How the Digital Thread Creates Business Value

By Rod Walters, Principal & Global Practice Leader, Enterprise Technology, Kalypso: A Rockwell Automation Business

The disruptions over the past year or so made it clear that manufacturers with a focus on building digital capabilities had a significant advantage in their ability to adapt and respond. And the pace of change has only increased.

At the same time, a glaring spotlight is shining on inefficient, siloed processes, systems and data that affect the way companies innovate and how products are developed, manufactured, sold and serviced.

The future of product development is powered by the digital thread — a seamless flow of data that connects business processes, systems, products and equipment across the value chain to deliver business growth, operating efficiency, cost reduction, resiliency and risk mitigation.

Let’s examine some examples.

Drive Business Growth: Accelerate Innovation

Activities associated with the way companies discover and create new products occur early in the value chain. R&D teams must design and simulate products and production processes virtually, connecting the dots between data and processes associated with consumer insights, research, ideation, product requirements, concept development, product design and development.

In this phase, the digital thread can help companies accelerate innovation by creating a seamless collaboration environment, where teams can simultaneously develop parts of the same product in context of the same overall goal. This collaboration and data connection reduces product development cycle times, optimizes product and plant design, and automates decision-making.

Cut Product Development Cycle Times. By connecting people, data and processes along the digital thread, companies can drive value by speeding design and product testing and reducing the need for physical prototypes. They can increase real-time, global collaboration and streamline design efforts with 3D design tools and digital product creation.

Manufacturers also can drive reuse, reduce rework and speed approvals by synchronizing data across functions and the value chain with product lifecycle management (PLM) as the backbone.

Optimize Product and Plant Design. Optimization, and the collaboration supported by a digital environment, can create significant benefits for both products and plants, even before any products are manufactured.

For example, manufacturers can create differentiated products based on data-driven insights. They can decrease commissioning time for new lines by validating manufacturing processes prior to physical implementation. And they can help meet sustainability goals, cutting material use, waste and energy consumption by reducing physical prototypes of products and facilities.

Automate Decision-Making. Whenever data is connected via the digital thread, it can be turned into insights that drive results. Companies can predict the impact of product development on key business metrics like demand, cycle time, cost, quality, compliance, manufacturability and supply chain efficiency.

In addition, firms can quickly resolve quality, safety and downtime issues by prescribing actions based on real-time production analytics. And they can run production lines with optimal speed and quality by automating decisions with predictive control models.

Maximize Performance and Workforce Productivity

As products move into production at scale, manufacturing and operations teams can benefit from connected processes and data across compliance, logistics, manufacturing, production planning and quality processes.

The digital thread can add value by improving asset and machine performance, enhancing labor effectiveness, and increasing capacity and yield.

Improve Asset Performance. Manufacturing assets are expensive, so optimization is key. Companies can increase uptime with machine health monitoring and smart production scheduling. They can reduce unplanned downtime by predicting faults before they occur, and reduce planned downtime with smart maintenance scheduling.

Enhance Labor Effectiveness. The digital thread can help companies optimize allocation of resources with smart shop-floor planning and scheduling for labor, materials and tooling. They also can decrease operator training time and improve efficacy with low-risk, high-fidelity virtual reality environments.

Increase Production Capacity and Yield

When the factory floor is connected via a digital thread, manufacturers can increase production yield with AI-enhanced process control optimization. They can minimize production losses by building predictive supply-chain models and reduce quality incidents, rework and scrap with predictive analytics.

Achieve Business Continuity, Agility and Resiliency

The last few years have certainly exposed the risks of poor inventory management and broken supply chains. As products move into the market, the digital thread can help companies increase supply-chain transparency while improving product quality and regulatory compliance.

Increase Value Chain Transparency. The digital thread can help manufacturers sustain customer/consumer safety and limit product recall costs by enabling supply-chain traceability with blockchain and sensors. They can improve inventory management by detecting and evaluating demand in real time, and predict weak points and prescribe recommendations to optimize supply chains.

Improve Product Quality and Regulatory Compliance. A closed-loop quality process that connects to in-market products can minimize reputational risk and decrease the cost of quality and noncompliance fines by reducing product recalls.

And connecting in-market data back to the product development process closes the loop to improve quality, safety and efficacy for products under development.

The Bottom Line

Many opportunities exist to drive improvements across the value chain with the digital thread. Manufacturers can centralize product data and insights from across business functions to improve and automate decision-making during every phase of the life cycle.

The challenge ahead is to think strategically about the people, process and technology aspects of digital transformation to create a scalable, unique roadmap that provides the greatest impact and resiliency.

Kalypso: A Rockwell Automation business, is a professional services firm that provides consulting, digital innovation, technology, business process management and managed services across the innovation value chain.

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