A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM Transformation – What Type Of Digital Thread You Need?

PLM Transformation – What Type Of Digital Thread You Need?
Oleg
Oleg
8 April, 2021 | 3 min for reading

Digital Thread is a new catchy phrase you can hear often these days. Very often, Digital Thread is used by companies today to replace old fashion PLMish marketing slogans. To be honest, I like it and it makes a lot of sense. But it raises so many questions and I’ve been contacted by many industry colleagues and companies with questions about different aspects of digital thread implementations – technological, solution architecture, legacy data, and many others.

In my earlier discussions this month, I found it interesting how companies are using digital threads to solve different problems. Which made me think about some kind of digital thread classifications. While I’m still not sure about this classification in the broad range of the companies, I’d like to give you some ideas about various types of “digital thread” and what kind of problems it can bring.

Complex Product Development and Engineering Data

Modern products are super complex combining a variety of pieces – mechanical, electronic, software with tons of dependencies on other tools, components, and software systems. Today, the products are operated by cloud software services combining a variety of functions together.  The challenge of all tools is to combine the data together produced by multiple tools in a dynamic fashion. We all need to have the right data at the right time. A combination of these two factors is a killer. What if the data you have is distributed between multiple files and databases? How to make use of it. This is one type of digital thread for product development connecting data from multiple system and software sources.

History and Traceability

The change is the only constant that we have. Depending on the product type, you will have different types of changes in design, production planning, field operations, supply chain. All these events will trigger changes in the product data- supplier components replacement, product defects, problems with suppliers. There are a lot of changes and a lot of data. Companies need to cope with the regulations and provide traceability on many pieces of information. How to do so? How to have the right information visibility when it is needed. This is how you come to another type of Digital Thread – managing history and trace changes back to the source of operation.

Maintenance and Operation

Manufacturing is switching from products to services. You don’t buy equipment – you buy hours of operation, you don’t buy cars – you buy miles of driving. You don’t buy engines – you buy a subscription to a specific performance. These fundamental changes in business models require systems capable of supporting them. One of them is a total shift to maintenance operations that now is owned by manufacturing companies and not customers. There is a need to manage data about each instance of the product. The data is owned by the customers and needs to be managed with a high level of complexity and connectivity to other data sources. This is another Digital Thread – connecting data about product instances in real life.

What is my conclusion?

Digital Thread is a broad name for the technology that is capable of combining pieces of information together. While it is very generic and can be used in multiple applications, knowing the specific problem, methodologies, tools, and technological limitations is important to make the right choices of products, suppliers and navigate your architecture and decision making in the right direction. A note for PLM architects working on Digital Thread programs – choose wisely, don’t buy marketing slides, and dig deeper. I’d be happy to help you. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital network-based platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers and their supply chain networksMy opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
22 December, 2008

I was looking at the evolution of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and BIM (Building Information Modeling) and found interesting parallels...

10 October, 2017

IoT is everywhere these days. You may think, there is no way to escape from the transformation and success IoT...

16 May, 2013

Enterprise software is a fascinating place these days. It comes in a different angles and perspective. The disruption of consumer...

17 August, 2010

I want to continue the discussion started last week in my post ‘PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective‘. Thank you...

1 June, 2011

I can see around more and more people are playing with mobile devices. Last 3-4 months contained many announcements coming...

15 September, 2015

How are you doing this morning? About joining IoT world and create (or buy) IoT platform? You are not alone,...

25 March, 2015

I attended PI Congress in Dusseldorf last month. During the conference I had a chance to share my thoughts about...

31 December, 2009

The idea of 3D publishing isn’t new. For the last few years we had chance to see multiple examples of...

20 April, 2015

Last week at COFES 2015, I shared my thoughts and opinion about what happens between PLM and the cloud for...

Blogroll

To the top