Changing the time-to-value equation with Virtual Twin as a Service

This was originally published on LinkedIn (March 21, 2024)

Only 55% of products launch on schedule, according to research from Gartner. Although annoying for customers, this can be catastrophic for many businesses that pursue time to market as a competitive advantage.

Similarly, Time-to-Value is equally important for businesses, whereby promptly achieving the benefits of internal investments to improve performance or augment capability is equally critical. The time it takes you to produce the outcome that actually drives value for your business.

A car manufacturer doesn’t build a new factory because it wants to build a new factory. It builds a new factory because it has the demand to sell more cars and thereby has to augment its production capacity. Interestingly, Factory Virtual Twins were pioneered by Toyota and ourselves over 20 years ago to continuously improve production capability. Changes to a production system could only be effectively investigated with a Virtual Twin before committing the improvements to the factory. Any other approach significantly increased downtime and risk making continuous improvement impractical.

Today, Virtual Twins have proven their effectiveness time and time again in managing and delivering projects across a much broader spectrum. But achieving value is the goal; the Virtual Twin is but the means. Virtual Twin as a Service (VTaaS) addresses the need to minimize the risk, time, and cost of building twins, taking the shortcut to value.

Why VTaaS?

At Dassault Systèmes we have been developing the enabling technology for Virtual Twins for over 40 years. In addition to inventing them, we have also been building and managing them, and we’re good at it. We know what to use, what models to build, and how to build them fit for use. VTaaS brings together all that capability to customers in three key ways:

Technology: The technology required to create and extract value from virtual twins has been arguably the core activity at Dassault Systèmes since our inception. Today we have the broadest and most advanced technology available to create and use Virtual Twins.

Take GEA Group. They are a major provider of technology solutions to the food & beverage industry and were looking for a way to safely re-open their cafeterias in a post-COVID world. To do this, they opted for a virtual twin solution, run by our team.

Combined simulations of diverse aerosols, effectiveness of remediation strategies and human interaction in a purpose-built synthetic environment was not a capability they had ever needed before.

Expertise: Technology is nothing without knowledge and know-how. Our customers have their own areas of expertise and we collaborate together to combine their know-how with our expertise in producing Virtual Twins to produce an outcome with the value that is being sought.

We had the good fortune to work with beauty products specialists L’OCCITANE Group to help build a virtual twin to support their MyHealth@Work initiative, which aimed to address workplace safety risks.

As Maxime Plazolles, Engineering and Innovation Project Manager at L’OCCITANE Group described: “We realize that the 3DEXPERIENCE platform requires expertise to be used to its full advantage. This activity is not our core business. However, it’s Dassault Systèmes’.” VTaaS allowed them to outsource that skillset.

Assets: With Time to Value as the goal, with Virtual Twins as the means, it follows that #Time-To-Twin is a critical measure. We invest not only in our technology, people and know how, we also invest in building assets, libraries and harness data to accelerate Time to Twin.

For example, a construction project might involve creating specific assets to track energy use, or model how construction teams move around a site. We already have models like these ready to go, and VTaaS allows us to implement them instantly.

We helped ASICS reduce the cost of building and operating their manufacturing laboratory, the “ASICS Personalization Studio“. This enabled ASICS to focus on their strategy without complex issues and quickly turn their vision into a physical laboratory. Together, we discussed many scenarios to expand this value to different countries and different consumers so that the ASICS Personalization Studio can be easily disassembled and transported.

Now, all these clients could have achieved what they did without VTaaS. But it would have taken them longer, it would likely have involved more risk and possible setbacks, and it could well have cost a lot more making the attainment of that value unaffordable.

By taking a Virtual Twin as a Service approach, each were able to reduce time-to-value – in some cases from months to weeks and in some cases days – whether that value was in providing safer social spaces, minimising workplace injuries, or delivering improved battery designs.

And as well as accelerating the delivery of the desired outcome, VTaaS can also amplify the achieved value. While L’OCCITANE initially focused on reducing musculoskeletal injuries, VTaaS has allowed them to improve outcomes in areas far beyond the initial brief.

British politician Michael Gove once made headlines when he suggested that people had “had enough of experts”. But I believe that as the world grows more complex, and our industries grow more specialized, we need expertise more than ever.

We can’t be masters of everything; VTaaS lets us help you get what you need from your business, when you need it – so that you can take the shortcut to the value you really need.