Digital twin within the supply chain – the benefits

In the first blog in this series, we looked at the concept of leveraging a digital twin approach to optimize your supply chain. In this blog, we look at how Capgemini has helped a client to efficiently minimize the friction in the order processing area, and delve into the benefits that a digital twin can bring to your supply chain organization

15–20% FTE reduction with minimal change

One of our global clients was concerned about the low scores it received in a customer satisfaction survey, which was caused by inconsistencies and errors in its order validations. On top of this, the client’s huge, unmapped data lake wasn’t helping its increasing need for end-to-end supply chain visibility – especially due to these order-related concerns.

To address this, Capgemini took an industrialized approach to quickly identify the cause of the problem, leveraging our Digital Global Enterprise (D-GEM) transformation platform to create a digital twin of the client’s order management operations. The steps we took are outlined below:

• Business mining – the client’s data was fed into a process mining application to understand what was actually happening in its order management operations. This revealed that the client’s order managers were confirming orders without the proper downstream validation, which was the main cause of the low customer satisfaction scores. It also revealed that, despite a lack of order validation, customers experienced issues in only 40% of cases
• Modeling – the process mining outcomes were translated into a virtual model of the “as-is” operations and an optimized scenario leveraging solutions that would accelerate order processing operations
• Simulating – digitally-isolated, offline simulations revealed that the model outcomes had high queues in a number of downstream tasks – no matter what the order confirmation step sequence was. At this stage, we also verified the transformation by inputting the relevant values into our offline model
• Improving – process re-engineering analysis revealed that a specific downstream order validation process could be robotized due to its low complexity and high repeatability. The implementation of robotic process automation (RPA) manual processes to be eliminated, leading to a 91% improvement in overall processing time.

Capgemini’s D-GEM platform confirmed the digital twin model predictions, delivering a 15–20% reduction in order to invoice FTEs and a 94% increase in order completion time.

What digital twins bring to the table

As the use case above shows, implementing a digital twin across your supply chain can deliver a range of tangible benefits, including:

• Enhanced bottleneck identification – provides a continuous, end-to-end view of frictions and bottlenecks across your supply chain, which enables faster problem resolution with minimal human intervention
• Improved process design testing – mitigates business continuity and transformation risks before they occur
• Improved outcome prediction – enables benefits, savings, and potential ROI to be calculated before transformation occurs, maximizing your transformation positives while minimizing the negatives that often come with them
• Enhanced risk monitoring and emergency simulation – discovers the best course of action for emergency situations through proven, digitally-isolated testing techniques that can significantly improve your organizational stability.

Tangible, real-world benefits

In short, implementing a digital twin can improve efficiency and reduce supply chain costs by delivering business process outcomes simulated in a virtual environment that enable your organization to make the right investments and decisions for guaranteed return.

As digital twin technology matures and developers gain a wider appreciation for how it can be applied in the supply chain world, these tangible, real-world benefits will only increase. The only question remaining is: “Have you digitally twined your processes yet to ensure a successful transformation?”

To learn more about how Capgemini’s Digital Supply Chain practice  can help your organization leverage a digital twin to build a resilient, agile, and frictionless supply chain , contact: joerg.junghanns@capgemini.com

Jörg Junghanns  leverages innovation and a strategic and service mindset to help clients transform their supply chain operations into a growth enabler.