How digital twins can support digital transformation (2024)

It’s evident: digitization is all around us. Whether we’re trying to contact a customer service agent or ordering food, digital technologies are behind an immense volume of day-to-day processes and transactions — many of which we don’t see ourselves.

Is it hard to imagine a time before this? Not really, if we think about it: long queues, constant errors, wrong information and frustratingly slow progress. Support from digital technologies has been the saving grace for many businesses and customers alike. It’s taken the repetitive, labor-intensive, and mundane tasks away from humans and directed them to focus on more high-level, productive work. The bottom line is that time is spent better, which brings out a wealth of other benefits with it.

But how do organizations go about this mammoth task to identify, validate, and monitor processes that can be reimagined through digitization?

It’s why most companies have a process-improvement team. They use process and task mining, also known as digital twins, to evaluate every task or transaction as it evolves, either through manual updates or – if they’re smart – by automation.

They analyse throughput time and processes for smoother operations. In situations where tiny margins count, this allows companies to improve processes, reduce costs, and improve product quality.

Intelligent automation makes quick work of business activities through its digital workforce. But do you know which processes should actually be automated?

How to make digital twins work for you

Process and task mining are the maestros of the digital landscape. Critical to your organization, both analyze and improve real-time business processes but focus on different aspects and have distinct methodologies.

Process mining concentrates on the broader view of end-to-end business operations. It seeks to discover, monitor, and improve the entire sequence of activities and interactions within an organization, including the way tasks are connected and how data flows through the processes.

Task mining focuses primarily on how individual tasks are performed by users, including the specific steps they take and the applications they use, to capture their interactions with software and systems. By extracting these valuable data insights, businesses can refine them to improve specific processes and business productivity.

Although digital twins are virtual models working happily side by side comparing and testing different strategies, they are critical to revolutionizing how your business operates. The real power occurs when they work in harmony to integrate plans, innovations, and technologies, without risk.

To understand the role of digital twins in a successful automation strategy, let’s take a closer look at the part played by process mining in helping to assess the eligibility of new processes for automation and provide an end-to-end, realistic view of combined process performance.

Holistic automated process view benefits

With the advancement of machine learning and intelligent automation, digital twins are now a staple in driving innovation and improving performance across most sectors, not least in the financial, healthcare, insurance, supply chain and telecom areas.

Process mining is hugely beneficial for capturing a picture of how processes are performing, with process visualizations providing an accurate workflow through each of the process stages, identifying any delays or bottlenecks along the way. Process mining also makes compliance easier by using audit trails to create a model of processes. They can then be monitored in real time and alert organizations immediately to any issues.

Without these process mining techniques, business process improvement goals are based on guesswork or extremely complex and time-consuming. To properly analyze process performance, you’d have to perform manual data reviews and interviews with users. This isn’t just a slow process, but one with a high margin of error.

Process mining generates granular process maps, flowcharts, and performance metrics for entire business operations. In a rapidly evolving landscape, this helps you stay on top of your automation and identify opportunities to improve with minimal effort.

For larger global companies managing huge physical and digital footprints with increased business activity, simple tasks, such as resolving billing disputes and processing payments are ripe with inefficiencies and errors. Business analysis through process mining is ideal for preventing issues before they arise or become more challenging to tackle.

Process mining can also monitor people, processes and tasks within a business, instantly highlighting areas for optimization so automations can then be developed to integrate anything from artificial intelligence to software analytics.

Conclusion

Inefficient tasks have the potential to slow the progress of your business, hindering its growth and efficiency if they go unseen. Whether it’s data entry, document approvals or regulatory compliance, each process presents room for error, oversight, and non-compliance to sneak in.

Fortunately, digital twins and digital workers play a crucial role in process improvement and optimization to help alleviate these challenges and spot automation opportunities, paving the way for enhanced productivity and optimized processes to ultimately accelerate and scale the success of your business.

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