Abstract:

Although the digital thread is a key topic nowadays among designers and engineers, the ideas underpinning the concept and its implementation remains difficult to understand. Actually, there is almost a general opinion among engineers and team leaders that while the digital thread can be valuable, it is only financially viable for large companies with huge budgets. Despite of a disproportionally bad perception of the next inevitable integrate digital change and challenge in all areas of the community life, Digital Thread and Digital Twin are naturally embedded functions on IoT and IIoT   that can be defined on the basis of existing systems. This study presents a detailed description of the Digital Thread and Digital Twin concept, and the benefits of adopting them for the newly designed products / processes and for the existing ones. It is presented as well a real-life case study, on integrating CMMS and Digital Twin, where the digital thread has been used to improve MRO for non-enterprise companies.