Key takeaways
For an organization to truly reap the rewards of a complete digital thread, participation and collaboration of service with engineering is essential. Involving service in the design phase of products and incorporating service feedback in continuous product innovation is often the missing link in bringing digital thread value to life.
Functional business groups are relying on incomplete data sets to support existing products and in developing new products. As a result, innovation cycles are long, reliability issues are costly to change and manage, and service execution is inefficient and difficult to scale. While these challenges were addressed in their respective functional groups with an investment in people, processes, and technology, the results haven’t met expectations. Now organizations are in a bind where the funds available to spend are limited, manpower resources are dwindling, and technology solutions are siloed in their impact. Moreover, there is an increasing amount of pressure from customers to improve asset quality and readiness, while reducing the overall lifecycle cost of the product.
At a fundamental level, PTC solutions connect the digital thread by linking the digital definition of the product with the digital and most up to date record of the physical asset. This connection allows engineering and service stakeholders to collaborate, innovate, and operate. This means that service teams can benefit from relevant engineering data that determines how they plan and execute service work. It also means that engineering teams can have a line of sight into the performance of actual products in the field and execute innovation and change management strategies.