Summer Reading List: Exploring the Digital Thread

It’s that time of year! As you head off on your summer vacation, here is a collection of our favorite digital thread blogs to add to your summer reading list. You’ll notice a common theme – a unified digital thread is crucial for streamlining collaboration and decision-making throughout the product lifecycle. This approach promotes connectivity across digital engineering and the wider digital enterprise, establishing a strong data foundation. Using data analytics and AI, organizations can improve efficiency and foster innovation.

Let us know if you have a favorite!

1. Future-Proof Your Digital Transformation: 7 Predictions That Will Shape the PLM Landscape

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has been at the forefront of digital transformations, enabling companies to improve their product development processes and increase efficiency. Aras experts look ahead to the next few years at emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, visual collaboration tools that provide data in context, and the continuing adoption of cloud-PLM and the digital thread.

2. PLM Tales in Space: Aras Innovator and the Digital Thread

Our author shares his childhood interest in space (even his participation in Comic-Con events as his favorite Star Trek character). He had accumulated over 21 years in the aerospace industry when he joined the Aras team. Once exposed to Aras Innovator®, he realized it would be the perfect platform for his vision of a data management environment for the space industry. See if you agree.

3. The Future of Product Innovation and PLM – Abstraction, Digital Threads, and Artificial Intelligence

PLM solutions traditionally manage what a product is (aka design data) without much understanding of what the product does (aka design intent). Design data configuration management is critical for keeping track of product variants, releases, changes, and the transformation of the engineering Bill of Materials (eBOM) to the manufacturing Bill of Materials (mBOM).

4. ACE 2024: Reflections on My First Tech Summit

Aras Labs’ AJ Sebastian shares his experience at ACE 2024 and his thoughts about the impact of the Aras Community. He believes that becoming a more active member of the Aras Community provides both personal and career growth opportunities. We’ll be sharing details for ACE 2025 soon and hope this blog inspires you to join us and experience the Aras Community first-hand!

5. Operationalizing Sustainability via the Digital Thread

Acting on sustainability goals is a challenge for businesses today. The critical thing to remember is that questions and goals must be data-driven and addressed systematically to make decision-making a complex combination of leveraging and extending data traceability via the digital thread to operationalize sustainability. Read the blog to learn how.

6. The Upside of AI: A Use-Case for the PLM World

None of us should underestimate the impact AI will have on the future of engineering. We should embrace the idea that repetitive or non-value-added work may be done by a machine. This blog examines a realistic PLM use case and compares how it could be handled before introducing AI and how AI might facilitate the same scenario.

7. Exploring the Transformation to the Digital Enterprise: 4 Key Takeaways

Discover key insights from industry leaders on building an effective digital thread to drive collaboration, innovation, and success in product development.

8. VLOG: Transform Your Product Lifecycle with a Unified Digital Thread: A Demo

Keith Shaw of Foundry recently welcomed Aras CTO Rob McAveney to their Needham, MA studio! On the May 29 episode, Rob explained the concept of a digital thread and demonstrated how Aras Innovator® maintains connections to critical product information, allowing teams to track digital assets throughout the product lifecycle.