Enabling resilient decision making for operations through digital twin capabilities is a key to the future state companies across Asia Pacific will have in place, according to IDC.
In its latest document entitled IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT/OT Convergence 2021 Predictions — Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) Implications to help enterprises in the New Normal, IDC stressed that developing a system that can ingest, analyse, and present decision options rapidly and effectively is required, and being able to do so in a consistent, defined, and accessible framework.
It added that digitised processes and role-based apps like ERP, CRM, APM, and PLM are connected to physical entities representing business processes, assets, products, designs, and so on. The applications are then connected to a digital thread layer that ingests and contextualises the data. A digital twin development platform can take contextualised data to create digital twins for any product, asset, design, process, or operation. The decision-making framework will depend on AI due to the size of the data sets, the complexity of the multivariate relationships in the data, and the speed at which data will be ingested.
IDC’s latest IT/OT predictions highlight the laser focus that the COVID pandemic has placed on the foundations of enterprise and operational data, data governance, connectivity, and enterprise architecture. Companies still have a spaghetti of paper-based processes, spreadsheets, applications, and approaches across operations and the enterprise that limits the flow of data and value across the value chain. Getting an end-to-end approach in place from a process and system perspective for critical operational capabilities such as asset operations, supply chain, and production execution will be a key going forward as they take steps towards putting physical/digital models in place to support decision making going forward. Technologies like cloud and AI particularly have a huge role to play in enabling that integration.
Indeed, with the shift in maturity of integration of IT and OT systems, processes and organisations have become a critical focus, according to IDC.
The technology research firm further pointed out that in 2020 companies in Asia Pacific have been challenged by the requirement to manage their operations remotely, and to enable a level of visibility and integration across the operations and the enterprise well beyond previous expectations. Hence, the ability of operations to consume data insight and enable resilient decision making will become a critical factor of competition differentiation for industry leaders.
“Driving a strategy of IT/OT convergence is a priority that more than 90% of industrial organisations have, but in practice the integration is still very difficult. Companies have expressed that the biggest challenge when utilising data for decision making is the integration of OT systems across siloes, and of those systems with enterprise systems – in particular enterprise resource management systems (ERP),” said Emilie Ditton, associate vice president for Energy and Manufacturing Insights at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Some of the key Future of IT/OT Convergence that will impact operations leaders and technology buyers and suppliers in Asia/Pacific are:
- By 2026, 40% of A2000 organizations will have invested in a common IoT platform layer that provides access to data collected through various point solutions.
- By 2024, 50% of industrial organisations will be integrating data from edge OT systems with cloud-based reporting and analytics, moving from single-asset views to sitewide operational awareness.
- Industrial enterprises that fail to implement an enterprise data governance model enabling the foundation for resilient decision making by 2023 will underperform on profitability by 10%.
