Frequently Asked Questions
Process Manufacturer Solutions are designed for plant owners to transform manufacturing operations across their enterprise.
OEM Solutions are designed for industrial equipment owners or field service providers to monitor and optimize assets deployed within their customers’ enterprises, residences, or anywhere distributed equipment may be used.
Although fully configurable to meet your unique operational needs, TwinThread natively addresses several of the most impactful optimization metrics right out of the box, including those related to batch optimization, quality, production, uptime, throughput, energy efficiency, asset reliability, and asset life. Our pre-built solutions target specific sets of metrics for improvement. For example, our Perfect Quality Solution targets metrics like First Pass Quality and CpK, while our Perfect Energy Solution targets Energy Cost / Unit.
For detailed information on the metrics optimized by each solution, visit the Pre-Built Solutions pages on TwinThread.
TwinThread’s Industrial Cloud Platform was designed to solve the common productivity challenges industrial companies face today due to aging infrastructure, accelerating skills gaps, volatile supply chains, and regulatory compliance burdens. Our out-of-the-box pre-built solutions combine your sensor and process data with Industrial AI to improve a variety of metrics crucial to the success of your operations, such as quality, efficiency, and reliability.
By providing solutions with flexible deployment architectures, we help our customer’s digital transformation regardless of their current level of maturity, accelerating the process from pilot to broader enterprise-wide rollout.
TwinThread connects to virtually any Historian, MES, CMM, DCS, PLC, Sensor Gateway, or IoT platform in minutes. Our Edge Agent technology performs local processing and maintains a secure connection to the TwinThread Industrial Cloud Platform. TwinThread's pre-built solutions can be configured in less than an hour to proactively drive improvements across key operations and maintenance metrics.
Learn more about TwinThread's Platform.
Several factors make TwinThread a unique offering in the industrial landscape:
- Rapid Time to Value: Pre-built solutions, no-code and low-code tools, and minimal development work ensure your subject matter experts can quickly prove value and ROI.
- Operationalize: Powerful workflow and open integration capabilities enable fully autonomous actions that implement process recommendations based on opportunities for optimization.
- Innovation: Experts can develop and innovate quickly through no-code development tools that make applying Industrial AI easy.
- Scalability: TwinThread has proven it can scale Industrial AI from a single site across an enterprise comprising millions of sensors and thousands of pieces of equipment.
To learn more about the value we deliver to our customers, go to our Why TwinThread page.
Like most systems, the greater the volume of data to train with, the more effective the model is in driving results. However, first, principal-based metrics and models do not require any history. Simple anomaly models can deliver value with a few weeks of history, and more complex solutions, such as Perfect Quality, may require from three months to a year's worth of data to become effective. The good news is that we can tap directly into historical data if you already have it. If you don't have historical data, there is no better time than the present to start collecting that history and unlocking its potential.
The key to driving improvements is found in how recommendations from Industrial AI are “operationalized.” Operationalization is a combination of visualizations, analytics, and workflows that form an automated work process to translate your raw industrial data into recommendations and automated actions.
TwinThread’s Industrial Cloud Platform was built with operationalization in mind. Automated data capture, contextualization, visualization, and the ability to create customizable workflows based on AI allow you to realize incremental value at each step in your digital transformation journey.
Pre-built solutions, built around a standardized Digital Twin structure, embed AI into your production and identify opportunities for optimization. Through monitoring rules, AI surfaces critical anomalies that impact performance. These issues are automatically triaged, with actions passed to the right resources for resolution.
Coordination of those actions and the broader implementation of operationalization require a digital command hub, TwinThread’s Virtual Operations Center. This extends the reach of subject matter experts, allowing them to manage and monitor operations across various locations and systems. The VOC, as part of the Industrial Cloud Platform, can be rapidly and easily scaled. It enables teams to digitize their knowledge and collaborate on recommendations and innovation opportunities across their entire operations.
Deployments typically enjoy a 12x return on subscription investment, with a 5-8% gross margin improvement, and can be implemented and fully operationalized in just 4-8 weeks.
