Tightening the Digital Thread: How Platform Solutions Bind Your Business Together

Have you ever made a telephone from tin cans or paper cups? By connecting two cans with a thread, you can pull them apart and communicate from room to room—and, if desired, even extend the ‘telephone line’ through several spaces, altering its direction.

The thread must be taut for information to be transmitted. Similarly, for effective data exchange within your company, the digital thread must always be taut, ensuring a continuous flow of the necessary information.

People, processes, applications—everything in your company uses this thread for data exchange, product creation, or customer interaction. Every act of exchanging information—from the inception of an idea to its realisation—engages this thread, and the tighter it is maintained, the more effective the interaction becomes.

Ideally, the thread is taut and uninterrupted from start to finish and supports the product management process.

However, reality often looks quite different: sometimes, the required file lies in a folder, waiting for its moment, causing only a slight ‘sag’ in the line, while in many cases, the transfer of data between processes, systems, or colleagues is significantly hindered.

For instance, instead of gaining access to the necessary data at the right time, you might have to request an Excel file from a colleague and then manually transfer it into another system or into another Excel file formatted according to a different template.

Alternatively, different systems may use various data formats, requiring additional effort to harmonise them (remember how you once had to hunt for different codecs to play a video file that the standard application could not open?).

All these issues become barriers between processes, applications, and people.

Since one company might use dozens of different applications and formats, the IT department (and others) must work diligently to ensure the continuity of the thread with minimal sag, doing everything possible to keep these barriers unnoticed. However, if the necessary data remains in an inaccessible folder, even the IT department will be powerless to help.

There can be many such ‘sags’ and barriers, from discrepancies in terminology to a lack of understanding of the overall objective. These can lead to divergent expectations and delays in reaching an agreement, but that is a topic for another discussion.

From a management perspective, consider how many people must ‘shake hands’ before a quarterly sales report can be finalised if there is no unified, connected database? How much time elapses from the moment an event occurs until a decision is made if the data ‘matures’ for a week or even a month before it becomes available? And in what way might the data become distorted after passing through five hands?

To avoid such complexities and increase efficiency throughout the entire product lifecycle, it is advisable not only to implement the concept of the digital thread but also to create a full-fledged ecosystem by introducing platform solutions for data and business process management, thereby expanding the capabilities of the digital thread in many directions:

Complexity and Integration

The digital thread links data at every stage of the product lifecycle, while the platform unifies it into a single information space, integrating design, manufacturing, maintenance, and analytics into one solution.

Unification of Business Processes

The platform standardises data and processes, which simplifies their interconnection between various departments within the company. This helps minimise errors, avoid duplication of information, and enhance the efficiency of communication.

Data Centralisation

Instead of merely passing data from one stage to the next, the platform creates a single source of truth where data is centrally stored, processed, and analysed. This significantly simplifies managerial decision-making.

Support for Collaboration

A unified digital environment enables specialists from different departments to work collaboratively, having access to up-to-date information and tools for analysis, simulation, and process optimisation.

Scalability and Flexibility

Platform solutions easily adapt to changing business requirements and technological challenges, allowing the integration of new modules or third-party services without a complete system overhaul.

This not only ensures a continuous connection of data, as the digital thread does, but also significantly expands functionality through integration, centralised management, collaboration, and scalability. This, in turn, helps reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the enterprise’s operations.

What types of barriers interrupt digital threads that you encountered in your company?

P.S.: Inspired by John Stark's book PLM, Volume 1, Chapter 12.2 Digital Thread.

#DigitalThread, #PlatformSolutions, #DigitalTransformation, #DataIntegration, #BusinessInnovation, #DigitalEcosystem, #NobodyReadsHashtags, #ITStrategy, #Collaboration, #BusinessEfficiency, #TechTrends, #PLM, #DigitalContinuity, #ProductLifecycleManagement,