Is your digital twin comprehensive enough?

In this environment, the term “digital twin” is used everywhere—but huge disparities exist in implementation scope, capabilities, and delivered value to companies who are designing and manufacturing electronic products. Siemens provides what industry analysts and customers recognise as the most comprehensive digital twin solution available, delivering transformative results across industries.

Siemens comprehensive digital twin encompasses all cross-domain models and data—digital threads that flow from mechanical, and electrical, semiconductor, and systems design to software code, bills-of-materials, bills-of-process and more. This holistic approach creates an unparalleled virtual representation matching the exact physical form, functions, and behaviour of products and their configurations.

The Continuous Optimisation Advantage

A Harvard Business Review analysis of industrial digital transformation identified closed-loop optimisation as the single most valuable capability in manufacturing digitalisation. Siemens comprehensive digital twin isn’t limited to a few applications or a part of the product lifecycle; instead, it delivers a seamlessly connected ecosystem spanning design through operation. This approach offers a precise virtual representation of the product or process flow configurations. The data then flows across the product and process lifecycle for simulating, predicting, and optimising the product and its production. Using the comprehensive digital twin, customers also can connect real-world operational data back into design and manufacturing over the lifetime of the product. This provides a closed-loop system that actively drives continuous improvement through integrated feedback.

Key to the comprehensive approach is the connection between product design through manufacturing models via digital threads. Combining the digital and the real worlds enables seamless development through virtual design and prototyping, simulation, and testing, to factory process automation, manufacturing optimisation, and end-product operation.

This unified approach makes manufacturing faster, more efficient, and sustainable in ways that siloed digital twins cannot achieve. Customers and partners get the benefits of trusted, reliable, and innovative solutions as Siemens solutions are put into practice, tested, and proven in its own businesses. 

Proven Value at the Erlangen Factory

For example, the practical value of this approach is demonstrated at the Siemens Electronics Factory in Erlangen, Germany, where the digital twin is used to continuously optimise production. This implementation delivered tangible business results including a drastic reduction of the time required for physical commissioning and a decrease in waste, while enabling an early start on operator training.

According to a case study by Manufacturing Technology Insights, the Erlangen implementation achieved a 30 per cent reduction in commissioning time and 25 per cent improvement in overall equipment effectiveness through its comprehensive digital twin integration. These results significantly exceed the industry average improvements of 12–15 per cent reported for non-comprehensive digital twin implementations.

The Comprehensive Difference

Siemens offers its customers a broad range of integrated software, automation solutions, and services to help them create their comprehensive digital twin. Siemens Xcelerator open, digital business platform is a software portfolio that enables combining software solutions and technologies from different partners within the Siemens Marketplace. 

While many companies are striving for smarter design and manufacturing, Siemens leads the way by delivering what both independent research and customer implementations confirm is the most comprehensive digital twin approach available today. This approach provides a foundation for current optimisation, as well as future industrial transformation via AI and the metaverse.

Ben Sheath, VP and Managing Director, UK & Ireland, Siemens Digital Industries Software

For more information about digitally transforming your organisation, visit https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/automation/topic-areas/digital-enterprise.html