Smart manufacturing, or “industry 4.0,” is transforming manufacturing back into an economic powerhouse. It’s helping companies digitally transform their manufacturing operations to provide new capabilities, reduce costs, empower teams, improve decision making and fundamentally create new and better ways of doing business. An integral part of smart manufacturing is the concept of the digital thread, which is key to capturing and managing the information associated with manufacturing operations.
The digital thread captures and documents everything that happens inside the manufacturing facility electronically instead of on paper. Acquiring this traceable data is a very effective way to analyze manufacturing operations, track manufacturing history and support process and product genealogy. It also makes everything about the manufacturing operations much easier to manage and supports historical analyses, production run comparisons and golden batch approaches, just to name a few.
Ultimately, the digital thread is not only about how raw materials move through the manufacturing process, but also about how they are transformed along the way to the finished products at the shipping dock. Therefore, it captures information about the materials and the lot genealogy (e.g., inventory and work in process tracking), as well as what goes into manufacturing the product, including equipment, labor and processes (e.g., maintenance, cleaning, quality and safety). This transformation process is what manufacturing is all about, and significant business value can be derived from the flow of data coming from the digital thread.
There are several significant business reasons for the digital thread. These include
- Handling of a product retrieval or product recall.
- Dealing with problems with equipment.
- Dealing with problems with materials.
- Dealing with customer issues.
The digital thread is intended to include the information necessary to diagnose any type of problem in the manufacturing plant. One of the most compelling reasons for the digital thread is handling a potential product retrieval or product recall. Most manufacturing companies understand the role of lot genealogy and material and lot tracking and tracing when it comes to a product recall. But there’s so much more that’s needed beyond just track and trace information when a product recall occurs.
Because the biggest part of manufacturing is the transformation of raw materials to the finished product, manufacturers need to look at everything that happens in a product’s lifespan, including the required equipment, labor, processes (both automatic and manual) and a variety of other activities. Many problems can occur in these areas and trigger product retrievals. To really determine what needs to be retrieved, it’s necessary for the digital thread to capture a lot of additional information that goes beyond just the material and lot genealogy. That way you can deal with any type of potential product retrieval situation that might occur.
For example, if foreign objects like metal, wood or plastic were found in a manufacturing area, it’s important to know all the batches or production runs that were processed before the objects were found. In this situation, lot tracing doesn’t help, but lot tracking does moving forward. In addition to the lot tracking, it’s necessary to know everything about that manufacturing area and what was processed in it.
In addition to information about material and lot genealogy, you also need information about your people. There may be potential problems with particular people working in the manufacturing process. They may not have been fully trained in the processes, or they may not have the required certifications. Therefore, knowing who worked on the processes and when they worked is all critical to understanding what may have caused a product recall. Again, just having genealogy information or equipment information is not enough.
The approach to a digital transformation, however, can be incremental. You can start small so you can build up and customize as you go with what’s needed for your specific requirements. In addition, consulting a third party that has expertise with the latest technology can help to provide a holistic view of your manufacturing operations. Leveraging digital thread technology to transform your manufacturing operations is the smart move forward.