A digital twin is a living digital record of one specific physical thing, updated through that thing’s life. Not a specification for a product line, and not a marketing page: a record of the individual item, which changes as the item changes.<\/p>\n
The distinction between the line and the item sounds pedantic. It is the whole subject.<\/p>\n
Digital twins started in aerospace and heavy manufacturing, where the problem was predicting failure. If you run a turbine, you do not want to know how turbines of that model behave on average. You want to know how this<\/em> turbine behaves, given what it has actually been through: its hours, its temperatures, its maintenance history, the batch its blades came from.<\/p>\n So the twin was a model of one machine, fed by data from that machine, used to answer questions about that machine. Expensive, sensor-heavy, and entirely justified when the asset is worth millions and failure is catastrophic.<\/p>\n What has changed is the cost of identity. Putting a readable identity on an individual item used to be an industrial project. It is now a tag costing pennies, and that moves the idea out of the hangar and into ordinary goods.<\/p>\n Here is the part that gets skipped, and skipping it is why a lot of digital twin projects in consumer goods quietly fail.<\/p>\n A barcode identifies a product line. Scan the barcode on a 70cl bottle and you learn it is that product, from that brand, at that size. You learn nothing about which bottle. Every bottle on the shelf carries the identical code, because that is exactly what a barcode is for: pricing and stock, at the level of the line.<\/p>\n Almost every question worth asking is about the individual item.<\/p>\n None of those can be answered by a product line identifier, however good the database behind it is. You need item level identity first, which means each unit carries something unique and machine readable that stays attached to it. Serialisation is the unglamorous foundation, and a digital twin without it is a brochure with a fancier name.<\/p>\n Once an item has its own identity, the record attached to it accumulates. In practice it tends to hold four kinds of thing:<\/p>\n Birth data is written once. The other three are the twin doing its job. A record that never changes after manufacture is a specification, not a twin.<\/p>\n The clearest example we work with is a cask.<\/p>\n A cask is filled, stored, occasionally regauged, sometimes refilled with a different spirit, moved between warehouses, and traded, often several times, without ever physically moving. Its value depends almost entirely on facts about that one cask: what went into it, when, how many fills it has had, where it has been kept and how it has been handled.<\/p>\n Historically all of that lives in a chain of paperwork, warehouse records and trust. Casks are bought on the strength of documents describing a thing the buyer will probably never see.<\/p>\n The digital twin version is a tag on the cask that binds it to a record showing its fill cycles, its warehouse location and its movement history, updated at each event by whoever carried out that event. The physical cask and the record cannot drift apart, because the record is reached by going to the cask.<\/p>\n That is a good test case for the whole idea, because it makes the value obvious. Nobody has to be persuaded that provenance matters when the asset is worth what a cask is worth.<\/p>\n A digital twin is not a database design problem. There are plenty of systems that can store an item history. The hard part is keeping the atoms and the record joined together for years, across owners, through resale, in a warehouse where nobody has heard of your software.<\/p>\n That join is made by something physical on the item. A tag embedded in or fixed to the object, read with a phone or a handheld reader, which resolves to that item’s record and no other. Anyone holding the item can reach the record. Nobody needs to know which system it lives in, or to find the right spreadsheet.<\/p>\n Get the join right and the record survives things a database never does: a change of owner, a change of supplier, a company being sold, a system being replaced.<\/p>\n Most digital twin programmes in consumer and industrial goods start at the wrong end. They begin with simulation, dashboards and analytics, because that is the exciting part and it demonstrates well.<\/p>\n They then discover that the data has nowhere to attach. There is no item level identity, so every insight is about a product line, and the analytics have nothing specific to be analytics of.<\/p>\n Start at the other end. Give items identity, capture the handful of events that genuinely matter, and let the record accumulate. The dashboards are easy once there is something real underneath them. The identity cannot be retrofitted to items already out in the world.<\/p>\n It is also worth saying that a twin does not require continuous sensing. A record updated at meaningful events, by people doing their jobs, is a perfectly good twin. Sensors are an option, not the entry fee.<\/p>\n If you are looking at Digital Product Passports under the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, a twin is the same foundation seen from a different angle. A passport is essentially a defined, regulated view onto an item’s record, with different audiences seeing different parts of it.<\/p>\n Build item level identity for one reason and you have most of what you need for the other. Build a passport as a standalone compliance exercise and you will build the identity anyway, just without getting anything else back for it.<\/p>\n One question, asked about a single unit rather than a product line.<\/p>\n For one item you made last year, can you say today where it is, who has it, and what has happened to it since it left you?<\/strong><\/p>\n If the answer is no, that gap is the project, and it is an identity problem before it is a software one.<\/p>\n Veribli builds item level identity into products and their packaging, using tagging technology that has tracked physical goods through circular supply chains for nearly thirty years, including over 900 million refillable containers. If you want to talk through what a digital twin would need to hold for your products, call us on 01482 455 855<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A digital twin is a living digital record of one specific physical thing, updated through that thing’s life. Not a specification for a product line, and not a marketing page: a record of the individual item, which changes as the item changes. The distinction between the line and the item sounds pedantic. It is the… Read More »What is a digital twin, and what does it mean for a physical product?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":337,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tThe distinction everything depends on<\/h2>\n
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What a twin actually holds<\/h2>\n
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\n \nKind<\/th>\n Examples<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n \n Birth data<\/td>\n What it is, what it is made of, where and when it was made, which batch<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Event history<\/td>\n Inspections, repairs, refills, fills, cleans, tests, movements<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n State now<\/td>\n Location, condition, ownership, status flags such as stolen or withdrawn<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n Documents<\/td>\n Certificates, conformity records, test results, photographs<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n The whisky cask<\/h2>\n
Why it has to be physical<\/h2>\n
The mistake worth avoiding<\/h2>\n
Where this meets product passports<\/h2>\n
Where to start<\/h2>\n