Military readiness through supply chain resilience

Our research identified four barriers specific to implementing digital twins in defense supply chains. Organizations that break these barriers can improve resilience and decision advantage—moving toward a new performance frontier.

1. The knowledge deficit - The impact of skills and organization-wide awareness gaps on digital twin adoption.
2. The data dilemma - The perception that digital twins create massive data management complexity.
3. The security paradox - The dynamic in which concerns about data security for digital twins prevent greater security.
4. The supplier gap - The reality that small suppliers require support to fully participate in digital twins platforms.

• Ensure that senior leaders are informed about the power of digital twins for supply chains and that adoption and investment is led by them, not by the IT organization.
• Consider acquiring key skills (e.g., AI, ML and cloud enablement network connectivity) through strategic partnerships with academic and research institutions and vendors.
• Do what’s realistic to create an environment to attract the right skills—an environment that offers options like remote work and flexible contracts that support on-demand talent models.

• Create a common user platform in information services and design an intuitive user experience at the point of collection to trigger correct inputs and minimizes errors.
• Evaluate the supply chain for a data aggregation approach to support digital twins, identifying areas of risk; system, sensor and third-party data gaps; and how to close them.
• Invest in analytics and business intelligence platforms that integrate data into a decision support capability, so decision makers aren’t overwhelmed with insights that aren’t useful.

Digital twins deliver more value to the military ecosystem when they extend beyond one organization and integrate with the entire supply chain. However, security concerns can make this difficult to do. Given this and the nascency of digital twin applications in defense supply chains, governance is lagging. The irony? This governance gap only perpetuates fears around security and compliance; this is the security paradox.

• Update defense policies and agreements that relate to data security and data sharing to ensure they promote data sharing across the end-top-end supply chain.
• Refine environment, application and data security accreditation standards to clarify how defense players and suppliers can prove they are compliant with sharing rules.
• Prioritize cloud adoption to break the security paradox, putting trust in the cloud to connect data and experiences to accelerate momentum around digital twins.

Defense agencies and prime contractors choose suppliers based on their compliance with contracting requirements, skills and capabilities and operational performance. As momentum for digital twins grows, defense organizations will need additional criteria around digitalization and data literacy, as well as modernized contracting protocols, to select right-fit suppliers.