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For engineers developing complex systems and software, the concept of Digital Thread is drastically transforming how they approach product development and lifecycle management. Digital Thread represents the seamless flow of data throughout a product’s lifecycle—from initial concept to final disposal. This continuous stream of information requires the integration of data, systems, tools, and processes throughout the engineering lifecycle to allow engineers to access real-time and accurate information, improve decision-making, reduce the risk of errors, boost collaboration, and improve development processes. What is a Digital Thread? Is it the same thing as Digital Twin? (Spoiler Alert: it is not...) What are the Digital Thread’s main capabilities and benefits? Where does SodiusWillert stand among this broad but crucial engineering concept? Read our article to find out!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2. Digital Thread vs. Digital Twin
3. Concrete Examples of Digital Thread Capabilities
4. What about Digital Thread’s Main benefits?
What is Digital Thread?
Digital Thread Through The Lens of Digital Engineering
Digital Thread (you may also find the term Digital Chain) represents the end-to-end flow of continuous and consistent data throughout a product’s lifecycle. The concept of Digital Thread is integrated with Digital Engineering, which is the umbrella framework for the entire product lifecycle of digital transformation.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Digital Engineering can be defined as:
“An integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciplines to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal.”
In concrete terms, this means that the whole design is captured in models and that an authoritative set of sources is set up to ensure reliable management of models and data. However, it also means that the continuum of shared data between models must cover the entire lifecycle. And this is precisely where Digital thread comes in.
Digital Thread's Purposes
Digital Thread’s main objective is to boost collaboration and streamline the decision-making process across the product or system’s lifecycle. It provides stakeholders with a comprehensive view of data and detailed records of activities and relationships across the entire product or system’s lifecycle. Based on this understanding, manufacturers can make appropriate decisions, re-purpose, reuse, or trace product information.
Every phase of a product's lifecycle, from early conception to disposal requires its operating mode, dedicated teams, and above all, its own set of software solutions. Implementing a digital thread requires setting up a strong interoperability strategy that will allow organizations to break down silos, connect information, improve collaboration, and streamline workflows.
This is achieved by leveraging various technologies to integrate and connect data from disparate sources, systems, and formats. It creates links enabling a seamless chain of communication through the development process.
Digital Thread vs. Digital Twin
What is a Digital Twin?
The term Digital Thread is often confused with Digital Twin(s), another essential element of the engineering world. We thought it would be useful to make a clear distinction, once and for all, between these two concepts.
Digital Twin refers to a virtual model that accurately reproduces an object, an operation, or a system. Such digital replicas have numerous helpful purposes.
Digital Twin encompasses the whole process through which the object has gone, from its conception to its final state. It comprises all the design and operational information of the physical item, including performance data, or behavior models. It does not only reflect the object itself but also its development and manufacturing history. As a result, the object's entire lifecycle can be understood in its entirety.
Then, What Are The Differences Between Digital Thread and Digital Twin?
From this perspective, a Digital Twin seems very similar to a Digital Thread as they both rely on a virtual representation of real-world items and processes.
However, their purposes are quite different. Whereas Digital Twin is strictly employed to simulate behaviors, identify anomalies, and improve the physical version of a product, Digital Thread aims to establish an extensive and transparent view of systems.
To be more precise, a Digital thread's approach strives to streamline the entire product lifecycle activities, enhance collaboration and decision-making, and boost the quality and reliability of data with digital continuity. Digital Twin uses models to explore and predict the performance of the physical product, during its design and operation. However, it does not ensure that all system requirements are met by the design or that all test plans have been executed successfully. This is Digital Thread's task...
Capabilities Needed To Implement Digital Thread
Lifecycle Traceability
Digital Thread enhances traceability of product data and changes throughout the engineering lifecycle. It provides a clear and extensive picture of a product or system throughout its development. Traceability is one of the very reasons for a concept such as Digital Thread, to build a flow of continuous data, a chain of tools and processes, making it possible to trace and keep a record of the slightest piece of information.
From design decisions to manufacturing processes and field performance, having all the traceable and recorded activities improves quality and auditability. It facilitates change management and significantly improves cross-team and cross-domain collaboration. Digital Thread is also a great asset for requirements traceability. It helps to assert the degree of success and quality of a project's requirements at every stage of the lifecycle. This is a key contribution to compliance management and risk reduction since information can be traced back to its source.
Smooth Integration of Change Management
When connecting disparate systems and software, it creates a new relevant source of information that gathers data that were never linked before, even though they are related. They are now accessible to the relevant stakeholders who can easily see potential inconsistencies and carry out faster the appropriate changes.
