These digital representations of real-world systems can be anything from a small smart home setup, a large factory production line or even making a city’s infrastructure ‘smart’. In a smart home, Digital Twins can reduce energy bills, ensure the house is kept in comfortable temperature conditions and more around the clock, all without human interaction. In an industry setting, Digital Twins can significantly reduce operational costs. Fundamentally driven by sensors in an interconnected system, a digital twin has the potential to increase productivity, efficiency, automation and more. Just as powerfully, the substantial growth in data provided by these sensors that was previously unavailable provides enormous opportunity to generate new insights and drive further innovation, backed up by hard data.

ARQ is helping businesses grow through Digital Twins

Digital Twins have the potential to greatly improve both the day to day and long-term operations and the experiences a service, business, or product can achieve. However, there’s a perception that they are complex long-term engagements that require multi-year, multi-million-dollar investments to achieve a return on investment. The perception may be accurate if attempting to develop an all-encompassing digital twin system, so it isn’t surprising some businesses may be hesitant to invest in this area, even with such fantastic potential. However, this doesn’t need to be the case. ARQ provides an accelerated digital twin solution, what we call a ‘Twin In A Box’. By keeping a narrow focus for the digital twin, it is far easier and cost effective to develop, deploy and begin gaining a return on the investment. Both large and even the smallest of organisations can use Digital Twins to gain a competitive advantage and make a big impact – when effective and targeted choices are made.

North East Water engaged ARQ to improve the efficiency of their operations. Rather than attempting to transform their entire network, together we researched which area to initially target to bring them the most value. For North East Water’s network, it was their sewer pumps. Their standard operations were nearly entirely reactive; they would only be aware of an issue with their pumps after they had occurred. Instead of requiring a call out to an engineer at 2 am on a Saturday to resolve a problem, with ARQ’s partnership North East Water could foresee, plan and fix the issue at 2 pm on a Friday. Likewise, without any real time information on their pump’s conditions, maintenance would simply be scheduled on regular intervals, not necessarily when or if it was needed.

With ARQ’s accelerated digital twin, North East Water effectively have a set ‘eyes’ on the ground. This real time data enables the North East Water to determine in advance where and when maintenance of individual pumps is actually required. These are only two examples of the many advantages a single implementation our accelerated digital twin solution can provide. With our ‘Twin In A Box’ solution, we are confident many businesses can achieve a return on investment in as little as six months.

ARQ Loves Innovation

The Emerging Technology team loves the adoption of this technology so much, that they are even using it at home. An ARQ team member has a fully connected smart house that they developed. While fantastic, achieving such a comprehensive, interconnected and bespoke system was not an easy task.