The Rise of Digital Twins in Business
Digital Twins have shifted from being a futuristic concept to becoming a key driver of business transformation. Once used primarily in niche applications, they are now receiving widespread attention across industries. Analyst firms like Gartner and QKS Group (formerly known as Quadrant Knowledge Solutions) have recognized this growing importance, often highlighting the value of digital twins in their reports. For example, Gartner has included digital twins in eight Hype Cycles and multiple Emerging Technology reports, noting their progression from the “Trough of Disillusionment” to the “Slope of Enlightenment.”
As digital twins gain traction, their real-world impact becomes increasingly clear. From improving operational efficiency to creating new revenue streams, digital twins are reshaping how businesses manage and optimize processes. iGrafx, recognized as a Leader in QKS Group’s SPARK Matrix for Digital Twins of an Organization (DTO), is leading the charge—helping businesses visualize, optimize, and innovate in ways that drive real value.
What are Digital Twins and Why are they Transformational?
At their core, digital twins are software-based models that replicate the state of real-world entities—whether it’s an asset, a person, or even an entire organization. These models are more than static visualizations; they incorporate real-time data and business logic to simulate, predict, and optimize outcomes. Gartner believes digital twins blend technology like analytics, IoT, and CRM to provide real-time insights and actionable information, making them vital tools for modern enterprises.
What makes digital twins so transformational is their ability to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. By creating a virtual counterpart of a physical asset or process, businesses can assess performance, simulate changes, and optimize operations without disrupting real-world activities. This is a game-changer for industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services, where the ability to experiment and iterate in a virtual environment drives significant cost savings, efficiency gains, and innovation.
Interestingly, many businesses that have already modeled their processes may not realize they have the foundational elements of a digital twin. By building on existing process models, organizations can evolve these into full-fledged digital twins, gaining the added value of real-time monitoring, advanced simulations, and predictive insights. As companies increasingly rely on data to guide decisions, digital twins offer a powerful way to transform that data into meaningful, real-time actions that directly impact business performance.
Why Digital Twins are a Game-Changer in Business Operations?
The true value of digital twins lies in their ability to transform business operations by making the invisible visible. By mirroring physical assets, processes, or even entire organizations, digital twins give enterprises a powerful tool to gain real-time visibility into their operations and predict future outcomes. Gartner emphasizes that incorporating business process logic into digital twins allows companies to speed up decision-making, increase operational efficiencies, and cut costs.
What makes digital twins particularly powerful is that they can represent not only machines and processes but also people. For example, digital twins can be used to:
- Mirror patients in healthcare, allowing doctors to simulate treatments and predict outcomes to improve care protocols and patient safety.
- Model employees in the workplace to monitor safety conditions, optimize workflows, and enhance productivity by analyzing how employees interact with their environment and equipment.
- Simulate customer interactions to refine marketing campaigns, improve customer experiences, and predict buying behavior.
Across industries, digital twins offer significant advantages:
- Manufacturing: Companies use digital twins to optimize production lines, simulate changes in workflows, and reduce downtime by predicting equipment failures before they occur.
- Healthcare: Digital twins simulate patient outcomes, improve treatment protocols, and enhance safety by monitoring medical equipment in real time.
- Financial Services: Businesses leverage digital twins to mirror complex processes like compliance and risk management, allowing for faster adjustments and better control over outcomes.
In each of these cases, the power of digital twins comes from their ability to predict, simulate, and optimize in ways that static models or traditional data analysis methods cannot. By creating a dynamic, data-driven mirror of a physical entity or process—whether that’s a machine, a person, or a customer interaction—businesses are empowered to innovate faster, improve outcomes, and develop new revenue streams.
For enterprises looking to embrace the full potential of digital twins, the ability to simulate changes and predict outcomes before making decisions in the real world is invaluable. This is especially critical as businesses navigate increasingly complex markets and operational challenges. The role of platforms like iGrafx Process360 Live becomes essential in helping organizations capture, model, and optimize these processes, providing the insight needed to drive transformation.
Industry Adoption and Impact
Digital twins are no longer a niche technology reserved for advanced tech-driven industries. They are now being adopted across a wide range of sectors, each leveraging digital twins in unique ways to drive transformation. Gartner observes that industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and building operations are at the forefront of adopting digital twins to streamline complex processes, improve decision-making, and reduce costs.
Digital Twins in Manufacturing
In manufacturing, digital twins allow companies to model and monitor entire production lines, improving equipment uptime and operational efficiency. Simulations enable manufacturers to experiment with changes before implementing them in the real world, minimizing disruptions and reducing costs.
Digital Twins in Healthcare
In healthcare, digital twins are revolutionizing patient care by creating models of individuals that doctors can use to simulate treatment outcomes. These patient twins help personalize care plans and predict responses to different therapies, improving patient outcomes and safety.
Digital Twins in Finance
For financial services, digital twins play a critical role in managing risk and regulatory compliance—a key strength for iGrafx—but also extend to optimizing processes like loan application management for mortgages, automobile, or personal loans. By modeling these complex workflows, financial institutions can streamline operations, improve decision-making, and provide faster, more accurate services to their customers. This can result in enhanced customer experiences and reduced processing times.
