In the previous blog, we discussed the need of an intelligent twin for business processes.
Possibilities of having intelligent twins are easier said than elaborated… being done is far more distant. This blog is about the first building block of OUR methodology of intelligent twin.

At PID, we consider the ‘process’ as the first building block, or the foundation of building intelligent twins.
Unfortunately, ‘process’ is a much abused word and evokes emotions from listeners, ranging from awe to skepticism to frustration. The most outrageous prejudice about process comes from the mental image it evokes: the image of ubiquitous flow chart!

In reality, process is much more that a bunch of actions or series of activities and definitely a lot more than some chart!

An intelligent twin will have to incorporate multiple aspects of the process. See the graphic below.

Process Flow:

This is the most obvious aspect of a process. Process flow includes actions or activities by process participants and their continuous impact on the state of the process. Apart from flowcharts, business process modelling tools and other modelling and simulation tools capture this aspect of the process.

Process Visibility:

By its inherent nature, a business process is multi-faceted. One facet is the business entities and their life-cycles. Other facets include organizational structures, internal and external stakeholders, business environment, objectives and KPI’s etc.
Subject to needs to know and appropriate controls, defined and unhindered visibility to every aspect of the process needs to be an important feature of the intelligent process twin.
In the IOT space, there are many existing solutions, which seek to provide process visibility in a very graphical way. Similarly, SCADA systems and some other simulation systems provide ability to actually draw and visualize physical equipment. In classical IT transaction systems, visibility is achieved through various reports or dashboards or similar solutions.
Visualization for a twin for a business process needs to be really tuned to the broader objectives of the business process itself!

Process Performance:

Performance aspect is the raison d’etre of an intelligent twin. The intelligent twin should be able to monitor all characteristics of process performance.
These characteristics may range from daily operational characteristics like system availabilities, turnaround times of specific actions to deep strategic characteristics like contributions or share of strategic products or offerings.
Only very strong capabilities to monitor process performance can justify the time and effort spent in creating a twin for the process.

Process Actions:

This last aspect completes the need of characteristics for an intelligent twin. This aspect also completes the loop or bidirectional interaction between a transaction twin and an intelligent twin. By capturing and observing various actions in the process, the intelligent twin can actually make specific interventions and influence the performance. Through this aspect of process actions, real benefits of the exponential technologies (discussed before) can be brought to bear.

Realizing these four aspects in an intelligent twin in a seamless way is really an immense ask.
Playmaker is being designed to fulfill this ask.

Watch this space!

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