On April 13, 1970, about 200,000 miles away from Earth, a small spaceship called Apollo 13 had an explosion and ran into trouble, putting the lives of 3 astronauts in grave danger. As shown in movie dramatization Apollo 13, NASA built a model of the stricken spacecraft on Earth to try different possible solutions and find a way to save the crew. This was the idea of a “twin” to help simulate what was possible. NASA’s twin was a physical replica of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, but as computers became more powerful and analytic technologies advanced, the idea of a “twin” became that of a “Digital Twin” where a physical entity and its behavior including all interconnections and dependencies between inputs and outputs is fully modeled digitally.
Once the technology was introduced, Digital Twins started to gain a foothold in the modeling of engineering systems and then of whole factories and supply chains and opened up a world of new possibilities for managers. It was now possible to test systems against scenarios and ask “What if” questions in a way that would not be possible with physical entities. With physical systems testing can be costly and it can also be hard to create the experimental situation that you want to test. But with a digital twin, setting up the required scenario is easy enough to do via configuration with the output of the twin showing what the expected response. This allows managers to ask business questions of the system. “What if we decreased inventory by 20%, what would that lead to in terms of customer service levels?” Or, “What’s the impact of shifting production from an existing location to a new one?” Digital Twins are also useful the way NASA used the one to find a way to rescue the crew of Apollo 13. If something goes wrong, different possible solutions can be tried to find one that works. Digital Twins provide a safe environment to experiment and find ways to optimize business policies and metrics. They are also a way for executives to answer business questions instead of, say, having to call in expensive consultants.
It is no wonder the practice of using digital twins to refine managerial policies has been growing rapidly in recent years, with 75% of C-Suite enterprise executives evaluating or adopting digital twins into their businesses.
Given their usefulness, digital twins are without a doubt useful for MSPs. With digital twins, MSP executives can answer questions such as: “What’s the impact of adding buffer days between projects?” “Given the forecast, how many resources should we bring on board to meet customer service levels?” “What if we change customer service levels, what does that do to our cost?” “What happens is if we bring on new consultants?” In effect, an MSP digital twin can give executives the decision support they need to run their business more effectively and profitably.
Which leads to the question: How do you create a digital twin for your MSP? This is question that Red Swift solves. If you’d like to hear more, do get in touch.