A conversation with Michel Besner, CEO of Prevu3D, and Jeremy Jarrett, CEO of Kinetic Vision
What does it actually take to turn a facility scan into a decision your leadership team can act on tomorrow? That’s the question at the heart of a recent conversation between Michel Besner and Jeremy Jarrett — two people who’ve spent the last four years helping manufacturers close the gap between the world as it was designed and the world as it actually exists.
The uncomfortable truth no one says out loud
Before any conversation about digital twins can go anywhere useful, Jeremy Jarrett wants to surface something most organizations quietly know but rarely admit. Jarrett is President and CEO of Kinetic Vision, a Cincinnati-based engineering and technology consulting firm that has been helping manufacturers solve complex operational problems for over 40 years.
“What you designed is not what you built. There are always differences. You hope those differences are down at the molecular level, but the reality is they’re at the inch and foot level.”
It’s not a criticism. It’s physics. Every facility accumulates small deviations over time. And if your digital transformation strategy is built on design data alone, you’re optimizing a version of your facility that doesn’t exist. This is the foundational argument for as-built data, and the starting point for everything Prevu3D and Kinetic Vision do together.
Who’s in the room? What our audience told us.
During the webinar, we ran a live poll to understand where people actually are in their digital twin journey.
A third of attendees are “Developing” — they have some structured data but haven’t fully activated it. Nearly 30% are already “Connected” with an integrated digital twin. The rest are split between early exploration and active evaluation.
The takeaway: most organizations have some data. The real question is whether it’s living in a system — or dying in someone’s inbox.
Acquire. Activate. Optimize.
Kinetic Vision’s operating model sounds like a slogan until you understand what it’s actually solving. Each word represents a real place where organizations get stuck.
Acquire is about getting your data out of the wild. You’d be surprised how many companies are still hunting through emails to find a photo of a machine. The data exists; it’s just not usable yet.
Activate is where most projects stall. You’ve done a scan, created a model, handed off a file, and then nothing happens. Activation means putting that data in front of the people who need it, in a format they can use without a training program. Michel’s benchmark: give them something easier to use than PowerPoint.
Optimize is where the ROI shows up. One example from the conversation: a warehouse measurement project, almost boring by engineering standards, that unlocked a $250 million per year revenue opportunity simply by accurately understanding what space was already there.
The real barrier isn’t the technology
Four years ago, Michel and Jeremy were having very different conversations with customers. Today, the technology is largely resolved. What’s harder is the human side — specifically, getting everyone working from the same reality.
Jeremy recalled a story from BMW: after opening up their digital twin broadly across the company and tracking internal access, they discovered an unexpected hotspot in the accounting department. Turns out, finance was using it to count and verify equipment for renewal decisions. Nobody planned for that use case. It emerged because the data was accessible.
That’s what a shared digital twin actually provides — not just a 3D model, but a common reference point that gets engineers, executives, and operations teams looking at the same truth. As Jeremy put it, the biggest breakthroughs in digital transformation right now live not in the technology, but in building that shared spatial understanding across stakeholders.
Speed to decision: the metric that changes everything
If there’s one idea Michel kept returning to, it’s this: the ROI of a digital twin isn’t just about what you build — it’s about how fast you can stop building the wrong things.
Detailed engineering is expensive. When teams spend weeks developing options that turn out to be unviable, that cost doesn’t show up on a budget line but absolutely shows up in outcomes. In one oil and gas project, an engineer using Prevu3D’s tools spotted a third option — less equipment, less construction — that saved millions of dollars. The decision happened in days, not months, because the team could evaluate options against reality.
“If you can make faster decisions, remove the options that are not the right ones, minimize time spent on detailed engineering that ends up not being what you’ll do — that is a major impact on your investment.” — Michel Besner
Jeremy framed it through the lens of Uber and Amazon: their revenue is driven by reducing friction to a single button click. Digital decision-making in manufacturing should work the same way.
How to actually get started
The most practical moment in the conversation came when someone asked how to get the budget approved. The answer: don’t ask for the big number first.
Between Prevu3D licenses and Kinetic Vision’s implementation work, you can have a first digital twin running in three weeks. You don’t need to digitize the entire facility — start with a section, show what it unlocks, let the ROI make the next conversation easier. Most digital transformation teams have $20–30K they can move without needing major executive sign-off. That’s your entry point.
Get a win. Document the value. Then scale.
What success actually looks like
When asked to define success in a digital transformation initiative, Jeremy didn’t talk about technology. He talked about people — small, agile teams combining deep operational experience with genuine technical understanding, backed by leadership that has both.
The foundation, though, is always the same: operating from as-built data and building a common visual understanding of the facility that everyone can work from. Everything else follows.
See what your facility looks like in three weeks
Whether you’re in the “Developing” or “Evaluating” bucket — or anywhere else on the maturity curve — the best next step is a conversation.
Reach Jeremy Jarrett and the Kinetic Vision team at kineticvision.com or on LinkedIn. To explore what Prevu3D can do for your facility, get in touch with our team or find us at an upcoming event.
