Digital twins

Digital twins integrate data, visualization, and sensors, providing deep insights into asset operations across various sectors, from office occupancy to hospital energy consumption to offshore wind turbine conditions. These insights drive informed decisions, improving asset operations, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness while guiding future design choices. Drawing on our expertise across the built environment, we collaborate with your organization to create digital twins that deliver valuable intelligence every day.

How we can help

Initial exploration

Data is increasingly recognised as another asset on company balance sheets, one that historically has often gone unnoticed. The ability to review and interpret data – from seasonal changes in sales or changing demand on a nation’s energy network – strengthens an organisation’s ability to pivot its business model, develop new services or anticipate costs. Adopting a digital twin approach can unlock the value of your business data.

All over the world regulators are raising standards for the built environment, so a major part of our work is developing digital twins for existing buildings and assets, retroactively bringing them into the data-intelligence era. Soon a digital twin strategy will be an expectation when proposals are reviewed by investors, insurers and banks. Given the lifespan of assets this is both an urgent and exciting priority.

We find out what data you can take advantage of, and how it might be combined to form a compelling business case. Costings are developed including a timeline to return-on-investment.

Develop a digital twin

A digital twin isn’t really ‘a product’. You can’t buy one and simply plug it in. A digital twin is a methodology, a business process that connects something physical to the digital realm within your organisation, enabling a new level of insight and decision-making.

This new level of control allows clients to then optimise the physical component in some way – be it an office, a train, a water network or other complex system or process – creating a virtuous feedback loop.

We develop a baseline model from your data and underlying information infrastructure. The situation and challenge vary per sector. Therefore, it is important to make a fit for purpose digital twin based on the specific situation and challenge because there is no ‘one fits all’ twin.

Manage and maintain

Once implemented within your organisation, we support you to refine and expand the twin’s effectiveness and security, bolting on new services and data streams, including data architecture, data governance and data storage. Through in-depth monitoring, we can unveil other problems and challenges that will help develop new use cases. Implementing these new use cases in the twin could improve organisational performance.

Furthermore, to ensure the twin operates smoothly and efficiently, it needs to be effectively managed and maintained. This involves not only meeting security, privacy, and technical standards but also keeping the software up to date and maintaining data storage to ensure data relevance and prevent duplication or loss. The software's performance must remain high to continue meeting customer needs. Additionally, any problems that arise should be resolved quickly to minimize business impact.

Develop maturity

Improving your organization's digital twin maturity is crucial for achieving long-term goals and fostering continuous improvement. As technology innovations rapidly evolve, organizations should identify which developments are relevant to them and how these can enhance their overall business performance. X can assist you in leveraging the latest advancements and integrating them into your roadmap and digital twin strategy.

Continuous improvements are possible as data platforms gain in power and capability every year. We work with you to continually improve the twin. We look on how the twin fits in the organisational IT landscape, how data is stored, how to improve the performance of the twin, how data could be shared with others, how this twin will help in the organisation in the long term and which steps could be taken to boost overall maturity and performance. 

We also help you understand how to use your data more efficiently, make certain steps autonomous, increase automatic data flows, add interaction with other objects and models in your digital twin process, adopting a multi-system approach, and making use of new ‘right time’ data sources.