Digital twins give you the ability to run multiple what-if scenarios and pick the optimal one
By Dan Tynan, Workflow contributor
It’s tempting to blame the world’s supply chain woes on the pandemic. Factory closures and labor shortages shut down delivery hubs and tied up merchant shipping. Unexpected gaps between supply and demand—for everything from laptops and lawn furniture to blue paint—exposed flaws in “just-in-time” models in dozens of industries.
There’s a deeper reason for lingering supply chain problems: the ongoing reliance on legacy IT systems and manual processes to move goods from farm or factory to their final destination. Some of the planet’s most complex supply chains, in fact, still rely on spreadsheets, email, and whiteboards.
Nearly 40% of organizations handle most of their procurement systems manually, and only 6% had fully automated supply chain processes, an April 2021 survey by SAP and Oxford Economics showed.
Running supply chains on email, spreadsheets, web portals, or ERP tools “leads to horrendous productivity and huge opportunities for error, and it’s very difficult for management to track,” says Chris Taylor, chief transformation officer at ServiceNow.
Technology alone won’t magically resolve current supply chain disruptions and slowdowns, but one emerging tool, the AI-powered digital twin, could help supply chain managers mitigate future problems before they turn into crises.