Highlights –
- Digital twin technology can now produce live behavioral models and integrate and share data.
- Eventually, digital twins could also simplify data integration across chain systems from various vendors.
Recently, ParkourSC announced that it had extended its supply chain digital twin technology line to simplify and digitize more supply chain components into live behavioral models and share them across supply chain partners.
The eight-year-old organization had rebranded itself from Cloudleaf, which focused on enhancing supply chain visibility.
The latest intelligent digital twin promises to upgrade supply chain resilience, planning, collaboration, and execution.
“While visibility is still a key component of the ParkourSC solution, the newly-expanded platform will move beyond digital visibility by enabling enterprises to digitize their entire end-to-end supply chains, embed intelligence and automation for optimized operations and increase on-time, in-full delivery,” said ParkourSC CTO Alok Bhanot.
Joining the dots
Digital twins can help break down a few of the complexities in developing and running predictive analytics, which provides insights into operations that are in progress and assists in stimulating the impact of disruptions.
ParkourSC’s latest platform also eases automation processes such as manager approvals, package delivery confirmations, and documents required for customs, invoices, and shipping labels.
Enterprises compose supply chain objects into a virtual representation of their end-to-end supply chain.
ParkourSC has developed integrations that accumulate signals and data from any entity, device, or system within and across organizations. Enterprises can link supply chain objects to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) models, Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards, business rules, and queries.
The collected data can be integrated into business and supply, and demand plans to enhance the predictability and reliability of forecasts.
This platform also permits enterprises to safely share live digital twins with others in the supply chain. This enables every partner within the network to build a digital twin depicting its extended supply chain network.
“This capability allows the entire supply chain to have shared insight into the status of their inventory, assets, logistics, and so on – and the ability to react in concert when issues arise,” Bhanot said.
Supply chain objects
Major supply chain platforms, including Kinaxis, Blue Yonder, and Logility, have started supporting digital twin capabilities.
Bhanot is of the view that these companies started with a planning-first approach, thus limiting their ability to evolve into digital twins.
On the contrary, ParkourSC initiated an object-oriented approach. This permits teams to create digital objects representing the behavior, state, and properties of supply chain elements.
This could include elements such as products, shipping, and facilities, which could be composed to represent supply chain operations.
The benefit for teams is that they can create definitions of all supply chain elements. It even includes behaviors summed up within individual organizations that are stored in a catalog.
“Digital twin of the supply chain” is referred to the instances of the catalog entities and relations between them collectively.
“This enables a very flexible way to build, operate and extend the digital version of your supply chain, something unique to our platform,” Bhanot said.
Eventually, digital twins could simplify data integration across chain systems from various vendors.
Many cloud and supply chain service providers use different approaches to represent supply chain data that can be hard to be brought together.
Digital twins translate data from different systems by combining schemas and ontologies.
“Digital twins can be an excellent connective tissue to provide seamless solutions across multiple providers, participants, and roles,” Bhanot said.
