Has your digital twin delivered on its promises? Does the whole organization know about it yet? Is it now delivering the results you envisioned?
As with any stage of your digitalization strategy, changing people, processes, and technology is an incredible investment not only monetarily, but also in time, resources, and the amount of sleep you lose thinking about its success. According to the study from Eaton, Digital Transformation and Energy Transition, “While digital change has become a priority in corporate boardrooms, its evolution is still in its infancy, requiring C-level buy-in, upskilling of digital capabilities and the adoption of enabling digital technologies.”
Yet, keeping your executive sponsor engaged is no small task because the next big problem is lurking and will pull their focus. This makes it even more important that you have evidence to show that the digital twin you developed is delivering results – creating efficiencies, improving collaboration across previously siloed teams, creating experiences for greater insights, or helping you predict future behaviors for informed decisions and better outcomes.
What if you could show evidence of smaller, incremental improvements in your digital twin? You could keep that executive sponsor interested and engaged as well as garner support for next in your digitalization strategy. And while most utilities are still building digitally skilled staff to make this transition successful, your small wins can be successful examples that help in both hiring new and upskilling existing employees.
While it is not necessarily a question of “should you have gone the direction of digital twins?”, it might be time to ask how you can make your digital twin environment work smarter for your organization and quantify the impact. Here are 3 small but effective ways you can prove its value.
1. Start small – solve a simple problem and share early success. This could be within your own department, or in alignment with other groups who have shared challenges and have different data in similar spatial locations. Once one team understands your goals and objectives, collaboration spreads quickly to others who want to be part of the larger solution.
2. Expose the value to others. Determine which audiences would gain the most value from the graphic layers and related tabular datasets. Provide demonstrations, examples and quick how-to’s on capabilities for expanded use cases and future requests. Consider both highly technical skilled teams, as well as novice users that may find value in new methods to make decisions. That means shorter timelines, lower overhead, and less rework.
3. Use it! Whether daily or in a time of crisis, remember that the digital twin is there for you as a foundation of what you can work with. Test it in simulation and be ready to provide access to something new when the opportunity arises. Do not forget that different teams own their contributions to the digital twin, which provides an opportunity for a refresh and update, often in real time. The best digital twins come together with both static and dynamic layers, offering a perspective that could be changing moment to moment. These insights can make you a champion and allow increased investment for future uses.
Example use case: Upgrading the nation’s aging substation infrastructure to support the increase in energy demand provides you with an opportunity to advance worker safety – and serve customers even better. You have a lot of substation assets with little historical engineering data. You can use drones with cameras to capture high-resolution images and collect LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data. Reality modeling is the process of capturing existing site conditions using photographs and point clouds to create high-fidelity, georeferenced, 3D models. Processes the captured data into a 3D reality model. By creating this digital context, assets can be easily documented, and 3D-registered infrastructure can be linked to operations and engineering data. These capabilities provide a complete, up-to-date representation of the asset as a single, digital source, which can be easily shared and streamed in other software applications for better asset management or for retrofit. For retrofit, you can then import the model into a design environment to plan upgrades, verify clearances, and produce an automated bill of materials. Everyone involved—from remotely located stakeholders, to engineers in the office, to workers in the field—can be connected and assist in the asset design, construction, operation, and inspection workflows.
If you are still trying to figure out a good place to start, let’s chat. Drop by the Bentley Systems, booth # 5019, at DistribuTECH in San Diego, February 7-9. Speak with the team who can show you ways to advance your digital strategy – and maybe cause that executive sponsor to talk about the value of digital twins with the entire organization.
- Discover ways you can use reality modeling to capture the current state of your asset and wearable tech to experience infrastructure in new ways.
- See how to more easily you can coordinate engineering, pole loading, and infrastructure analysis to gain insights into asset health and integrity
- Transition from 2D drawings to intelligent 3D modelling for the design, construction, and maintenance of substations.