GPDIS Promotes Community and Cooperation: Stay Sharp Episode 104

In Stay Sharp Episode 104, GPDIS Wrap Up, Juliann Grant steps in as the sole host to interview three attendees of last month’s Global Product Data Interoperability Summit (GPDIS): podcast co-host Jonathan Scott, Razorleaf account manager Tony Ceccoli, and Razorleaf account manager François Schlub. The group reviews highlights and insights from the event, the goal of which is bringing aerospace and manufacturing leaders together to discuss the major challenges they all face around data and digital engineering. While the official theme for 2025 was the digital thread in manufacturing, the conversations were wide-ranging.

One of the Industry’s Better Kept Secrets

Based on the amount of useful information being discussed and shared, all three attendees recommend GPDIS to anyone in the manufacturing arena. What’s unique about it is having companies that compete head-to-head for contracts—Boeing and Northrup Grumman originated the event 11 years ago—coming together, sharing practices and information, and collaborating on interoperability topics. Tony explains, “It was a gathering of industry people and vendors, as well as OEMs and suppliers to the industry, to really talk through, what are we doing with PLM? What are we doing with MES? How are we integrating those? How are we using that? How can we do that in the most future-facing way?” François notes that attendees came from all areas of their organizations, from the higher, business requirement levels all the way to people who manufacture and deliver products. “That was interesting to have this complete vision of the company,” he says.

Another valuable aspect of the Summit was the range of information, from theoretical to practical. As a practical example, Boeing openly shared their supplier engagement framework to help other organizations consider how to engage with suppliers from the simplest to the most complex scenarios. For the theoretical or long-range perspective, Jonathan mentions the use case of the Digital Product Passport, which contains lots of pieces of metadata from all points in the product lifecycle. Because it’s becoming a regulatory requirement in Europe, the Passport has implications for global manufacturers and future possible U.S. adoption as well. Jonathan explains, “You’ve got to think about this, how you’re going to standardize it and collect it, or it’s going to cost you a ton of money to chase it all down.”

The Buzz on the Summit Floor

The digital thread was covered widely, and for as much as it is and has been discussed—in industry, at events like GPDIS, and in this podcast—there were still some surprises. Jonathan reports there are groups starting to form standards around technical data packages (TDPs) and digital data packages (DDPs). He says, “A technical data package, it’s got the technical data in it. You send it to somebody, you share it with them. A digital data package is more sharing the map to digital data with someone in a standard way.”

Integration was another popular concern, even if it’s still an immature domain. “Though people are thinking about it, no one has achieved a grand vision of integration … deploying a real digital thread, François says. “We have a lot of things to achieve and we’re not done with integration, but it will keep us busy and we’ll be talking about it for the next 10 years.” Jonathan agreed and referenced Boeing’s opening keynote. Though organizations have a lot of point-to-point integrations, he says, “even though we think that’s exposing our data and getting our data where it needs to be, reality is it’s not. It’s still in silos between those two points that you’ve connected.” Smaller companies face even more integration challenges, primarily because they have product equipment and systems that are a decade or more old. “Before they can do any integration or before they can deploy an MBSE installation, now they have to update background IT systems,” François explains.

Other topics also got attention throughout the event, such as MBSE and manufacturing, which was covered in a pre-event workshop. Artificial intelligence was as hot as ever, with some “AI-everything” people and some skeptics—though Tony pointed out not even the AI enthusiasts chose to raise their hands when a presenter asked who’d be willing to fly in a plane completely built by AI.

Learn More About GPDIS

The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including the boom in questions about hub-and-spoke architecture for integrations, why one large manufacturer has a board that handles requests for PLM enhancements, why some organizations have engineering and IT teams co-creating their digital threads, why CASCADE might be the next innovation in interoperability, and more.

Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 104: GPDIS Wrap Up and join us each week for a new podcast