The highest continuous ROI solutions are Perfect Quality, Uptime Optimization, and Throughput Optimization. These applications can immediately and continuously impact performance, achieving payback periods as short as a few weeks.
Perfect Energy also offers continuous returns but typically has extended payback periods.
Asset Reliability and Asset Life offer "event" driven and cost-avoidant ROI profiles (making it more challenging to approximate an ROI). However, preventing a single catastrophic failure often justifies the price of a subscription many years over.
Read more about how TwinThread has helped its customers maximize their ROI.
TwinThread offers multiple implementation options, from self-provisioned to turnkey through one of our preferred solution partners.
As part of our base subscription, we offer a host of onboarding resources, including online support, regularly scheduled Onboarding Accelerator webinars, and no-agenda office hours during which you can interact live with TwinThread's Customer Success Consultants. These resources are intended to accelerate adoption and ensure long-term self-sufficiency.
The most popular implementation option is our "Assisted" onboarding. TwinThread engineers, or our partner engineers, work directly with your team to implement the first use case on the first process/asset. We support you in achieving self-sufficiency within the first implementation phase. If you don't have the necessary resources for either implementation approach, our preferred solution partners can offer turnkey onboarding and a fully managed service deployment.
TwinThread can be fully operationalized in 4-8 weeks. The software can be deployed in minutes to hours. The remaining onboarding time is focused on incorporating the learnings and recommendations from TwinThread's pre-built solutions into your operating strategy.
Typically, there are three types of systems that TwinThread connects to and works with:
- On-Premise Automation and Information Systems: PLCs, DCSs, Historians, and MES systems. TwinThread has developed deep integrations with the most popular vendor solutions.
- IoT Gateways and Smart Sensors: Our "IoT Hub" enables direct streaming data connections from various vendors' sensors using multiple protocols and various communication networks.
- Cloud-to-Cloud Applications: This includes leading cloud vendors and industrial cloud applications. Similar to On-Premise, we have developed deep integrations with the most popular vendor solutions.
TwinThread has an On-Premise Agent that connects to your local automation and securely pushes data to our Industrial Cloud Platform. We can also use our "IoT Hub," which allows you to create your own service (running locally on your device) and securely push data to TwinThread. In both cases, secure HTTPS is used, and the Agent can still securely operate where corporate firewalls are required to block inbound traffic.
TwinThread was designed and built by a team of industrial automation professionals with over 100 years of collective experience optimizing thousands of plants and millions of assets across virtually every industry. We have applied TwinThread to almost every process type, from discrete to batch to hybrid.
We provide a solution that seamlessly handles multiple process types and/or multiple types of equipment. This capability was built from the team’s diversity of experience and our history of innovation in industrial software.
To learn more about our team of industry experts, visit TwinThread’s Our Team page.
Our Customer Success team brings a wealth of industrial experience and expertise in control systems engineering, process engineering, industrial consulting, and IT.
Their mission is your success. Whether you are self-provisioning your first solution or rolling it out across your enterprise, this team has seen it all and is here to support you at every step.
TwinThread also has highly experienced partners who are experts in combining OT and IT to transform your operations.
The key to determining whether an improvement initiative you've identified is a good fit for an Industrial AI solution lies in a few key factors:
- You have historical data supporting the initiative to train with, ideally at three months or more.
- You have a clearly defined metric that measures current performance, ideally one that’s demonstrated variation over time.
- Improvements in the defined metric have significant value.
- Your initiative has scale potential and more than one asset, production line, or plant that can benefit.
If you've identified a challenge you're trying to address and the metric you'd like to optimize, you're ready to go.
We'll start by briefing your team on our solution and onboarding approach. Then, we'll follow up with a business case assessment with one of our Industrial Consultants. After that, it's just a matter of identifying your pilot team and executive sponsorship before kicking off your production pilot.
Interested in getting started? Visit our Options to Get Started page to review more information about TwinThread's platform, register for live demos, and speak to different team members about how to begin.
