In Episode 52 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Mastering Integration Across the Product Digital Thread, co-hosts Jen Ferello and Jonathan Scott welcome Jim Brown, president and founder of Tech-Clarity Research. An independent research and consulting firm, Tech-Clarity specializes in analyzing the true business value of software, technology, and services. Jim’s organization recently took on a research project, with sponsorship from Razorleaf, to understand the importance of integration in the product digital thread. In this episode, Jen, Jonathan, and Jim discuss the sometimes surprising results.
Why the Product Digital Thread is Valuable to Manufacturers
Out of the many types of digital thread that can exist, Tech-Clarity focused on the product digital thread and specifically on the perceived criticality of integration between enterprise systems to support it. Jim notes, “I think we’ve just realized as an industry that the digital thread sits across applications—across different data sources—and that integration is becoming extremely important to that.”
Defining the product digital thread itself isn’t difficult. As Jim explains, it’s the data and data-relationships that contain all of the decisions and information related to product development. But what the trio find so interesting about the idea of a product digital thread is, as Jonathan says, “A digital thread can look different to each organization in terms of what they want out of it.” Moreover, it’s not “a” digital thread. “For a single product,” Jim says, “there might be multiple digital threads that represent it. One at the vendor, one at the customer, one at another organization that uses it.” And every product digital thread is its own storehouse of everything the manufacturer or supplier or partner needs to know about the product.
Why Integration is So Important
About the digital thread, Jen concludes, “Obviously, it’s not just design anymore. It’s passing of data. You need to have the different systems integrated.” The results of the survey Tech-Clarity conducted with more than 100 companies, primarily in the manufacturing industry, indicated that manufacturers agree. In fact, Jim reports that when asked about the importance of digital thread integration to achieving digital thread goals, “About 18% said it’s critical, but another 51% said it’s important … that’s about two-thirds of them saying it’s important or critical.” Another telling and unusual data point Jim mentions is that no one—0% of respondents—said that integration wasn’t important.
While so many in the industry believe integration is at least important for the product digital thread, integration maturity is not as advanced as you might think. Jim explains that the survey examined how integrated respondents were, and again, about two-thirds said that they at least have some integration. Unfortunately, it’s not all good or complete integration—and the impact of those deficits can be significant. “It’s not achieving the quality that you want. It’s errors … missing time-to-market marks, poor efficiency, that kind of thing,” Jim says. “About a third are dealing with all of these issues on a daily basis. You start going beyond that, for duplicate entry, about a third say daily, about a third say weekly.” Those compounded inefficiencies can add up to a bigger problem quickly.
At the other end of the spectrum are the group that Tech-Clarity considers the Top Performers, aka, the top 25% of companies that self-report the highest levels of integration competency and progress. Tech-Clarity makes a point, in this report as in others, of examining what that group is doing differently, to glean any information that can help the other 75% of manufacturers.
The defining characteristic this survey uncovered was that the Top Performers have simply done more integration. Jim says, “They’re four times more likely to have those higher levels of integration and four times more likely to be [integrated] at the supply-chain level, beyond the departmental level.” Those results were surprising, Jim goes on to explain, because Tech-Clarity is used to identifying discrete processes or characteristics as indications of Top Performers’ success. But in this case, it’s not just one process, characteristic, or “muscle” they’re using. “What we found is that they were likely to use all of their muscles. They were more likely to use all of these different capabilities,” he says. In other words, what makes them more successful is all the different systems working together to achieve a goal, whether that’s a pushup or an integrated product digital thread.
Learn More About Integration in the Product Digital Thread
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what’s driving the surge of interest in digital thread integration these days, what percentage of time the survey reports engineers are doing “real work,” what Pommel Horse Guy (U.S. Olympic Medal winning gymnast Stephen Nedoroscik) has to do with a discussion about digital threads, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 52: Mastering Integration Across the Product Digital Thread, and join us each week for a new podcast.
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