Features of a Digital Planning Twin

What makes a digital planning twin different than a traditional planning exercise or planning software? Well, primarily, it's the ability of a of a digital planning twin to represent with high fidelity your entire value chain from end to end. But not just your operations, but also your your financial operations because, you know, a company is both its operations, what it does, and then how those activities impact its financial statements, which ultimately become its profit. So first, let's talk about fidelity within a digital, planning twin. When you use a digital planning twin, you don't just tell it Here's how much it costs to make a product. You tell it, here's where I can make the product. If I make it here, here's what the variable cost would be. Here's what the six cost would be. Here's what the raw materials would be. And then each time the digital planning twin suggests some way of running the business, it will recalculate the the total product cost. From that. And that's important because those decisions really are what you're using to drive what's the best thing to do, not just what's my average cost of production. From a financial side, the same thing applies. When I buy raw materials from a vendor, I'm not just handing them cash. I'm actually waiting thirty days to pay the bill. And, you know, maybe there's some other terms involved or I spend or I pay something, in terms of interest, When I produce things, I pay my labor right away. I pay other things at other times. Some of the expenses I have in production or non cash, depreciation. So in that case, you you need a system that understands all these, intricacies of financial of how financial metric are, added up, let's say, within an organization at the general budget level. So our digital planning twins include that as well. And the way that that gets used is in the goal setting or constraint setting of your planning process. An example might be, you know, show me how to achieve these these goals deliver this amount of product to my customers, but do it with the least cash. So if I'm constrained on cash in my So I might I might set that as a constraint or as a goal to meet, or I might have constraints on my balance sheet, how much inventory I can carry. Can I do this with a lower amount of inventory? And then all the way, of course, the profit profit is really the king. So will this plan be profitable and how can I achieve the most profit with so all of these are things that are encompassed in what additional planning twin does at the detailed level? And that so it's that fidelity of all the things I talked about that really drives what makes a digital planning twins so special. One of the special things about digital planning twins is that they have a capability, to look through a large number of options of how you could run your business. So when I talk about options, I'm talking about where to produce, who to buy from, which customers to serve, which shipping lanes to use, and how to use my distribution network in the most way. For any given, say, set of demand that you're trying to fulfill or markets that you're trying to penetrate, there could be thousands or millions of different ways to achieve this. I can produce this here. I can produce that there. I can build inventory. I can drop inventory. What the digital planning twin does is because you've told it what all those possibilities are, it can look through and will look through millions of different possibilities on how to satisfy that demand. And for each of those possibilities, it's going to measure what your goal is and choose the possibility, show you the possibility that achieves that in the best way. So that could mean profit. You you could say to the system, and we use the term objective function, the objective, the goal of the digital planning twin, is to show you the plan that has the highest amount of profit and achieves all of your requirements within the capabilities of your business. So a couple things happen. One is you feel like you've got a really good plan. You see where how to achieve that plan. And you have confidence that the plan is actually doable because you know that your digital planning twin understands your capacity, understands your capabilities. It's not gonna suggest to make, you know, twenty percent more product than you can at a particular plant or to buy more from a vendor than you can achieve. So in that way, the digital planning crew becomes extremely powerful.