A Digital Twin Based Approach For Ensuring Business Continuity Plan And Safe Return To Workplace

ABSTRACT

Organizations are struggling to ensure business continuity without compromising on delivery excellence in the face of Covid19 pandemic related uncertainties. The uncertainty exists along multiple dimensions such as virus mutations, infectivity and severity of new mutants, efficacy of vaccines against new mutants, waning of vaccine induced immunity over time, and lockdown / opening-up policies effected by city authorities. Moreover, this uncertainty plays out in a non-uniform manner across nations, states, cities, and even within the cities thus leading to highly heterogeneous evolution of pandemic. While Work From Home (WFH) strategy has served well to meet ever-increasing business demands without compromising on individual health safety, there has been an undeniable reduction in social capital. With Covid19 pandemic showing definite waning trends, organizations are considering the possibility of safe transition from WFH to Work From Office (WFO) or a hybrid mode of operation. An effective strategy needs to score equally well on possibly interfering dimensions such as risk of infection, project delivery, and employee wellness. As large organizations will typically have a large number of offices spread across a geography, the problem of arriving at office-specific strategies becomes non-trivial. Moreover, the strategies need to adapt over time to changes that cannot be deduced upfront. This calls for an approach that is amenable to quick and easy adaptation. Our contribution in this regard is constructing a Digital Twin by leveraging various modelling techniques to realistically represent the above mentioned aspects of interest that can be subjected to what-if scenario analysis. We further demonstrate its efficacy using a case study from a large organization. © 2022 SCS.