Inside PepsiCo’s digital twin revolution

Reconfiguring a factory used to mean shutting it down, making costly bets, and hoping the design worked in the real world. PepsiCo found a way around that. Rather than rely on engineering blueprints to solve the problem, the company used a specialized laser to scan the facility and create a digital representation that was accurate to within a millimeter. It then used this 3D model to simulate the current manufacturing process and identify production bottlenecks. This exercise gave engineers a blank canvas to experiment with new layouts that would help expand and speed up production—all befo...