Digital Thread - Your Pathway to Product and Process Optimization

Improve your organization's ability to leverage data across the enterprise! The Digital Thread serves as a very effective means for companies to manage disruptions and ensure quality assurance of products and processes.

In doing so, companies can create the Digital Thread for many different systems and processes. Typically, it follows the life cycle of a product and links the information together in a data-driven architecture.

From Silo to Learning Organization

Challenges and Solutions along the Product Life Cycle

The process of creating a product is highly collaborative, requiring the contribution and interaction of multiple disciplines within engineering and manufacturing, including the involvement of the supplier network. Distribution across multiple isolated teams and tools leads to significant risk of product delays, defects, cost overruns, failed verifications and validations, recalls, etc.

Leadership

Mastering Challenges in the Product Development Process with the Digital Thread

  • To reduce risks and benefit from cross-team collaboration and subsequent early detection of deviations, end-to-end process transparency is required.
  • In industrial practice, more and more companies are confronted with the need to transform themselves from a pure parts or component manufacturer to a system provider.
  • At the same time, products - parts, components and systems - have shifted from purely mechanical design to system design, which also includes an increasing share of electrics/electronics and software.
The Hero

Digital Thread Solution Approach: How Companies Benefit from Their Data Throughout the Product Life Cycle

  • Digital Threads are designed to provide easy universal access to the vast amount of data in the product life cycle. They create a closed loop between the digital and physical worlds and transform the way products are designed, manufactured and maintained.
  • By linking requirements to key downstream metadata, a Digital Thread creates the ability to understand the state of the product development process, which risks are visible, and which corrective actions should be considered.
  • The Digital Thread also continues into the engineering phase through the production, post-delivery and support phases. Here, valuable data that contributes to improvement is also collected. A learning organization is created.

In summary, the Digital Thread provides companies with a holistic view of their product data, enabling them to make informed decisions, improve collaboration, and streamline the product development process. This is especially important for companies that have an enormous amount of data: from development through design to manufacturing, including supply chain management and service history, as well as customer experience.

With Insight to Foresight

Advantages of the Digital Thread for Manufacturing Companies

Thanks to the Digital Thread, companies can make predictions and communicate efficiently in both directions along this life cycle. It enables companies and their various disciplines to anticipate and effectively engage with all stakeholders, gain a unified and end-to-end view of their product and system data, access up-to-date data, and thus respond quickly to changes or new insights.

Improved Visibility and Traceability

The Digital Thread enables companies to improve the visibility and traceability of product data throughout the product development process. This means that everyone involved can access the same information, reducing failures and noticeably improving collaboration.

Faster Time to Market

The Digital Thread enables companies to shorten the time to market for a product. By eliminating manual data transfer between multiple systems, companies can streamline their product development process and get products to market faster.

Improved Quality

By identifying problems early in the product development process and thus enabling them to be rectified, the Digital Thread helps companies to improve product quality. Access to up-to-date data equips companies to make informed decisions that help avoid the occurrence of quality problems.

Reduced Costs

The Digital Thread can help companies increase their innovative power. Opportunities to revise drafts more quickly, incorporating customer and supplier feedback, enhance reputation and the ability to act. In this way, the Digital Thread supports companies in increasing their innovative strength. The unified view of product data empowers companies to more easily identify opportunities for improvement and make changes directly.

Increased Innovation

The Digital Thread can help companies increase their innovative power. Opportunities to revise drafts more quickly, incorporating customer and supplier feedback, enhance reputation and the ability to act. In this way, the Digital Thread supports companies in increasing their innovative strength. The unified view of product data empowers companies to more easily identify opportunities for improvement and make changes directly.

Improved Compliance

By providing a clear audit trail of product data, companies are able to demonstrate complete regulatory compliance and reduce the risk of non-compliance. The Digital Thread thereby enables reliable assurances regarding compliance and proof of regulations and requirements.

Improved Collaboration

Simplifying the collaboration of all project participants (internal and external) ensures a common understanding of the system, which acts as the basis for rapid, economical and successful product development and allows correct decisions to be made. Document-based, local work, duplicate data management, data silos and a mixture of different software tools that only work together via interfaces are just some of the possible causes of error that companies can effectively avoid using a Digital Thread.

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The common thread for a holistic mapping of the product life cycle

Engineering and CAQ Along the Digital Thread

The combination of engineering and CAQ software enables companies to achieve consistent use of requirements and specifications in the form of drawing and characteristic data throughout the entire product life cycle.

Process grafic in DNA style for desktop
Process grafic in DNA style for mobile

From Engineering to End-of-Life

The various phases of the product life cycle can be worked through with APQP project planning and guarantee on-time and documented use of methods from engineering to "end-of-life". This is ensured by specifically defined actions and specification or result documents.

FMEA as a Knowledge Base for New Product Development

The holistic view of data along the Digital Thread allows real data from production or from the customer (complaints) to flow back into the planning documentation, such as the FMEA. This turns the FMEA into a knowledge base that directly passes on Lessons Learned to new products.

Solid Data - Solid Decisions

The active integration of engineering and quality processes creates the data basis for the comprehensible presentation and evaluation of all decisions, actions and results along the Digital Thread. Supplier processes can also be seamlessly integrated here.

Your path towards a professional
engineering and quality process
along the Digital Thread

Would you like to experience the possibilities for digitization along your product development process and product life cycle? Talk to our experts in person and they'll show you digital ways to design end-to-end processes along your engineering and quality management.