Interview with Virginie Maillard at Siemens

Twinning supply: Virginie Maillard works for Siemens, one of the largest industrial companies on the planet, where she leads the global research for the Simulation and Digital Twin Technology, from her office in New Jersey (US,) while carrying also the responsibility for research in key markets, like Germany, India and China.

Before Siemens, she worked in the automotive industry, which is being taken by storm by multiple revolutions, starting from electrification. She is probably the best person to torture about supply chain disruption and the trend of “twinning” what we manufacture, or the factories per se, where everything gets created in the first place.

“A digital twin is a digital representation of real machines and factories, buildings and cities, networks and transport systems, which evolves with their lifecycle. As a digital prototype, it helps to define and optimize the product and production system, before investing in physical assets. This reduces the need for physical, more resource intensive, prototypes. Later, it helps monitor and optimize the operation of the real systems by testing changes in a digital environment before implementing them in the real world,” says Maillard, confirming our description of a flipped supply chain, where digital always precedes physical.

The efficiencies of a set-up based on twins are massive, for the full network of stakeholders revolving around whatever value chain, with the plus of delivering the best outcome for the final customer. “The digital twin generates tremendous value, by running ‘what if’ scenarios and predicting future performance and behavior. It lays the foundation for making quick and confident decisions, before taking action in the real world. It also helps to reduce time to market and ensures that specific requirements are met. Users get direct feedback on their actions – when they change settings or create new scenarios, they experience the impact and can make better and confident decisions.

Data suddenly becomes understandable and tangible, leading to more reliable decision making. The digital twin is the practical solution for mastering industry’s challenges: reducing CO2 footprint, improving sustainability, increasing resilience, and speeding up processes and time to market,” confirms Maillard. It looks like there will not be another way of running a business in the future; it needs, however, reliable data underneath and computing power to perform iterative scenario analyses, especially when the stakes are high or when we use taxpayers’ money for huge infrastructural investments.

Good news is: the twins are not identical, and the digital one is poised to be smarter and smarter, leading the way before its physical alter ego. “In the future, the digital twin will become increasingly interactive and immersive. At Siemens we call this the Industrial Metaverse: an immersive environment, potentially with photo-realistic visualization, which allows a multitude of users to easily interact with digital twins. It will be a new and powerful collaboration tool for engineering and manufacturing operations,” Maillard closes. Technology, as we saw, becomes the enabler of a multi-stakeholder and enhanced collaboration, in smart and immersive environments, helped by tech stacks like AI and blockchains, or virtual and augmented reality. This is another confirmation of the shift from simple products to meta-products, and from supply chains to open ecosystems, based on data syndication and multimodal interfaces. We can create a better future, and we can even test it beforehand. Listening to Maillard, one thing is sure: we can twin and test supply.

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