Top 5 stakeholders who benefit from E2E visibility through a digital twin 

At large international companies today, data is often scattered around several different systems. This makes it far more challenging than it needs to be for stakeholders across a company’s supply chain pipeline to do their jobs. Value chain managers, end-to-end planners, operational excellence leads, finance managers and complaint managers, among others, all stand to benefit tremendously from superior end-to-end visibility. And I’m happy to tell you that digital supply chain twin can help. 

The difference between life with and without a digital supply chain twin is abundantly clear for these top 5 stakeholders: 

• Without a digital supply chain twin: The task at hand is exceedingly manual and non-energizing. Moreover, their value chain maps are woefully outdated by the time they are finally accumulated and published. 
• With a digital supply chain twin: The end-to-end flow is automatically generated through data and smart algorithms, freeing-up the manager to dedicate more of their precious time to true value-adding activities—from reducing waste to optimizing flows and more. 

• Without a digital supply chain twin: The end-to-end flows are not easily accessible, and the master data is neither available nor accurate. The effort required to keep everything up to date is immense, as it’s nearly impossible to get the job done correctly and in a timely fashion. 

• With a digital supply chain twin: There is an automatic check on end-to-end flows based on reality, as well as automatic updates of the master data. This results in less manual work and improved plan accuracy. 

• Without a digital supply chain twin: There are several different dashboards per department—quality assurance, quality control, production, transport, warehousing—but it’s difficult to compare or to make the end-to-end connection. How can you reliably make accurate conclusions or take the right actions? 
• With a digital supply chain twin: One model integrates all the different departments, eliminating the need for multiple dashboards for each department. It’s now possible to identify where you need to act first and to monitor the impact of actions. 

• Without a digital supply chain twin: More often than not, there is a lack of visibility on the link between financial and physical supply chain flows. There is frequently also insufficient visibility on how inventory or working capital is spread across the different segments of the end-to-end flow. 
• With a digital supply chain twin: A single model that integrates both financial and physical supply chain flows. There’s visibility on true product flows, on inventory in transit and on where each value is within the network. 

• Without a digital supply chain twin: While investigating a complaint, considerable time is lost tracing the product batch through the network and finding the production location, connected suppliers and external partners.  
• With a digital supply chain twin: Identification happens faster, allowing the manager to dedicate more time and focus to the complaint investigation itself, as well as collaboration with other teams. 

→ Compliance managers, resilience teams, sustainability teams and other business units also stand to benefit from the use of a digital supply chain twin.