Supply Chain & Digital Twins: Mature Enough?

Supply chain management (SCM) is constantly in search of new ways to improve operations. Actors in supply chains have digitized their operations to a large extent. Theories have already suggested that the concept of digital twins (DTs) has promise as a means to improve SCM, from digitizing operations to sharing updated/real-time digital information about the objects within them. In practice, however, the implementation of DTs is typically limited to those shadowing past events; thus, DTs have not yet provided the proposed opportunities. We claim that the enabling technology for DTs may be mature and available, but the individual partners in the supply chain may not be sufficiently mature to use it. We propose a maturity model to evaluate stakeholders’ DT capability maturity. On a more theoretical level, our study leads to a more generic requestioning of whether SCM is compatible with the use of DTs.