Digital Twins Transforming Enterprise Operations

Insights from Nigel Yard of Aerogility

 Revolutionising Business Performance Through Virtual Enterprise Modelling

Enterprises across industries are increasingly turning to digital twin technology to transform their operations, optimise performance and respond swiftly to disruptions. At a recent Clustre Next Gen Tech Briefing, Nigel Yard of Aerogility shared how their digital twin platform is revolutionising major organisations’ operational capabilities, with an illuminating case study from Rolls-Royce Defence.

What Are Enterprise Digital Twins?

Unlike traditional digital twins that might replicate a single piece of equipment, Aerogility specialises in creating comprehensive digital twins of what Yard calls “the operating enterprise.” This approach models the entire operational ecosystem required to deliver an outcome.

“All of our customers have an output of some description,” explained Yard. “In the case of Rolls-Royce, they have to deliver engines or power plants capable of providing so many hours of running time. To support that, there’s an entire business operation that includes supply chain, maintenance, modifications, training people, having facilities – all that needs to come together to deliver that output. All of that is what our customers look to twin.”

Agent-Based AI Drives the Technology

The Aerogility platform utilises agent-based artificial intelligence as its core technology. Each element of the operating enterprise is represented by an intelligent agent within the system.

“Each of those agents negotiate with themselves to come up with an optimum solution for achieving the outcome that a customer wants,” Yard outlined.

Rather than programmers hard-coding solutions, the agents enact business rules to find optimal arrangements, making the system both powerful and adaptable to changing circumstances.

From Product Provider to Outcome Provider 

One of the most compelling aspects of Yard’s presentation was how digital twins are enabling business model transformations. Rolls-Royce exemplifies this evolution, having moved from being simply an engine provider with a “here’s a bunch of spares, if you need more just give us a call” approach, to taking on outcome-based contracts.

“In their case, they call it ‘power by the hour’,” noted Yard. “There’s an expectation about the level of availability of an aircraft engine, but this could equally be true for a submarine nuclear reactor, or an engine on a ship, or a land-based generator.”

This transition to outcome-based models created complexity that traditional systems struggled to handle. The enterprise digital twin emerged as the solution to this challenge.

Real-World Applications

The digital twin technology developed for Rolls-Royce Defence is deployed across multiple use cases:

• Bid Development. ”Aerogility is used to develop and validate future support solutions,” Yard explained. This capability allowed Rolls-Royce to show potential customers not just the product, but how effectively they could support it over its lifecycle.
• Business Performance Analysis. “Every quarter when they do a performance review. They run an Aerogility simulation to say, ‘Are we still on track? What is the likely outcome going to be? How do we address the risks?'”
• Business Case Development. The platform helps evaluate investment cases, determining whether proposed changes will achieve the desired outcomes before committing resources.
• Supply Chain Optimisation. Digital twins enable comprehensive modelling of complex supply chains, helping identify potential bottlenecks and optimise resource allocation.
• Sustainability Applications. An emerging application highlighted by Yard is using digital twins to model carbon footprints: “When new assets, new platforms, new equipment are being developed, you can look at it in the context of how much carbon is being generated. The Royal Air Force has a future target, so in terms of the new 6th generation fighter jet that’s being developed, Rolls-Royce is using Aerogility to assess the carbon footprint.”
• Measurable Business Impact. While exact numbers weren’t disclosed, Yard indicated that Rolls-Royce had significantly increased the profitability of their service propositions. Being a pioneer of this capability has enabled Rolls-Royce to work with their customers and suppliers to extend the scope of the operational enterprise that is twinned.  This ‘first-mover’ position has enabled them to address broader defence enterprise issues and better position themselves for future opportunities in the ever-evolving defence landscape.

Implementation Timeframe

For organisations considering enterprise digital twin implementation, Yard offered encouraging news about deployment timelines: “We get them a usable capability within three months.”

This rapid deployment is possible because of modular components developed through previous implementations. Rather than attempting to model an entire enterprise at once, Aerogility recommends starting with one operational area, such as maintenance and expanding from there.

Collaborative Development

Yard emphasised that creating digital twins is fundamentally a collaborative process: “We basically need to define the individual agents. We work with stakeholders and customers’ business that know how they work. The analogy I use is like getting a whole bunch of subject matter experts put in a room and saying ‘we need to achieve this’ – get on the whiteboard and start sketching out how you might do it. All you’re doing is taking their knowledge and putting it into the agents.”

Future Direction

The recognition of Aerogility’s value is evident in Rolls-Royce’s commitment to the technology: “It’s now deployed across the defence business,” Yard noted. This strategic endorsement demonstrates the transformative potential that enterprise digital twins offer to complex operations.

As businesses face increasingly complex operational challenges and seek to deliver outcome-based services rather than simply products, the enterprise digital twin approach pioneered by companies like Aerogility represents a significant advancement in business technology. By creating virtual replicas of entire operating enterprises, organisations can test scenarios, optimise resources, and respond to disruptions with unprecedented agility.