Digital Twins Are the Future of EAM (Equipment Asset Monitoring)

With the right tools and processes in place, you can automate and streamline Equipment Asset Monitoring (EAM), allowing you to achieve greater cost savings, efficiency gains, and overall asset/equipment performance improvement. One of the biggest keys to success when it comes to EAM is creating digital twins.

Digital twins are digital replicas or models of physical assets. These replicas are used to record the assets’ properties, behaviors, and lifecycles. By using digital twins combined with a comprehensive monitoring system and predictive maintenance strategy, manufacturers can ensure maximum returns on their investments while also increasing safety standards and environmental compliance requirements for businesses across all industries. Read on to learn more about what digital twins are, and how they enable smarter monitoring solutions for EAM, revolutionizing operations for manufacturing companies in any industry.

What is a digital twin?

A digital twin is an important innovation in the production industry that can provide insight into physical machinery. It is a virtual model that gives access to a vast range of data, more than what the physical asset alone could offer. CAD 3D representations, technical information, maintenance information, and replications of behavior can be combined to create a more precise understanding of how equipment functions in a given context.

With this understanding comes increased scope for predictive maintenance strategies, reduced costs and damage control due to instant problem identification, and greater overall accuracy due to automated record-keeping.

The role of digital twins in EAM

Digital twins literally act as a digital proxy for physical assets. Let’s take a closer look at the full scope of benefits that digital twins offer across the factory floor.

Enhancing equipment visibility and management
By creating digital records of physical assets, digital twins stream the continued upkeep and monitoring of critical equipment across the factory floor. With digital twins, engineers now have access to virtual versions of machines and their current parameters, allowing them to readily assess the health and performance of their equipment. They can also use digital twins to ensure the service record is up to date, making equipment servicing and maintenance more efficient.

Enabling preventive and predictive maintenance
Digital twins provide an up-to-date digital record of physical assets, so engineers are now able to quickly identify key factors that foreshadow the need for preventative repairs or maintenance. Furthermore, this technology can be used to optimize tool calibration, load levels, and even cycle times. These invaluable benefits allow companies to increase their operational efficiency while significantly reducing costly downtime or equipment malfunctions.

Providing training opportunities for staff
As organizations look to bridge the mounting skills gap in the manufacturing sector, digital twins are growing in popularity. Thanks to this technology, companies can leverage high-fidelity virtual reality training to improve proficiency and knowledge retention among technicians and equipment maintenance personnel.

This new approach allows staff to practice performing maintenance tasks on an exact digital replica of the physical asset instead of risking safety or damaging actual equipment. Digital twins help producers meet the demands of upskilling staff, reducing associated costs, and creating significant productivity benefits.

Providing real-time monitoring and integrations
Real-time monitoring and integrations enabled by digital twin technology have become invaluable assets for production floor engineers who are able to accurately monitor the health and condition of equipment and diagnose and resolve issues in real-time.

Thanks to digital twins, engineers can easily access complete service records with detailed analytics of specific assets from anywhere, providing a comprehensive set of data to facilitate improved decision making. This is an invaluable addition to any intelligent manufacturing operation as it gives teams unprecedented visibility into asset performance.

How does SmartSights digital twin software work?

ABLE™ powers SmartSights digital twin technology, actively monitoring production lines, quickly identifying downtime issues, and providing analytics and data on shop floor HMIs to ensure maximum availability, MTBF, and MTTR. This revolutionary technology allows manufacturers to get the most out of their machines and production lines without any modifications being made to PLC logic.
What makes ABLE™ so powerful is its ability to integrate real-time IoT edge data into business systems such as MES (manufacturing execution system), SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition system), and ERPs (enterprise resource planning systems). This integration helps speed up the process of Production Line Modeling by reducing the need for manual tagging by more than 80%.

By leveraging this digital twin technology, manufacturers have access to sophisticated analytics that can be visualized on shop floor HMIs. This helps provide insight into how processes are working at all times, making it easier to diagnose problems before they become major issues. Additionally, it allows factory engineers or plant managers to identify areas of improvement in their processes that could lead to greater efficiency in their production lines.

In addition, ABLE™ simplifies the process of finding root cause analysis for downtime issues by providing an efficient line flow model that quickly identifies problem areas. On top of this, mobile views for smart devices or desktop computers give users easy access to the information they need from anywhere.

SmartSights digital twin technology revolutionizes the way factories are run today by providing real-time monitoring and root-cause analysis. By integrating IoT edge data into business systems such as MES, SCADA, and ERPs, factory engineers have access to sophisticated analytics that can help them diagnose problems quicker than ever before.