Understand the Potential of Digital Thread

By Westin Siemsglusz, Technical Consultant, Information Solutions, Rockwell Automation

With the ever-evolving Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) space within the industrial marketplace, the understanding and the journey of what the digital thread means to your business is vital. The digital thread is the core of what digital transformation and industrialization will attain in the coming days, months and years.

The major focus areas for digital transformation in manufacturing are accelerating line ramp-up time and decreasing ramp-up costs. Digitally enabled enterprises are seeing benefits that include:

• Improved right-first time quality by 90%.
• Lowered ramp-up anomalies by 97%.
• Reduced maintenance costs by 40%.
• Reduced unplanned downtime by 50%.

There’s great urgency to accelerate digital transformation initiatives, because early adopters of digital technologies are surging ahead of the competition. In every industry, a handful of world-class organizations are prioritizing adoption and implementation of digital transformation initiatives.

According to the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends For 2023: Applied Observability report, “To enhance their organization’s financial position during times of economic turbulence, IT leaders and other executives must look beyond saving costs to new forms of operational efficiency — preserving operating margin and reinvesting in sustainable technologies.”

Some of these organizations are well on their way to becoming a digitally enabled enterprise and reaping the benefits. They’ve begun to realize value in their product design and production engineering. The next step is to bridge the gap between these business functions to realize a new net benefit.

A common hurdle for customers is targeting a single use case within their business for digital investment from operation areas such as product and machine design, production engineering, plant operations and supply chain.

Each function experiences unique challenges including collaboration across the value chain; validating line designs and increasing the configurability; improving time to value and time to quality; and responding to shifting markets and global supply chains. But viewing these challenges as separate is a common mistake. With digital thread, you can allow collaboration across these functional areas to improve quality in each category.

As a result, this is key: It’s time to move from siloed systems and business functions to a connected, intelligent value chain that shares information and insights that improve decision-making at every stage in the product life cycle with the digital thread.

What is Digital Thread, and Why is It Important?

The digital thread is a communication framework that allows simple, universal access to data and an integrated view of an asset’s data throughout its life cycle across traditionally siloed functional areas.  A continuous flow of data between business functions and digital twin models is the key to unlocking your digital potential and supporting better decision-making.

Complex discrete manufacturing operations have experienced significant gains in efficiency, quality and profitability by using the digital thread to deliver the right information to the right place at the right time.

The digital thread connects the whole engineering/manufacturing process and provides the basis for a digital, paperless shop floor — from product design, through production, inspection, testing and maintenance.

Best Practices for Implementing Digital Thread

Implementing digital thread across your value chain is no small feat. Here are some key best practices for maximizing impact early on in your roadmap to prove value and maintain momentum:

Focus on value with an MVP approach. We recommend first choosing a high-value, narrow use case to quickly deliver and prove value to the business. Often, manufacturers make the mistake of focusing on building a foundation of capabilities before realizing value, risking failure from the outset. And these high-value use cases aren’t always greenfield applications.  The digital thread  can offer process optimization in brownfield plants to drive significant incremental efficiency gains on the lines they’re already operating.