Will Digital Twins Help Clients Base Choices on Environmental Performance?

If there was a hit list of terms most often used in the manufacturing business, “optimization” would be somewhere on the top. We all agree, for producers, success is based on becoming faster, using less resources, increasing safety, and better satisfying customers. With the adoption of industry 4.0 technologies we’ve opened a whole box of possibilities to increase the value of products and services to customers and communities. And how about environmental performance? Can manufacturers turn it into more than a welcomed byproduct of optimization? Without doubt, digital twins already help create environmental benefits. The question we should be asking ourselves is rather how and when we can help clients choose products but also suppliers based on environmental performance.  

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“We see a lot of opportunities for improving manufacturing and supply chain operations through industry 4.0,” says Roy Sibbald, Manufacturing Excellence Officer Pipelife, “Last year, we have started rolling out digital twins at our production units. They are digital representations of our complete physical manufacturing setup. With hundreds of data points running together from our production machinery and lines, we can gather all the relevant data we need to identify potential areas of improvement and to set measures accordingly.”

Together with fully digitalized production planning and scheduling, the digital twins help monitor and improve production timing, load factors, raw material use and energy management, product quality, and more. Clients benefit from higher production precision and therefore better quality as well as faster deliveries. Optimizing production performance and reducing errors saves energy and raw materials; it reduces scrap and waste, which in turn improves the products’ and hence also the company’s environmental performance.