The increasing complexity of products means that the number of IT tools in companies and supply chains has also increased. Their level of integration however has not kept pace. There is currently no concept for linking digital twins in a meaningful way. The biggest problem is that the digital Thread, if it exists at all, exists in only one direction, namely from product planning to development and manufacturing through to testing and operation. There is no path leading in the other direction.
A sustainable integration concept needs to support traceability across systems, domains and company boundaries and in both directions. Neutralizing and copying the data or dumping it in a data lake and trawling murky waters with the help of artificial intelligence is not a solution. Which is why synchronization is being joined by state-of-the-art approaches for linking semantic data using ontologies and uniform standards.
What is needed is a comprehensive integration concept that supports data linking and synchronization and also integrates suppliers. Our integration solutions already provide this support. We have built our PLM integration solution OpenPDM, our traceability solution OpenCLM and our data exchange solution OpenDXM GlobalX on a uniform, cloud-enabled software architecture. This makes it possible for us to realize new integration concepts for end-to-end digitalization.
You can find out more in this newsletter, in our report on the PROSTEP INSIGHT DAYS.
Best regards
Karsten Theis