Top 3 benefits of remote inspections using digital twins

How much more convenient would it be if site inspections didn’t require you to be physically present? What else could you do with the time you’d spend travelling to and from sites, and how much could it save you? Imagine if you could immediately get your hands on important data from your teams, or if you could just ‘fly’ around your space or building without the need for health and safety equipment. In a world experiencing a tectonic shift towards tech-assisted efficiencies and remote operations, digital twins are an ideal solution to facilitate and actually improve your asset inspections.

What previously seemed to many like science fiction is now in everyday use – at least with early adopters. For instance, forward thinking organisations managing buildings or critical infrastructure are utilising digital twins and adjacent technologies to manage smarter, safer and more efficient spaces. At Spinview, we take digital twins a step further. Our approach is based around advancing and improving the communication and collaboration of the data you have about your buildings and assets. How do we do this? We transform your data into actionable visual intelligence – taking it from a simple repository of information to a source of constant guidance and tangible intelligence, communicated to any user through visual and other sensory cues. In essence, we utilise digital twin technology to bring your data to life. 

Not only does this enable you to access your assets remotely and gain the information you need, but by leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, Machine Vision and immersive technology applications, remote inspections can unlock greater insights about a space than in-person checks have ever allowed. Digital twins can improve operations and, more broadly, help companies to respond to an array of challenges, and make better data-driven decisions to optimise performance. The ability to deploy technologies that provide you with real-time visibility over your assets (allowing you to manage them, look around them, and communicate them to others in any location) is very powerful. 

There are a huge number of practical benefits created by having such unparalleled access to and understanding of your physical assets. Here we take a look at three of the most significant for any asset owner or operator.

• Greater access with a higher degree of safety

The first clear benefit of remote inspection technology is its implications for health and safety, as it mitigates the need to have your inspection personnel onsite. Taking rail infrastructure as an example, inspectors can generally only access the site during limited engineering hours; the environment is hazardous and specific training is required. Remote technology means you can access the site from anywhere in the world at any time, meaning there’s no need to put your people into potentially hazardous environments in order to conduct an inspection. 

• Identify better, more cost-effective solutions in less time, driving operational efficiency

With complex assets and infrastructure come complex problems. From fault finding to asset identification (at the scale of square metres in building environments or kilometres in road and rail), understanding where your key issues are and responding to them in a timely manner is crucial to operational efficiency. So too is getting the data into the hands of the relevant operational teams in the right format at the right time. 

As the manager or operator responsible for the maintenance of a physical asset, you will undoubtedly be facing intense pressure to ensure business continuity – and as ever, do more with less. With long-term solutions usually only discoverable through costly time spent onsite investigating various options, in-person inspections often end up recommending an immediately clear solution to get the asset operational again in short order. But digital twins offer a far more cost-effective option: not only do they enable you to conduct digitised remote inspections, you can also then virtually troubleshoot a solution to any flagged issues. You can automate the identification of key faults, run your asset inventory digitally, communicate your issues, tag notes for others and annotate for description and purpose, and even simulate a ‘what if’ scenario, based on real data. And in addition to all that, you can even share the intel with anyone in your team regardless of physical location. Crucially, using digital twins means you can discover and act upon all this intelligence without having to go through a costly trial-and-error process requiring real-time, physical resources. The result: a more effective long-term solution at a significantly lower cost.

• Enhanced insights creating more valuable spaces

Whatever the checklist your inspection may include, using Spinview’s technology means you can find all the information you need remotely. This solution takes you a step further though: it allows you to fuse multiple sets of data together to deliver enhanced insights. This could be in connection with various areas of interest, from asset performance, predictive maintenance, air quality and carbon reduction planning, to informing the design, planning or retrofitting of spaces and optimising them for human occupancy. 

Consider risks such as poor air quality and pollutants. With such information being invisible to the naked eye, your understanding of localised air quality throughout a space will so far have been limited. But by capturing and then communicating this data visually, your inspectors gain clearer, more accurate insights to help you optimise your physical assets and spaces.

These are just some of the ways remote inspections made possible by Spinview’s digital twin technology can benefit your business. If you would like to find out how you can utilise our tools to bring visual intelligence to your remote inspections, get in touch with us today.