Facility Digital Twin

Business Problem

In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, a new multi-billion dollar contract had been awarded to a Fortune 500 company, launching a complex systems program with facilities spanning every time zone across the United States. Some of these facilities served as daily workplaces for thousands of employees. At the program's headquarters, the scale was particularly daunting: dozens of conference rooms and thousands of workstations distributed across multiple multi-story buildings.

Navigating this complex environment became a significant operational challenge—finding people, places, and equipment was a daily struggle that impacted productivity and efficiency across the organization. Placing people in seats became a significant challenge and it was all being done with spreadsheets. Recognizing the interconnected nature of these challenges, it was posited that a graph database and a modern frontend web framework like React might be able to create an intuitive, real-time platform for modeling facility relationships, managing seat assignments, and providing instant visibility into the location and status of people, places, and equipment across the entire organization.

The Challenge

The company had never attempted something like this before. While our development team had ideas about how certain technologies might be used to solve specific problems, there wasn't anyone to orchestrate the pieces and ship a working application.

I was appointed Product Owner, and our team of six hit the ground running. I facilitated collaboration between developers and users to establish a shared product vision, define system requirements, and establish a consistent delivery cadence that enabled the app to ship in six months.

As soon as we started developing the app, the team faced significant pressure from company executives who were invested in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products that promised to deliver everything our app would provide, but delivered very little in practice.

The Solution

We developed an ontology that modeled how things, people, and places existed and related to each other in the workplace. Neo4j served as our application's backend database, chosen for its unique capability to capture and query these complex relationships. This approach completely replaced the spreadsheet-based system. We built the frontend using Material UI and React, creating an intuitive interface that could be easily adapted as requirements evolved and stakeholders identified new feature opportunities.

We exposed the graph database through both REST and GraphQL APIs, giving the frontend flexible ways to query relationships—whether finding all equipment in a building, tracking a person's location history, or discovering available conference rooms. This API layer also enabled integrations with existing systems like Outlook, allowing users to see conference room availability and future schedules—information that Outlook itself doesn't display.

The Result

A comprehensive data model was developed that captured the essential nature of workplace reality. Our digital twin could identify who sat at every workstation and their job title. We integrated floor layout plans that made it easy to navigate to any person or location. Over time, we added more features. The app became a virtual, live map of the entire facility.

As other programs and facilities learned about our application, demand skyrocketed. The scope of the system quickly expanded from one campus to several across the United States, with other programs willing to pay to have their facilities included. Today, the app is known and used by every employee at the program's headquarters. It has become an integral part of the business operations and remains unchallenged by COTS alternatives, saving the company millions of dollars in vendor costs.