Article for Jornal Económico: What if we start incorporating technology to make leaps in productivity?

Posted by Gonçalo Chaves on 28 Oct, 2022 11:43 am

In this article for Jornal Económico, João Pedro Serrano, Vice-President of the Lisbon MBA Alumni Board, reflects on the importance of the emergence of new technologies.

 

Making the leap forward requires more than experience and intuition. We need tools and technology that allow us to decide based on data and reality. To try and experiment with acceptable risk.

 

Technological evolution is the basis of people’s improvements in civilization. Different evolutions and industrial and scientific revolutions have allowed for developments in wealth and quality of life for humanity, in general, and Portugal, in particular. And, for this reason, it is strange that, at a time when the country is facing structural problems, in the extensive media coverage, we cannot find a word about technology and the transforming leaps forward that it can allow.

 

I’ll give you a hand. Digital Twin is the name of a set of tools that aims to create a virtual copy of any physical system, continuously updated in real-time. They allow you to run complex simulations of real systems by testing changes to specific variables. The result is a huge reduction in risks and problems and a significant performance improvement. In other words, it allows you to design the optimal systems, continuously updated in real-time, just as a GPS automatically updates the route.

 

Traditionally very expensive and limited, these types of systems were restricted to the defense and aerospace industries. But a change in circumstances – lower computing prices, widespread low-cost artificial intelligence models, and the introduction of 5G – have made their use much more universal. Today, most large industrial manufacturers have or are building some form of Digital Twin of their factories and supply and distribution chains, and are already being used to address current difficulties.

 

But this is only the beginning. The progressively lower cost of these technologies will lead to their being adopted universally and by all fields of business as a basis for competitive advantage. A Digital Twin can either optimize the design of an airplane or the traffic of a city or maximize how many customers a set of counters and employees can serve.

 

As an example, three structural problems in Portugal widely discussed in the last months could have quantitative developments by applying this kind of technology:

Health: a digital twin could simulate the different disruption scenarios, and anticipate which is the best distribution of resources in very specific metrics, such as waiting times and severity of diseases/services.

Fire and Forestry: a digital twin could anticipate and prevent scenarios like Pedrogão Grande, as well as test the best solutions for resource distribution without human risk, continuously updated for each occurrence.

Water: water management is one of the fundamental problems of our society in the decades to come, and it needs to be planned to take this into account. On the supply side, we have more and more unpredictability, with climate change, while consumption is managed in a disjointed way. On the heavy side – agriculture – decisions about the type of crops and even the seasons and methods used to make a huge difference in how much water we use. On top of that, we have to add electricity generation, industrial activity, and human consumption, including variations in tourism. A digital twin would be a fundamental tool for an integrated management model.

 

To take the step forward we need more than experience and intuition. We need tools and technology that allow us to decide based on data and reality. That allows us to try and experiment with acceptable risk.

 

It is true that this technology (like any other) requires investment and training of human resources. But the returns will be much greater, not only in the advantage that it represents for the challenges of our society but also for the creation of technical and scientific competencies that will be able to place our companies in a sustainable way and to grow internationally. It’s time to discuss and put technology at the service of our economy.

 

 

Read the full article (original) in Portuguese here.

Source: Jornal Económico