The First Step in Creating Digital Twins: Plant Walkdowns

Industry 4.0 is now being slowly implemented into the operations of both emerging and established companies alike, and for good reason. This new wave of productivity in manufacturing allows for companies to avoid unnecessary human labor and rely on automation instead. The success of digitalizing information has brought along several noteworthy developments to push the boundaries of how efficient and tactical businesses can truly be in their operations. The introduction of digital twins has been a significant factor in how companies have been integrating Industry 4.0 standards into their operations.

What are Digital Twins?

Put simply, a digital twin is a virtual replica of a system, physical object, or facility. The concept is comparable to full-scale, interactive mockups of projects that would benefit from life-like testing and simulation. There are plenty of benefits associated with the use of digital twins: drastically improved insights into performance of products and facilities, real-time overviews of intensive workflows, and even the ability to better predict when assets will be in need of repairs, making maintenance tasks preventive rather than reactive.

Creating and building adequate digital twins is a complex process and many businesses avoid the effort for brownfield operations where modern design and engineering data is unavailable. For brownfield facilities, the starting point for creating digital twins is usually the available asset and maintenance data. This means that if the existing asset data is inaccurate or incomplete, a proper twin cannot be made until it is updated. With this in mind, asset data accuracy and completeness is best achieved through detail-oriented plant walkdowns. Conducting plant walkdowns allows for the company to account for all the assets they’d like to digitize, record their respective sets of data in full, and begin the transition to a full-fledged digital twin.

NRX AssetHub is Your Gateway to Digital Twins

You know what they are, what they do, the steps to creating them, but you don’t know where to start – we can help! Through the combination of plant walkdowns and NRX AssetHub, users can match their physical to virtual plant data and format it into IoT-compatible data. These steps are not only useful in creating digital twins, but absolutely necessary. If digital twins pique your interest, reach out and book a demo with us to see how your data can start being transformed into digital twins of your own!