Digital Thread: An Essential Enabler of Digital Transformation

Throughout the product lifecycle, various stakeholders need data to perform their roles efficiently. For most companies, product data is not leveraged effectively due to:

• Data Silos: Product data exists in all kinds of systems across the enterprise. When product data is disconnected, there is a lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, and it is hard to manage changes and complexity.
• Product Complexity: Discrete manufacturers often produce highly customizable products with many variants. Managing the complexity of these products requires sophisticated engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and service processes.
• Data Volume: As complexity increases, greater volumes of product data are generated. Effectively organizing, analyzing, and leveraging it across the value chain is a significant challenge.

By implementing a digital thread, organizations can achieve a seamless flow of information across functional areas, improving decision-making, and fostering collaboration.

A digital thread provides fundamentally new ways to design, build, and service quality products—faster, better, and cheaper. It does this by making strategic use of the digital DNA of your products, transforming that product data from a static resource into a highly valuable living asset. With digital thread, stakeholders are empowered to make informed decisions at every stage of the product lifecycle.

A digital thread strategy is a plan or approach that outlines how an organization will interconnect and integrate their siloed digital data related to a product throughout its lifecycle. It involves implementing digital technologies to optimize internal processes, automate tasks, drive data-centricity, and improve overall efficiency, leading to cost savings and streamlined operations, among other benefits.

The primary goal of a digital thread strategy is to ensure that everyone across the product lifecycle has access to accurate, up to date, and contextualized product data. These efforts help to keep everyone on the same page by democratizing data and providing a continuous, connected, and easy-to-follow flow of information, leading to improved productivity, higher product quality, and reduced time to market.

A digital thread implementation can start small and grow into an enterprise-wide initiative. However, regardless of the scope, barriers may exist that slow down adoption. Common challenges include securing executive buy-in, budget allocation and prioritization, overcoming internal resistance, and identifying and connecting the right systems and data.

A digital twin is a dynamic digital representation of a real-world product or process that mirrors, emulates, and measures its physical counterpart. More than a digital copy, it includes the operational or experiential data of the physical counterpart from IoT data, real-world telemetry, service data, and more.

A digital thread provides the necessary information to create and maintain the digital twin, which can be used to optimize the performance of the physical product and process in the real world.

We have more detail on these two concepts on the blog.

Connectivity, integrations, and governance:
Frictionless integration and connectivity of siloed data sources, processes, and systems are critical to successful digital thread implementations. An open, standards-based, enterprise PLM system that governs, manages, orchestrates, and delivers data across the value chain is key.

Forward propagation of data:
The forward flow of relevant product data across the value chain enables stakeholders to share, utilize, and build upon that data, thereby creating value. Data reuse, change control, traceability, and feedback loops are critical capabilities.

Analysis and interrogation of data:
Additional value is achieved by combining data and performance metrics from multiple systems across your enterprise so that it can be easily analyzed and interrogated.

Scalability and security:
Product data not only needs to be securely shared across the enterprise, but also across geographies and the extended ecosystem with suppliers and customers.