Roundtable report: weaving a digital thread

Given the degree to which digitalisation dominates industry discourse, it’s easy to forget that so-called digital tools and processes have been a feature of manufacturing for many decades.

From the CNC machines and computer aided design (CAD) tools that began to proliferate from the 1970s, to the more recent introduction of enterprise-wide product lifecycle management (PLM) tools, digital innovations have been compressing design, streamlining manufacturing and boosting productivity for many years.

But such tools are now just the tip of the digital iceberg. Today, advances in the way we capture, analyse, and share data are leading firms to think not just about how digitalisation can improve one step of a product’s journey but how it can be used to create an all-embracing digital framework, or, to use the current buzz-phrase, a digital thread, that provides  a holistic view of an asset’s data across its entire lifecycle: from design and build, through in-service operation, and finally to decommissioning.