Security, candor, and trust are our highest priorities.
We understand it is a privilege to work with your data, and it’s imperative to protect it. You own your data and the insights TwinThread produces from it. Under no circumstances will we sell your data in any form, anonymized or otherwise.
As of May 2023, TwinThread has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation for its Industrial Cloud Platform. SOC 2 Attestation certifies through an independent audit by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) that TwinThread is compliant across five core principles:
- Security
- Confidentiality
- Availability
- Privacy
- Processing integrity
TwinThread is also routinely audited by some of the world's largest companies, and we encourage all customers to actively engage with us to keep their data secure.
View TwinThread's Privacy Policy to learn more about how we preserve your privacy even before you become a client. If you are unfamiliar with the process, TwinThread suggests that customers review the specific evaluation criteria of a SOC 2 Attestation. You may request a copy of TwinThread's SOC 2 report for more details.
Yes.
TwinThread offers an "add-in" for the Jupyter Notebook that seamlessly integrates with our Model Factory. This allows a data scientist to fully take advantage of TwinThread's data management and contextualization infrastructure, empowering them to focus their attention on developing better algorithms.
Custom algorithms can be set up to "compete" against TwinThread's out-of-the-box algorithms in the platform. TwinThread will automatically apply the algorithm that achieves the best results in each application of a model. Developers may also use the Model Factory to build their own complete models using powerful building blocks provided by TwinThread.
Learn more about how TwinThread employs models on the AI Modeling page.
Absolutely.
TwinThread was designed with process and equipment experts as our primary audience. We want to enable them to innovate quickly using data without requiring them to be IT or data science experts. All they need is their process and equipment expertise—TwinThread takes care of the rest.
We install a lightweight piece of software called an Agent. These prebuilt and out-of-the-box agents connect quickly to all types of industrial data sources (Historians, PLCs, smart devices, or other data sources) and send key data up to the TwinThread Cloud via a Secure Cloud Gateway for analysis.
In some cases, agents can communicate and write data back to your data sources, enabling you to apply the intelligence of TwinThread’s Industrial Cloud Platform directly to your control system.
A Digital Twin is a digital representation of your assets and processes organized into an easy-to-understand and visual format.
A Digital Thread connects to a Digital Twin to create calculations, rules, and workflows that act on Digital Twins to improve performance.
You could think of Digital Twins as the “nouns” and Digital Threads as the “verbs” in the platform.
You cannot fully assess the possibilities of what your data can do for you without first configuring a solution, training that solution on your data, and reviewing the model's results.
The good news is that TwinThread's pre-built solutions allow you to go from data connection to application in less than one hour. This approach allows you to experiment, evolve, and innovate.
Discover the predictive power of your data faster, easier, and with less risk than any other method.
There are two critical steps to solving performance issues.
- Find the root cause of the problem.
- Ensure that the resolution to that problem is consistently applied.
The entire feature set of TwinThread is available with your subscription.
Our pricing is based on the number of "sensors" or inputs fed into the system and the number of inputs to Industrial AI models. This approach allows you to try any available solutions and only pay for what you use.
To connect to your physical data sources, TwinThread must download and install an on-premise agent to a local server or workstation.
A basic computer or VM image running on a Windows Server is required. Windows and Linux operating systems are supported. Additional requirements and installation recommendations are featured below:
- Install the latest versions of the .NET Framework.
- Hardware specifications should include 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of available hard disk space.
- An outbound path on HTTPS using port 443 is necessary for network configuration. Depending on your IT policies, a predefined Endpoint provided by TwinThread might be required.
- Ensure the server has network access to on-premise data sources with the appropriate user credentials and that it is always set to run.
Connecting to your data sources in minutes and seeing results in hours is not unusual.
Our QuickStart wizards make building out your Digital Twins effortless.
Absolutely.
Although they come “out of the box” with a host of preconfigured views and reports, you can tailor dashboards to reflect what views you wish to see.
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