How the digital thread weaves through business

(futuristic music) - [Mark] In this eight episode series, we'll follow a part, an aerospace component called a bell crane, from modeling to manufacturing to deployment, all along the digital thread. But before we dive into our story, let's look at the big picture and begin to investigate the value of the digital thread. To do that, I'm going to talk to Deloitte's Joe Schibi and to Aaron Johns, the US Navy Technical Account Manager at Siemens PLM Software. - Guys, lots of words on this screen. Can you give me the big picture and put it all together for me, so that I can understand it, you know, holistically? - Absolutely, so one thing we learned, is that depending who you are and what your day to day role is, you view the digital thread as something completely different then what you and I would view the digital thread. So if I happen to work in CAD/CAM, I may see that as really the only area where I need to concern myself with the digital thread. Or if I'm in non-destructive examination or inspection, that may be my only real purview into what-- - Like I'm a guy who, that's what I look at. - That's my digital thread to me. But I think what you and I see as a digital thread, it's connecting all these different disciplines, all these different pieces of information, in one single strand of data across the life cycle of a program or an asset. - Okay, so Joe, draw a picture for me. - Sure. Yeah, so a lot of words on this screen. What we like to do is just jump into a simple graphic of how to visualize this. So this is our standard digital thread graphic across four distinct phases to help internalize what this looks like. So we have scan/design and analyze, build and monitor, test and validate, and deliver and manage. And so scan/design and analyze, there's some design work there but also the computer-aided engineering work to look at how we improve the design the next iteration. So both the design and the analysis step. And coming out of that first phase, what we have is really a as-designed model of our part that we're going to produce. - Okay, so I know what I want. - You know what you want. - That's the design. - You have the specifications of how you're going to get there. That's the as-designed model. And the idea is that you package those outputs in a usable way and send it off to a machine operator to actually manufacture a physical part. So to go from digital to physical. And then all that data is packaged into what we consider to be an as-manufactured model of the part. - Okay, so I have as-designed and as-manufactured. - Exactly, and so those two pieces-- - So I know what I wanted and I know what I've got. - Exactly. The whole idea there is that in the test and validate step, a testing technician wants to compare that as-manufactured model against our as-designed model to see whether or not we can field the part. Does it meet its performance requirements? - Okay, so I might have a standard inspection protocol that everything gets but by comparing those two things together I'm going to get a smart inspection protocol in some cases that's going to say, "No, no. Look at this particular thing." - Exactly, ways to save time and money in terms of what techniques or technologies you might use to inspect the part. And then not just that but once you actually field the part, how can you continue to learn from your part as it's out in the field? So via performance data that's collected, usage date that's collected, how can we understand those performance conditions that the part's being subjected to and help it inform an even better design in the future? And so we call that an as-maintained model of the part. - So I got as-designed, as-manufactured, and I got as-maintained? - Yep. - Okay, so two other concepts that I've heard quite a bit about, one is this notion of this body of knowledge and then the other is this notion of feedback, what's the story there? - Yeah, so throughout the process and each of those individual steps like we talked about, in terms of simulations and the machine instructions, you're collecting, these icons show, just the body of knowledge that's flowing through the process. And so at every single phase there's more knowledge that's being collected-- - And I've got them going all the way down. - Yeah and they're all the way down. And so you're collecting that information because you want to reuse it. So if we know how to successfully print this part, we can use those same specifications as we go about printing it again and again and again and save on the time that it takes to do this again. So squeezing it from weeks to days to be able to get there. - Feedback? - And then the feedback part, there's many different feedback mechanisms throughout, but the most notable one that I think has a lot of value to it, is capturing this performance and usage data over here on the far right, and getting that all the way back into design. And we can improve upon our simulations to keep producing better and better parts as we gather more and more data. And that's one of the big benefits of that feedback loop. - That's interesting. Aaron, so Joe showed me the high level picture. You showed me a word cloud before that. How do all those pieces fit into this picture that Joe showed me? - Well sure so really if you look, this is another way to look at those four phases of the digital thread as we defined it. What's the infrastructure needed to maintain that digital thread? Really the first piece is product lifecycle management, and our product is called Team Center. But what product lifecycle management allows you to do, it's much more than just managing information about a part. It's about managing information about a part as it evolves over time, but also it's inner relations to systems and subsystems of whatever your product is that you're trying to design. - Okay so all those pieces, all those words that you had that we started with, really kind of become the boxes that slot into each of these areas. And they're all feeding in, whether its as-designed, as-manufactured, as-maintained or sustained, driving into this PLM product lifecycle management system where this body of knowledge is living and growing. Is that right? - Precisely, but not in a vacuum. So each one of those pieces or elements of data needs to drive other elements of data and other pieces of the lifecycle. So they have that interconnectivity all the way through the digital thread. So I can take data from my computer-aided design, which I can use to drive my motion simulation. But then I can use that to drive my finite element model. I could take those loads in used cases, use those for NEFE, I could use those for topology optimization because I know, from a simulation standpoint, what loads this part needs to undergo in the field. (upbeat music) - [Mark] Coming up, we'll dive head first into the digital thread.