RPA – Rob Tiffany

A process is a series of actions, tasks or steps taken in a linear or sometimes a branching, non-linear sequence in order to achieve a desired outcome.

These process steps could be manual activities undertaken by a person, purely digital steps taken by software across computers, electromechanical actions between digital messages and mechanical actuators as well as advanced cyber-physical tasks performed by industrial robots.

Let’s walk through a few examples:

A farmer checks the weather forecast everyday then drives their truck to appropriate orchards or fields to perform irrigation for a certain amount of time based on previous rainfall totals and the needs of the crops.

A digital scheduling system for doctor appointments retrieves appointment time and location preferences of the patient and combines it with their insurance information and the doctor’s current schedule to deliver a range of appointment times.

An electromechanical system uses motion sensors to notice a person has entered a meeting room and carries out steps to turn on lights, adjust room temperature, and turn on the projector to show a presentation.

Cyber-physical industrial robots perform individual tasks but also have awareness of the current state of other robots on the assembly line to better work together in building a car.

Rather than just using digital twins to provide visibility to ongoing operations or to improve future product development via simulation, why not use digital twins to orchestrate processes?

Let’s dive into the simple electromechanical scenario shown above:

Imagine the familiar IoT process where you need to turn on the lights, adjust room temperature and turn on the projector when a person enters a meeting room. You’ve got a Digital Twin that represents the meeting room which acts like a group or container for a collection of digital twins that represent motion sensors, HVAC, the lighting system and the projector.

All you need now is an process automated by bots to bring this to life.

The motion sensor detects a person walking-in which triggers a software bot on the associated microcontroller to send a message to an IoT platform or building management system. Upon receiving the message, a bot identifies the particular meeting room and sends a command to activate the overhead lights. Concurrently, a bot sends a command to the HVAC system to adjust the room to a comfortable temperature. Last but not least, a bot sends a command to turn on the overhead projector so the person can deliver a presentation.

How do you orchestrate this process?

Since this is a simple process, you could probably do this with a series of rules via the event processor in your IoT platform. Knowing that processes can become more complex with many variables and different forks in the road, you could instead choose to define the orchestration in a Digital Twin Model. With it’s available process properties, this twin defines the steps needed to guide software bots in taking the actions needed to achieve the desired outcome. Each step is represented by a process property. Each process property defines the digital twins involved, the APIs needed to connect, security requirements for calling those APIs, data to be sent, return values to expect and other details needed to successfully complete the step and move on to the next one.

This doesn’t have to be a 100% digital process.

In another scenario, the prescriptive analytics from an IoT platform might alert a technician to fix a broken component. The orchestrating digital twin model would still have its process properties except this time, each step would guide a person instead of a bot to complete the required activities. In this form of guided repair, the process properties would use descriptive text to tell the technician what tools to bring, where to go, and step by step instructions to fix the component. These text based steps could be displayed on a mobile app or take a more digital form via augmented reality (AR) glasses. Once the repair was completed, a tap of a button on a mobile app might make the API call needed to let the orchestrating twin know the job is done.

If you ever find yourself struggling to digitally transform your organization, business units, divisions, processes, assets & people, you might combine #DigitalTwins with the architecture of a distributed #IoT software system as your guide. #IIoT #DigitalTransformation

I know you’ve been converting things like documents, photos, sounds, numbers, blueprints & measurements from the physical world into the digital world for decades so I won’t belabor this point – you’re going to keep doing that.

From now on, you’re going to create everything digitally first. That means you’re using a computer with a screen, and maybe even a mouse. Okay, I won’t hold it against you if you still scribble notes on airplane drink napkins or draw pictures of early designs on the back of paper place mats.

Also, don’t confuse this endeavor with the business process re-engineering projects of the 1990s. You’re not doing a straight port of your manual processes to digital equivalents. Just because Steve Jobs liked skeuomorphism doesn’t mean your digital processes should reflect the old way of doing things.

Determine every way employees, assets, processes, departments & business units interact with each other as well as how they interact with customers, partners & suppliers in order to digitally convert those interfaces into APIs.

Yes, I want you to create RESTful APIs for every one of those interactions. These are your Digital Threads. Oh, and make sure you version them because an organization is always learning and evolving.

You need to model the properties, artifacts, behaviors, history & events that business units, departments, processes, assets & employees respond to in order to create composite Digital Twins to complete your Digitalization.

Why “composite” digital twins? Because we’re not just talking about atoms here. We’re describing the complex and oftentimes hierarchical relationships that look more like molecules. The human body has important subsystems like the heart, lungs and brain. Your organization is no different.

Your Digital Twins will run in a distributed platform that manages the Digital Threads connecting employees, assets, processes, departments, business units, customers, partners & suppliers.

At this point, your Digital Transformation should be in beta stage & your organization, with all its components, should come to life as a Digital Organism that probably still needs to be debugged.

Notice how I just fast-forwarded through a multi-month or multi-year process? Becoming a Digital Organization is going to take a while so be patient.

An important takeaway is that you’ve now digitally documented how every last aspect of how your enterprise operates. No more reliance on tribal knowledge & the company memory issues you have due to employee turnover are solved.

Everything is made into software & connected via APIs streaming over 5G at a level no one has ever imagined. Digital Twins will collaborate with people & each other via APIs, apps & analytics to run your business.

Terms like CI/CD & DevOps will take on new meaning as they’re used to upgrade some or all of the business as developers make improvements. Scaling your business won’t necessarily mean hiring new employees anymore.

Instead, scaling might mean adding containers to a Cloud Native infrastructure. This probably sounds as weird as the first time you heard you had to write a job description for code performing Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

As your digitally transformed organization matures, you’ll be able to determine which functions are best handled by Digital Twins & which ones require human creativity, dexterity, or other unique abilities.

A new level of disruptive automation will sweep through. Don’t go dystopian on me. Like all the preceding industrial revolutions, Industry 4.0 will create more jobs than it eliminates. Lifelong education is the key.

This process is a large mountain to climb & I’m sure you’ve heard hundreds of examples of what it means from other analysts. My definition is a bit more revolutionary because you shouldn’t half-ass something this transformative.

You’re probably wondering, what’s the payoff in making digital transformation a reality? Hyper-efficiency, cost savings, a better customer experience, no more role confusion, no more lost organizational knowledge, & increased revenue via digital scaling.

I hope this synopsis has been helpful jump start to digitally transforming your organization & how it operates with people, processes, machines & connected intelligence.

Tag: RPA

Digital Twin Models and Process Properties

A process is a series of actions, tasks or steps taken in a linear or sometimes a branching, non-linear sequence in order to achieve a desired outcome.