Business Case for Digital Twins Gets Executive Perspective

At Bentley Systems’ Year in Infrastructure 2020 Conference (YII) the spotlight was on digital twins.  Bentley’s Adam Klatzkin, Vice President, iTwin Services, and Richard Cooper, Strategic Director, hosted the Executive Perspective on making the business case for digital twins.  Representatives of four users who are business leaders and address their organization’s and customer challenges spoke about the quantifiable benefits of deploying digital twins.  The video  can be viewed here. 

Business Case for Digital Twins

Mr. Cooper said that some of the critical business issues we are seeing today are to:

• Continue operating efficiently while being able to collaborate remotely
• Win more work through differentiation using the digital twin platform to deliver added value
• Improve efficiency and productivity

Mr. Klatzkin added that to address all these issues there is a need for an open, dynamic and vendor neutral platform.  “The business, the technology, the future of infrastructure is now, and it is iTwin enabled.”

Shell Deepwater Projects

Josh Etkind, Digital Transformation Manager at Shell Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Projects, highlighted these challenges:

• Change management: To reduce the time and cost of mega projects, some of the engineering work happens in parallel with other project work.  Midway through the project, if some important information flows in, multiple teams are impacted 
• Document-based collaboration models: Relying on documents to transfer data and information between internal and external teams causes version control issues
• Workflow transparency: Without a centralized view of the entire process, there were many bottlenecks and delays, resulting in cost increase    

After extensive scouting for solutions, the company zeroed in on Bentley’s solution as it offers an open architecture that gives them flexibility to collaborate with different external partners and enables mapping of different internal systems, processes, and data flows.  In partnership with Bentley, the company has been able to build an end-to-end orchestrated workflow within a platform.  This transformation goes beyond tools and technologies; it is about culture, behaviour, and the willingness to learn.  With structural digital twins, projects are delivered faster, construction is done more safely, asset life is extended, uptime and efficiency increased, and environmental footprint of the entire value chain is reduced.  “The digital twin is enabling a streamlined partnership to deliver better, together,” said Etkind.

Parsons

Bruce Irwin, Parsons’ Director of Technology Transformation, shared how they began with digital twins in the design phase.  He said that digital twins are a natural evolution of their platforms for CAD design and BIM.  The company wanted to introduce new digital processes to optimize information management and automated data exchange and was looking for a key differentiator for asset management to expand market presence.  After evaluating other digital platforms, Bentley’s iTwin platform was selected.  They tied the benefits of using digital twins with corporate strategy for two clients in key sectors (highways and rail) and increased transactional revenue from technology.  Parsons began with a test project (highways) in Canada.  When iTwin Services was compared to traditional processes for design review, validation, and insights, there was a 25 percent improvement.  The solution improves team alignment, and everyone sees the common version of the design, he said.  Next, they plan to leverage digital twins through the construction phase and asset management.

Arcadis

Ann Blanchard, Senior Construction Project Manager, explained how the company uses Bentley’s digital twin technologies for client value-add and to increase profit margins.  Arcadis’ client, which contracted them to work on a large hospital system, had spent a lot on a 3D federated model that couldn’t be used after construction was completed.  They wanted a solution where the construction data is populated into an iTwin that was formatted for owner usage, not as a construction contract of deliverable.  Arcadis set two goals:

• Link the project data on approval, and use the BIM model as a proactive risk collaboration tool
• Develop construction data normalization best practises that are focused on interactive owner usability

These goals required a live project to determine viable value outputs and the ease of replication.  The project had to be on track, although on-site meetings were not possible due to the pandemic.  A 50,000-square-foot municipality project, with a budget of $17 million had to be constructed in one year.  Arcadis was looking for a cloud-based software solution that could not only increase the company’s profit margins, but that would provide a data rich iTwin for decision making.  Bentley’s digital twin technology was the only fully open platform available.  A monthly schedule update took less than four hours, whereas a competitive software would have taken 120-man hours.  Six months into this project there were zero change orders (a change order costs approximately $250,000) and a delay of 3-4 months was averted.  

City of Helsinki

Jarmo Suomisto, Manager of Digital City Initiatives for Helsinki, highlighted how a business case for digital twins at city scale was developed.  The city’s digital journey began 35 years ago, and the next evolutionary step is a digital twin of the city.  The challenge was in putting the data together and understanding and analysing it to get better insights.

Helsinki has developed a concept called Digital City Synergy that facilitates collaboration among all stakeholders – city planners, technology providers, and the citizens.  This aligns well with Bentley’s open architecture that links data from multiple sources to the iTwin platform, making it accessible and comprehensible.  All stakeholders are engaging through the digital twin for co-innovation and providing feedback for future investment.  “Digital technology is ultimately about saving citizens time and money, making everyday life easier while optimizing city’s resources.”      

Conclusion

The users provided strong business cases for investing in digital twins, and these are the commonalities that emerged:

• Identify not only the business challenge, but also the impact and the likely benefit of the digital twin platform, and deliver what was promised
• Ensure that the business case for digital twins is fully aligned with corporate goals