Digital twins could be the key to successful automation

Automation has brought significant benefits to organizations that have taken the steps to adopt it, but let's face it: the journey to successful automation is usually not easy. Despite the best-laid plans, roadblocks and pain points continue to plague automation programs, creating bottlenecks, stifling scale, and limiting top returns.

Given the challenges of automation (for example, heavy maintenance loads can erode return on investment, and a lack of visibility into automation fleets can lead to layoffs and inflated costs), there is no It's no wonder that digital twinning and its innate ability to successfully solve problems is starting to resonate.

Drawing its origins from the NASA space program in the 1960s, digital twinning in automation can be defined as a digital copy of an automated process that resides in a separate repository from the automation platform robotic process (RPA) where the actual automation is developed, deployed and orchestrated.

Benefits of digital twins

The main advantage of the digital twin is that it scales as automation evolves. Therefore, if changes are applied to the automation in the RPA platform, those same changes are reflected in the twin, ideally in real time or at least near real time.

Operational metrics (including runs, last run, issue counts, usages, and success rates) are also accessible and displayed where the twin resides so it can be continuously monitored and improved .

Beyond changes and operational metrics, a digital twin in automation allows an organization to compile accurate documentation and detailed audit trails for the entire automation fleet and keep them in a single, centralized repository. This not only solves the problem of misplaced or lost process design documents, but also solves one of the main problems with automation: an inability to visualize and understand how automations have changed over time.

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Maintaining digital twins for all automations in a central location, regardless of the RPA platform on which they are built, deployed, and orchestrated, dramatically improves automation standardization, governance, and visibility. Especially for companies that use a cross-platform automation strategy, a single repository allows greater visibility into the complexity of all processes, as well as the systems and applications with which they interact.

This not only dramatically improves monitoring of the entire automation fleet, but also enables faster recognition of potential issues and redundancies and identification of automations that can be retired to reduce costs and increase yields .

Less maintenance required

Digital twinning also reduces the need for maintenance. By serving as a canvas for automation, a digital twin can be quickly examined to identify where an error has occurred and how it can be corrected, saving time and money.

This also reverses the change management process. Rather than waiting for an automation to fail to take corrective action, digital twins enable proactive action to be taken as soon as a potential malfunction is detected or in advance of a regulatory change or update of application.

Finally, digital twins allow for accelerated and simplified RPA platform migrations, as feasibility assessments to assess the effort required to switch destination platforms can be more easily performed. Since there is an up-to-date digital version of the automation, exporting the automation with a mapping engine that only requires minor editing greatly reduces the effort needed and eliminates manual recoding.

> Forging new partnerships

This will be especially important in the coming year as more and more organizations consider migrating their legacy RPA platforms to next-generation intelligent automation solutions.

Migrations will be further complicated as new partnerships are formed between well-established solution providers using information from the Internet of Things (IoT). At least three industry standards groups focused on the digital twin have al...