughout the product lifecycle. Applications can include those for enterprise resource management, customer relationship management and ERP, CRM, and supply chain management. The most obvious business process would be product lifecycle management—but any critical process could be connected. Business network partners include designers, manufacturing teams, suppliers, maintenance provides, product support specialists, and teams that manage the decommissioning of assets at the end of lifecycle.
CFE Media: The idea of modeling a plant’s operation creates so many new opportunities, it’s hard to know where to begin. Where should manufacturers start, and what should their expectations be?
Thalbauer: Modeling plant operations does present substantial opportunities for analysis of asset conditions and performance characteristics. However, in many plants the ability to do so is predicated on signals coming from the assets through sensors and devices, many of which do not exist yet depending on the age of the plant and its sub-systems. When looking to monitor assets, look first to those that have “smart” capabilities to send conditional and operational statistics.
In SAP’s case, we use applications like MII (Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence) to capture this information, with analysis and reporting enabled through our Cloud based Digital Manufacturing Insights solution. This will give the company OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) insights and predictive maintenance information to help keep the plant operating at peak performance.
CFE Media: In a modern plant today, you’ve got from your long-time workers who may be resistant to change and an equally risk-averse CFO. How do you sell this concept to your team and generate buy-in?
Thalbauer: Resistance to change is a natural reaction to methods and processes that change an employee’s daily work. Engagement is critical in the implementation of change and entrusting the value of the long-time workers tribal knowledge information is needed to improve adoption of these changes. The advancement in technology must be seen as a means for the long-time worker to share their knowledge and simplify processes for the next generation of workers.
This will drive efficiency in the workforce as a whole to improve quality, increase yield and instill best practices for operational effectiveness – all of which a CFO will see as valuable in cost reductions, improved product value, margin gains and brand equity for the company.
CFE Media: Beyond modeling, the concept of continuous monitoring in an operational setting also is important. Talk about the Digital Twin as a maintenance tool.
Thalbauer: In some ways the two approaches are independent, but if combined, operational monitoring and the Digital Twin are each valuable and complement each other. Independently, IoT sensor monitoring for conditional insight can be used to understand and analyze the structural, thermal and operational characteristics of an asset or its constituent components. We have solutions gained through our acquisition of FEDEM and our partnership with ANSYS that enable this to be done in the context of our Asset Intelligence Network (AIN). We use this extensively to develop algorithms that will help companies predict failure and proactively maintain equipment before problems arise.
In these instances, the Digital Twin can be used as an analysis tool, it can facilitate collaboration internally and throughout the supply chain and provide guidance for design improvements or visually enhance maintenance and repair procedures with 3D instructions and AI interface support. This is one of the ways we help our customers connect digitally to perfect reality.
CFE Media: There are other technologies emerging in manufacturing—AI, robotics, virtual reality training, 3-D modeling. How do you see the Digital Twin tying these technologies together?
Thalbauer: As always, technology is an enabler here, the real question is how to leverage that technology to improve the business. The interesting thing in these cases, is that often times the Digital Twin is the basis for leveraging these technologies. This is actually a fundamental premise of our Network of Digital Twins strategy. The utilization of the Digital Twin in practical applications across the entire lifecycle of a product, in connection with the supply chain and integrated with business data and networks.
For example, from a practical perspective, the Digital Twin is being utilized in manufacturing processes to drive Augmented Reality interfaces for assembly instructions and as a means to recognize, explore and visualize a physical product or asset. In turn, it can also be used in the same context for training and MRO procedures to help eliminate waste, improve quality and productivity. The Digital Twin becomes the Digital Thread across the lifecycle and ultimately is the single source of truth for each individual product and asset.
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