Business beginnings are diverse. The executive head of DYNAMIC FUTURE considers a project for Kofola to be determining, as well as working on the company’s own application that was never actually sold. Despite that, it opened the doors of a new world. Petr Jaluvka described how difficult it was to tell the story of digital twins 20 years ago and what it is like these days. 

What is a digital twin for?

We’ve been doing dynamic simulation for 25 years – it’s still the same thing, the difference is it’s called otherwise. In the beginning, it was just a simulation. Then it became dynamic simulation, then predictive simulation, then it was a digital factory and now, the interested prefer to call it a digital twin. I think this is the best term to say it, because everybody knows what a twin is. The digital twin enables you to test the behavior of a process under various conditions. Test it and find out what’s good, what’s wrong and get a knowledge base to make a decision in reality. 

Reconstruct a production line, build a new factory

The benefit of digital twins is that before we start building a new factory, we can start building it virtually. We can find out what stuff is missing, what needs to be added, what data we have to get in order to make an information based decision. The twins help to realize much more context. If I had a factory built in the way that a designer comes and builds the facility and then comes another one that implements machines, the fact that the facility and machines don’t correspond to each other would be frustrating. 

We’re going to create a simulation model, do we understand each other?

Now it’s more common that when a company builds up a production line, it has it simulated beforehand. When we came up to our customers with this proposal twenty years ago, it was like we spoke a foreign language. They listened to us, thanked us and left shaking their heads. Now, clients are much more open to this possibility. Sometimes, it takes five months to hand over the project, other times the customers call us in advance to reserve a spot for them in five months. 

From Autopal (automotive lighting) and Železárny (ironworks) to our own conference

When I studied at a university, it was not easy getting to the simulation technology. I was able to get a temp job in Nový Jičín’s Autopal, which was one of the two companies in the Czech Republic that had started doing something with dynamic simulation. Autopal acquired Witness and that’s when it ended. The company couldn’t make use of it, everything seemed too complicated to them… I was working with a friend of mine and while distributing the work, I decided that I would like to give Witness a try. He still laughs at the fact that he gave me space to grow in the field that day. It was really a stroke of chance.

After returning to school, one of the teachers let me know that Železárny (ironworks) and ŽDB drátovna are looking for somebody who knows how to work in Witness. Dynamic simulation was starting to be used at full blast – at that time, the foundations of DYNAMIC FUTURE were laid. Then I was contacted by Autopal, Siemens and more. 

One of the main sales channels was active face-to-face business. In 2001, we decided that it would be nice to organize a logistics conference that would help us spread awareness about dynamic simulation. 

Key projects

A 2008 project for Kofola was essential – the company was merging with a Polish partner back then. It was big and international. We weren’t completely ready for this kind of work, we had a lack of experience. And thought that if somebody pays us, we can’t say that we don’t know how to do something. Today, we approach this stuff in a different way. We talk them through with the client and move forward. At that time, we were attending some kind of a board meeting, where it was decided what factories would stay in operation. We thought that we were heading for a regular coordination meeting, they thought it was a strategic meeting. I remember that Jannis Samaras asked me whether I realized that what I was saying meant closing factories. I felt miserable, on the other hand, more people entered the project and with the passage of time, it’s clear that all of the intentions were executed. And that our results correspond with how it works in Kofola today.

The second strong project is related to our development. When we were starting the company, we knew that we wanted to focus on research and development. We decided to develop an application that would simplify our work. We called that HAPP (Handling Application) and thought that with time, we would sell it. That didn’t work out, however we used it many times. The important thing was that it opened the doors to Lanner, which is a Witness distributor. When we became Witness distributors for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we were visiting Lanner regularly. With Jan Slajer, we were explaining our philosophy, showing the mentioned application and discussing how to use their Viewer, which is a more simplified version of Witness, better. I felt like a village boy that came to a big city. However the guys listened to us and then for many years, we discussed the options of Lanner’s development. I think that their web applications and cloud development are based on the stuff we talked about back then. And our relationships are still absolutely great.