Digital Thread and PLM Strategy for Process Manufacturing: Top Experts Share Insights

If you’ve ever heard the term « Brix factor, » you might work in process manufacturing. Brix is a measurement used to describe the sugar content of fruit, which can vary seasonally. For manufacturers of products with fruit on the ingredient list, this presents a major product lifecycle management (PLM) challenge. Imagine you make jam, for example, and one week the Brix factor of your strawberry crop is unusually high. You’ll need to find all of the recipes you have that use strawberries and identify factors affected by the sugar content. If you dial down the added sugar to compensate, which do you omit — grape juice or cane sugar? How will that change affect the texture or the maximum temperature the jam can reach before burning? And so on.

This is the type of complexity professionals in the process manufacturing industry face—often without the full support of modern PLM solutions. In the latest episode of Pulling the Digital Thread, Aras brought together industry leaders to explore best practices for the process manufacturing industry. The episode focused on overcoming challenges through a strong PLM strategy and leveraging the power of the digital thread.

The panel included Lionel Grealou, founder and managing director of Xlifecycle, a consultancy focused on operations improvement and strategic advisory; Jim Brown, president and founder of Tech-Clarity, an independent research firm focused on software used in manufacturing; and Patrick Willemsen, director of EMEA Technical Community at Aras.

The panel agreed that the digital thread presents an enormous opportunity to drive business success and efficiency in process manufacturing, helping industries like food and beverage, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals achieve the product quality, consistency, and volume necessary to remain competitive in a global market. Over the course of the conversation, they discussed how flexible PLM tools — in particular, low-code, model-based platforms — can help process manufacturers bridge the gap.

How process manufacturers can use flexible PLM solutions to weave the digital thread

In process manufacturing, ingredients for a product are combined in bulk according to formulas (also known as recipes) that dictate both ingredient ratios and processing techniques. Process manufacturing can, therefore, yield unusable results if even one ingredient in the mix is off. As Grealou put it, “Once you mix the formula, you can’t put the product back into the box.” Therefore, PLM solutions pose a huge opportunity to minimize waste and maintain product consistency.

Low-code tools capture the unique data of recipes vs. BOMs

Many PLM platforms are built for discrete manufacturing processes in which each product has a bill of material (BOM). In process manufacturing, though, recipes must capture both the design of the product and the design of its manufacturing process, much as a cookbook lists both ingredients and instructions. Recall our hypothetical jam example, where how much fruit you add can impact flavor, water content, and even food safety. Because this kind of change in ingredient ratios may affect the process itself, Brown pointed out that process manufacturing experts need modern tools to quickly navigate these changes. Other unique characteristics of recipes that will need to be supported by the digital thread include batch sizing, byproducts and coproducts, and yield loss.

To handle these decisions effectively, process manufacturers need an ultra-flexible PLM tool, ideally model-based. These tools can easily be adapted to support many kinds of data along the digital thread, from recipes and regulations to research and development history, helping process manufacturing professionals make informed decisions with data at their fingertips.

Traceability supports compliance and safety imperatives

Traceability is an essential principle of the digital thread. By connecting all product data, manufacturers can illuminate how different components or steps in the manufacturing process influence one another. In process manufacturing, the traceability inherent in the digital thread presents an especially important opportunity: the chance to get ahead of compliance and safety needs.

Because process manufacturers often produce goods like food or pharmaceuticals, they typically need to follow a strict set of regulations designed to ensure product quality and safety. These regulations may change often, especially at the local government level. In order to keep ahead of compliance and avoid waste, PLM solutions can be adapted to track and verify compliance.

Let’s say that our hypothetical jam company needs to make sure all jars reach a certain high temperature during the canning process, for food safety and adherence to local regulations. Will our new, readjusted batch of jam be able to reach that temperature without burning? The digital thread allows manufacturing teams to reference all documentation they need to execute the process correctly.

Digital PLM empowers collaboration

In discrete manufacturing, suppliers typically aim for consistency: the same materials are delivered for the same products as needed. But for process manufacturers like our fictional jam company, some ingredients unavoidably vary from week to week, requiring an enhanced level of communication around the condition of these materials. In addition, process manufacturers often collaborate with partners, whether suppliers of raw materials or packaging experts.

Digitization has already enabled process manufacturing companies to work with their partners more nimbly, even from afar. However, the digital thread is poised to take this collaboration to the next level. Consider that information shared with collaborators could be proprietary, like recipes, or sensitive, like quality control data. PLM solutions today enable companies to share these resources more safely using secured web portals. Plus, as the digital thread for process manufacturers continues to mature, it will be used to capture more data, creating new analytics capabilities. Improved analytics will yield more opportunities to work with trusted collaborators.

As Willemsen told the audience, when it comes to collaboration with industry partners, “This perspective of, ‘What do you want to share, where?’ is extremely important. And I think that’s where PLM can help.”

PLM for process manufacturing: Looking forward

In his research, Brown has found that top-performing businesses are twice as likely to use AI and analytics in their PLM environments. That’s because the structured data created by a PLM can supercharge even basic analytics, helping companies identify unseen opportunities and make smarter decisions amid shifting circumstances.

Most process manufacturers have not fully harnessed PLM capabilities in a way that supports AI and analytics — but using a model-based, low-code solution can allow the process manufacturing industries to set the stage for these benefits.

In the process manufacturing industries, PLM creates opportunities for new efficiencies every day. To learn more, hear from the experts here, or read our eBook, Managing the Digital Thread in Process Manufacturing. Or better yet, register for our upcoming webinar, Implementing a Digital Thread for Product Traceability in Process Industries