Gartner’s new Market Guide for Technologies Supporting a Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO) highlights use cases across seven different business domains and lists representative vendors serving this growing and increasingly critical domain.
Analyst Marc Kerremans defines a DTO as “a dynamic software model of any organization that relies on operational and contextual data to understand how an organization operationalizes its business model, connects with its current state, responds to changes, deploys resources and delivers customer value.” A DTO provides visibility, delivers situational awareness, and supports improved decision-making at operational and strategic levels across an organization.
The new Market Guide identifies the five building blocks of a DTO, outlined common DTO use cases, and lists representative vendors of DTO technologies, including Cosmo Tech and its 360° AI-Simulation solutions for asset investment planning, asset management, asset performance management, manufacturing, and the supply chain.
While DTOs can address different use cases across a variety of industries, there are five common building blocks that all DTOs share.
The first is Destination, a capacity for a company to identify where it wants to go and when it wants to arrive. These goals can include things like optimized business operations, improved or new business models, an optimized customer experience, or a reduction in carbon emissions. The user should be able to identify a time period to achieve this goal and this can be as short as hours or days or as long as decades.
The second is a Map, a guide to how to reach the nominated destination. Kerremans explains that this DTO map is the digitalized business operations model which includes both internal and external interactions, interconnections, and interdependencies.
The third building block is Performance, a means to monitor progress towards the destination goal. This is the business performance management framework that serves to align diverse and heterogeneous data sources and measurement schemes.
The fourth building block of a DTO is Situation. The DTO needs to be able to absorb real-time data from IoT and IIoT devices and integrate these into a business operations intelligence system.
Finally, the fifth building block is Value, the capacity of the DTO to create value for internal and external stakeholders. The DTO needs to guide the business decisions and actions of operational and strategic decision-makers to optimal choices that help them arrive at their destination as initially planned.
With these building blocks in place, DTOs can be applied to a variety of use cases in different parts of an organization.
In the Market Guide, Kerremans classifies operational excellence as the most popular use case amongst the users that Gartner has surveyed. Nearly one quarter (24.3%) identify improving operational excellence as their focus, “where enterprise value is linked with the different parts of an organization” and the way that “business processes can impact value creation” is the primary concern.
Digital business and cost or enterprise performance optimization use cases have also proved popular, and use cases focused on the customer experience have expanded from 13.5% of DTO use cases in 2020 to 18.8% of uses cases just two years later.
Manufacturing/logistics, IoT, and business process outsourcing use cases combined represent 17.5% of DTO use cases, with significant relative acceleration in the latter two domains as adoption and success stories from industry emerge.
Referring to the DTO market as a whole, Kerremans explains “we are finally in a stage where the general market is starting to inquire about solutions addressed by this concept”. This, he continues, is driven by global consulting firms and system integrators creating new offerings and services around the DTO concept for their clients.
As in the previous Gartner® Market Guide, Cosmo Tech has been included by Kerremans as a representative vendor in the DTO space. In particular, the Market Guide identifies two Cosmo Tech solutions – Cosmo Tech Supply Chain and Cosmo Tech Asset – among the products, services, and solutions it highlights in the space.
Cosmo Tech Supply Chain has already been applied by customers such as Michelin to drive efficiencies and reduce costs in its strategic planning. Michelin was able to identify an actionable strategic sourcing plan for the next five years that would reduce their logistic costs by €10 million annually. Its global profit margin is optimized by more than 5%, transport and customs costs reduced by more than 60%, and immobilized transportation costs reduced significantly.
Cosmo Tech Asset, too, has helped large companies like RTE, the French electricity transmission network and the largest in Europe, to apply 360° AI Simulation to their asset management strategy to control systemic risks and avoid the challenges of uncertainty and complexity. RTE uses Cosmo Tech’s technology to help enable robust asset management and investment strategies that are environmentally sustainable and resilient to shocks.