Digital thread offers significant support to change management by capturing, tracking, and orchestrating suggested changes, approvals, and impacts across design, manufacturing, and service operations. It results in seamless transitions and reduces time-consuming disruptions.
Data Integration
Technologies used to create a Digital Thread integrate data from disparate sources, systems, and formats. It includes CAD models, simulation results, manufacturing data, IoT sensors, and enterprise systems.
It means tools and processes that used to have nothing in common could now be connected and interact with each other, thanks to the potential of APIs, containerization, data warehousing, the OSLC standard, and many other technologies. Data with different formats, systems, and origins directly work in concert, bringing seamless connectivity and interoperability to a new level.
Find out more about SodiusWillert integration add-ons for engineering tools that enable seamless communication and exchange of native data between multiple dedicated tools.
Cross-Lifecycle Analytics and Insights
Being able to get accurate analytics and insights across the lifecycle is another essential capability of the Digital Thread which significantly influences product development and lifecycle management.
Integrating data from various stages allows for a comprehensive view of how the project progresses. It provides stakeholders a reliable source of information allowing them to make critical decisions faster and with more confidence than ever before.
Real-time Analytics and Data-Driven Insights
Digital Thread leverages data analytics, automation, and machine learning algorithms to derive actionable insights from the vast amounts of data generated around product development. Yes, indeed, this one is quite a catch too. It contributes to predictive maintenance, performance optimization, and continuous improvement.
Global Configuration Management
Managing the complex, iterative process of finding the best solutions to meet varying requirements, while ensuring adherence to regulations and managing dependencies... is a real struggle.
A well-crafted Digital Thread strategy must be able to provide management of variants capabilities across the whole lifecycle – from conception to retirement phases. All this is to ensure consistency, accuracy, and compatibility throughout the product's development.
What are Digital Thread's Main Benefits?
Supply Chain Integration
Digital Thread’s approach integrates with supply chain systems and processes, facilitating seamless collaboration with suppliers, vendors, and partners, from design and sourcing to procurement and logistics. It enables access to up-to-date information and connects data across the whole supply chain, assuring its resilience and responsiveness.
Moreover, the elimination of silos, streamlined processes, or the reduction of errors and discrepancies allows teams to save money all along the supply chain.
Continuous Improvement and Optimization
Digital Thread creates a favorable ground for continuous improvements and optimization. It builds an environment encouraging a culture of feedback, stepping back, lessons learned, or warranty claims. It helps inform future design iterations and process optimizations, in a quest for constant progress.
Quality Assurance and Compliance
Digital Thread consolidates quality standards, regulations, and compliance requirements throughout the lifecycle. Thanks to the creation of a continuous and traceable data thread, and the integration of dedicated systems, teams can address quality issues and reduce risks linked to non-compliance – early in the development lifecycle, including design review, verification stages, etc.
End-to-End visibility
The highly comprehensive view of product data, process data, and relationships across the entire lifecycle is also a significant capability of Digital Thread. Moreover, it allows all parties involved to get a synchronized view of the status, product history, context, and feedback for every single asset.
Enhanced cross-team collaboration and communication
Among its virtues and many sources of innovation, we had to mention the way Digital Thread breaks siloed processes between large groups of professionals within organizations involved in a project.
Creating a digital thread greatly enhances collaboration across multidisciplinary teams, from designers to engineers, manufacturers, suppliers, customers, and more. It boosts knowledge sharing and the ability for each team to work up to the most recent and up-to-date information, making the decision-making process easier than ever before.
But also…
CONCLUSION
As you've probably already understood, Digital Thread is a very broad field. From one organization to another, from one expert to another, you won't necessarily have the same approach or the same exact definition. But there's one thing everyone agrees on. To be successful and effective, organizations need to master technology and processes to seamlessly navigate through these threads, no matter what definition you give to them.
At SodiusWillert, we're a chain, one link among many in the development of these threads. However, our number one concern remains to help companies leverage their engineering tools and get the best out of them, to improve collaboration between teams and align engineering lifecycle processes. We design solutions and integrate engineering tools to enable disparate environments to interact. This is where our expertise lies regarding Digital Thread.
“From siloed engineering to digital traceability, we help our clients enable the Digital Thread and achieve end-to-end traceability & analysis across the product development lifecycle.”
Eran Gery, Global MBSE & Digital Engineering Specialist, SodiusWillert
If you are interested in finding out more about our technologies and solutions contributing to Digital Thread, please contact us.
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