What value does the product digital thread offer manufacturers? How important is integrating data and systems across the digital thread to achieving that value? We set out to better understand the value of product digital thread integration and how top performing companies overcome implementation, operation, and maintenance challenges to achieve it. Did we find the magic bullet to effective product digital integration? The answer may surprise you.
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Table of Contents
- The Product Digital Thread Imperative
- Integrate the Product Digital Thread
- The Integration Status Quo is Insufficient
- Living with Poorly Integrated Product Data
- Causes of Underlying Integration Issues
- Challenges Throughout the Integration Lifecycle
- View Integration Effectiveness as a Discipline
- Better Integration Capabilities Drive Business Value
- Identify Further Advantages of the Top Performers
- Key Takeaways
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
The Product Digital Thread Imperative
Importance of the Digital Thread
Information is crucial to running a modern enterprise, and manufacturers know the power of data from experiences in their offices and plants. The product digital thread takes product-related data and puts it into context so people can quickly find the information they need and gain meaningful insights.
This is more than a convenience; it’s a business need. Two-thirds of manufacturers report that the product digital thread is important – or critical – to their company’s success and profitability. Only a fraction, one percent, say it’s not important.
The Business Value of the Digital Thread
Why do manufacturers need the digital thread? Manufacturers report a variety of goals for their initiatives. Most reasons have to do with efficiency and better decision-making available from trusted, contextual product data. Manufacturers’ most common goal for their product digital thread is to drive product quality. Companies also commonly turn to the product digital thread to improve efficiency not only within Engineering but also overall product development efficiency and resulting time to market. Some, just over one-third, seek improvements further down the product lifecycle to improve service. It’s clear that the digital thread offers value to many people in many ways.
The Integration Status Quo is Insufficient
Integration Levels are Lacking
Given the importance of integration to goals such as quality and time to market, both of which impact top-line and bottom-line business results, you might expect more integration across data and applications. Today, however, only about one-quarter claim that they have significantly integrated their product digital thread. The vast majority of manufacturers have only “some” integration, leaving a lot of opportunity for improvement.
Integration Scope is Too Narrow
Product digital thread data in today’s manufacturing environment clearly spans organizations and supply chains. Gaining contextual information that connects perspectives across disciplines and transcends corporate boundaries can provide valuable insights. Integration has not kept pace with this.
The state of integration stretches beyond the departmental level in two-thirds of companies, but only about one-quarter are integrated at the enterprise level. Further, very few have moved product digital thread data and application integration to the value chain level.
Target Greater Integration
Some manufacturers lead the way with significant integration and a broad scope. But this is not trivial to achieve. Broader integration boundaries hold the opportunity to increase business value through better quality, efficiency, and innovation but add additional complexity to integration efforts that may already be holding integration efforts back.
Challenges Throughout the Integration Lifecycle
Challenges in Operating Integration
One might think that once data and applications are integrated, the hard part is over. However, the challenges only get more complicated in production. For example, those with experience in integrating systems recognize that handling exceptions and issues is crucial. Exception handling is the most commonly reportedissue, with just over one-half of survey respondents reporting it as a top challenge for operating product digital thread integration. However, there are other complexities, such as how to scale integration effectively, particularly with a high-volume operational system like MES. Responding companies also report security as a top concern, which may explain why many companies have been forced to limit integration boundaries. These challenges are a good reflection of the challenges manufacturers face when increasing product digital thread integration.
Challenges Impacting the Maintenance Lifecycle
Implementing integration across data and applications along the digital thread is only the first step. Integration requires care and feeding to keep it running. It’s important to acknowledge that, like the products they manufacture, integration involves many moving parts, at least metaphorically. Manufacturers report that managing change is difficult, including both keeping up with releases for different systems and adjusting as business processes change.
Manufacturers also point to challenges related to continued cost and business risk in the maintenance phase. Additionally, about one-half reported that integration challenges disrupt operationsand that validating integration consumes about 25% of systems upgrade efforts. There is clearly room for improvement, and it’s no surprise that manufacturers lack the integration they need.
Maintenance Challenges Vary by Approach
Some integration approaches lead to more maintenance difficulties than others. For example, about two-thirds of companies report “point to point” integration as a top challenge, and about one-quarter report that too much custom code is an issue. These approaches are more prone to require manual updates when underlying systems or processes change. We’ll look at manufacturers’ approaches to integrate their product digital threads shortly.
Key Takeaways
The Product Digital Thread Drives Business Value
The product digital thread is very important or critical to business success and profitability. Manufacturers are turning to the digital thread for a variety of significant business benefits, including product quality, better decision-making, engineering efficiency, product development speed, and product traceability.
The Product Digital Thread Requires Assembly
The product digital thread doesn’t come in a single system. It lies across an ecosystem of applications and data sources. Manufacturers recognize the importance of integration to achieve their business goals.
Integration is Challenging
Product data is complex and requires technical and business expertise to interpret its meaning and the contextual relationships that make up the product digital thread. The current state of integration leads to data problems and challenges in implementation, operation, and maintenance. These challenges make it harder for manufacturers to achieve their product digital thread goals.
Develop Top Performing Integration Capabilities
The Top Performers, those with better integration capabilities, have accomplished more significant and more enterprise-wide integration. At the same time, they face fewer challenges in all phases of the integration lifecycle, including:
- Implementation
- Operation
- Maintenance
The Top Performers have fewer data issues, resulting in fewer negative business impacts.
Adopt a Variety of Strategies
However, integration is still not easy, even for these leading companies. The Top Performers follow some best practices, but they choose from a wide collection of integration techniques to find the optimal approach for each situation. We believe this is simply the state of the industry where companies strive for best practices but must take whatever approach they can. In this environment, we recommend adopting a wide variety of integration techniques and a platform approach that supports multiple methods.
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