Top 9 Digital Twin of an Organization Use Cases (DTO) in '24

Hazal Şimşek

Process Mining Digital twins

Updated on Jan 3

4 min read

Share on Linkedin Share on Twitter

Top 9 Digital Twin of an Organization Use Cases (DTO) in '24

Table of contents

1. Optimizing operational workflow 2. Generating procedures and ideal models 3. Designing data-driven strategies and projects 4. Assessing performance 5. Facilitating digital transformation 6. Improving customer experience 7. Managing mergers & acquisitions 8. Mitigating risk 9. Training new employees Further Reading

The digital twin of an organization (DTOs) allows business leaders and analysts to increase coordination across departments, identify bottlenecks, and simulate scenarios for predicting outcomes, risks and costs of changes and new adoptions.

Recently, business analysts and architects have leveraged DTOs for digital transformation projects. However, it is not quite straightforward for the analysts to identify the areas they can deploy a DTO.

In that light, we explain 9 DTO use cases/ applications to facilitate the decision-making process for business analysts and leaders to implement a DTO.

1. Optimizing operational workflow

Case studies have shown that optimizing processes can help decrease costs by ~ 88%. However, optimizing processes requires knowledge of the entire workflow, including all tasks, to identify those that may need to be changed.

DTOs generate a dynamic digital replica of any organization. This enables business leaders to fully understand the operations and tasks that employees execute on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Once the leaders better understand their operational workflow, they can identify specific tasks and operations that require modifications.

2. Generating procedures and ideal models

Business analysts generate procedures, standards and ideal process models, the formalized processes, to increase efficiency and reduce time and monetary waste. However, procedures and standards vary depending on the context, specific necessities, process, and the company’s operational area.

DTOs can ease the procedure and standard adoption period by generating a virtual replica of the extracted process flow and work instructions. Also, DTOs offer simulation capabilities, allowing users to run hypothetical situations to obtain the most efficient process model. As a result, they enable business analysts to create more consistent and accurate process procedures and establish the optimal ones as reference models. For example, analysts can create a DTO of an optimized operational framework for higher safety, quality, capacity, and economic efficiency.

3. Designing data-driven strategies and projects

Businesses are expected to correspond to the changing environment through innovation, new projects and strategic modifications. Strategy is also helpful to integrate and implement business capabilities, which refer to abilities that employees, companies and systems possess.

One of the major challenges to business strategy development and project management is setting clear goals and objectives. Senior managers and decision-makers usually lack relevant data and rely on their observation and experiences while developing the strategy.

DTOs bring more transparent, visual, and data-driven approaches to strategy development and project management by mapping the actual process data. With DTOs, project managers and strategists can identify pain points and simulate the changes they want to implement, measure the results, and predict possible risks without any financial commitments. Eventually, DTOs could help businesses allocate capabilities effectively and adapt to changing conditions agilely.

4. Assessing performance

Organizations assess their performance regularly to align performance with the determined goals, improve customer satisfaction and reduce factors that cause higher costs. Therefore, the business leaders and analysts evaluate the factors that affect their performance, such as employee performance, process management, outsourcing performance, or structure. However, it is challenging to develop adequate indicators to measure the complicated net of factors and their influence on performance.

DTOs contain information on actual processes, so they can be helpful to assess the performance while capturing the complex relations among different factors. For example, DTOs allow managers and supervisors to compare various aspects of the business, such as finance, risk, and operation key figures for each product, area, or brand. In addition, DTOs can increase coordination and communication over the indicators across teams by generating a single source of truth for understanding and measuring relevant KPIs.

5. Facilitating digital transformation

Digital transformation is essential to increase effectiveness and improve customer relations. However, digital transformation is a costly, risky and unclear journey with demanding financial strategy planning.

DTOs can help develop a financial strategy and digital transformation projects by allowing analysts and executives to visualize the entire organization and simulate the transformation before implementing any changes.

With DTOs, business analysts can detect the processes requiring RPA, orchestration, or other automation technologies. Business analysts and leaders can run hypothetical cases with processes that they want to automate. With DTOs, they can identify the conditions shaping digitization and predict the impacts and risks associated with undertaking a certain automation project. As a result, they can obtain long-term benefits and ROI and develop a digital transformation project. That is why a DTO is considered an automation enabler together with process mining and task mining.

6. Improving customer experience

Marketing and sales leaders design, manage and improve the customer processes in which prospects and customers interact with the company. For example, by obtaining insights from customer journey analysis, feedback, interviews, and CRM data they design and manage social media platforms, campaigns, services, and products.

DTOs can facilitate the customer experience management by allowing marketing and sales teams to identify the customer processes, interactions, and the expectations of customer segments in terms of KPIs and company goals. Based on such insights, teams can improve customer processes to meet their expectations, thus increasing customer satisfaction in the process.

7. Managing mergers & acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is the practice of reorganizing or combining business units, companies and other operating systems to increase efficiency, market share and customer base. However, it is a struggle to decide the impact of acquisition, merge two different units or companies, and align the processes and services under one single blueprint.

DTOs can overcome this challenge by allowing executives to generate both organizations, systems or units digitally and compare their combinations visually. The executives can simulate the M&A process to predict potential risks and outcomes to plan the merging and make the necessary arrangements. Also, the relevant teams and managers can align their sub-processes and services with the help of DTOs.

8. Mitigating risk

Business leaders ensure the continuity and stability of their businesses by identifying and managing potential risks that can occur due to changes implemented or events such as natural disasters and supply chain outages. Yet, risk management contains many unknown dependencies, complicating the detecting and eliminating the risks.

DTOs can provide insights on these dependencies by visualizing risk objectives, risk controls and components of the risks such as markets, IT systems or products.

9. Training new employees

New employees are supposed to learn the workflow of the business but it takes a while to be fully informed on the operations and tasks.

DTOs can rapid the learning period by serving as a training tool during on-boarding. Newcomers can visualize the actual and ideal processes and procedures to understand process dynamics, organizational structure, and operational workflow. They can simulate different scenarios to detect the optimal methods. Consequently, they can internalize the company’s operations faster than usual.