Digital Twins in Building Operations
Other sectors, such as oil and gas and building operations, use digital twins to manage assets and infrastructure, enabling predictive maintenance and reducing downtime. In these industries, digital twins are critical in ensuring that physical assets run smoothly and efficiently, extending their lifecycle while lowering operational costs.
Digital twins are also used to drive innovation in new business models. By leveraging real-time data and predictive analytics, organizations can experiment with as-a-service models or develop new products based on insights gained from digital twins. For example, companies can offer data-driven services or manage operations remotely using digital twins, allowing for greater scalability and new revenue streams.
By combining real-time data with predictive analytics and simulations, digital twins are helping organizations unlock greater efficiency, reduce operational risks, and drive innovation across a range of industries. The iGrafx Process360 Live platform empowers businesses to build these comprehensive models, integrating data from multiple systems and providing the tools necessary to optimize processes and drive long-term business success.
Keys to Success
Gartner suggests that successful digital twin implementations rely on a balance between business goals, team collaboration, architecture, and technology. They recommend that organizations prioritize business outcomes and people first, rather than focusing solely on the technology. Key factors for success include the following:
- Business Goals Drive Success: Aligning digital twin projects with clear business objectives ensures that technology investments lead to measurable improvements, whether it’s optimizing processes or enhancing customer service.
- Cross-functional Team Collaboration: Gartner emphasizes the importance of collaboration across leadership, operations, engineering, and IT teams. This approach fosters alignment and ensures that all areas of the organization benefit from the digital twin initiative.
- A Strong Architectural Foundation: Digital twins should be designed with embedded business process logic and include governance measures to manage their evolution over time, with a focus on integration and security.
- Technology as an Enabler: Gartner advises that technology should support, not lead, digital twin initiatives. Business objectives should dictate the choice of technology, ensuring it drives real business value.
The Crawl-Walk-Run Approach to Digital Twins
For companies concerned about the complexity of digital twin projects, adopting the crawl-walk-run approach is a widely recognized best practice. This incremental strategy allows businesses to start small with pilots and basic models (crawl), then gradually expand the scope (walk) and complexity (run) as they gain confidence and experience. Here’s how the process typically works:
- Crawl: Begin with simple pilots focused on individual assets or processes to prove the concept and achieve quick wins.
- Walk: As initial successes build momentum, expand into more complex projects that involve multiple processes and broader KPIs.
- Run: Once established, optimize systems of assets and integrated processes, driving real competitive advantages and long-term transformation.
By focusing on incremental steps, organizations can overcome the complexity of digital twin projects while achieving business goals and value at each stage.
Analyst Recognition and iGrafx Leadership in Digital Twins
iGrafx’s leadership in the digital twin space has consistently been recognized by prominent analyst firms, reinforcing its role in driving innovation and business transformation. Gartner and QKS Group have both referenced iGrafx’s solutions in several key reports.
Gartner has referenced iGrafx in multiple influential publications, including the Market Guide for Technologies Supporting a Digital Twin of an Organization (DTO). Additionally, iGrafx was mentioned in several Emerging Technology Research Reports, such as How Digital Twins are Shaping the Future of GenAI Models, Digital Twin Solutions Benefit from a Managed Tech Ecosystem, and Revenue Opportunity Projection of Simulation Digital Twins. These references affirm the growing importance of the iGrafx capabilities as digital twins continue to advance in business applications.
Gartner has referenced digital twins in several of its Hype Cycles, a widely used research tool second only to the Magic Quadrants. A Hype Cycle illustrates the progression of emerging technologies through different stages—from early innovation, through overhyped expectations and disillusionment, to broader, more stable adoption. In recent reports, Gartner observes that digital twins are moving beyond the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and entering the ‘Slope of Enlightenment,’ signaling that the technology is starting to deliver real business value.
QKS Group has further solidified iGrafx’s market leadership by naming it a Leader in its SPARK Matrix Assessment for Digital Twins of an Organization (DTO) for the past three consecutive years. This consistent recognition underscores iGrafx’s commitment to delivering comprehensive digital twin solutions that help businesses design, deploy, and optimize digital twins at scale.
The iGrafx Process360 Live platform integrates process modeling, process mining, process simulation, and a process repository, enabling companies to move beyond static process models to fully operational digital twins. With this platform, organizations can achieve greater operational efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and unlock new business models.
Analyst recognition from firms like Gartner and QKS Group underscores iGrafx’s influential role in advancing digital twins and driving business transformation.
Conclusion
Digital twins have emerged as a transformative technology with vast potential across industries, from optimizing operations and enhancing customer experiences to driving new business models. Industry experts, including those from Gartner and QKS Group, emphasize that the real value of digital twins lies not just in their technology itself, but in how well it is aligned with business goals, supported by cross-functional teams, and scaled strategically.
For organizations ready to embrace digital twins, success hinges on taking an incremental approach, such as the crawl-walk-run strategy, and focusing on business outcomes at each stage. iGrafx’s Process360 Live platform provides the tools and expertise necessary to build, deploy, and manage digital twins that deliver ongoing value. With recognition from industry leaders, iGrafx continues to stand at the forefront of helping businesses unlock the full potential of digital twins to innovate and transform.
As digital twins move into the mainstream, those that adopt early and strategically will not only enhance operational efficiency but also position themselves to lead in their markets. Now is the time to take the first steps toward realizing the benefits of digital twins, with iGrafx as your trusted partner on this journey. Contact us today to learn more.