Inside Look at 'Digital Thread' Aerospace Manufacturing Method

A new manufacturing approach, 'digital thread,' is moving the design, manufacture, and testing of industrial parts and machines into the digital sphere. This video is part of a series from MIT Sloan Management Review  and follows the creation of an aviation part as it moves along the digital thread, creating a growing knowledge base of data and feedback as it evolves from design to final testing.

Transcript

00:00:01 (upbeat electronic music) - Hello, I'm Paul Michelman, Editor in Chief of MIT Sloan Management Review and I am here with Mark Cotteleer, Research Director from Deloitte. We are in an airplane hangar in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We're here to introduce a new video series on an emerging technology called the digital thread. Like 3D printing and lean manufacturing, digital thread is an innovation

00:00:28 born of a very particular manufacturing context but one that has, we believe, ramifications that will cross industry, cross organizational function, and even cross individual roles within organizations. Mark is going to lead us on a journey of exploration of digital thread, one that will help us understand how the technology works, what its uses are today, and where it may lead organizations in the future. Mark, thank you, and let's begin the journey.

00:00:55 - It's terrific to be here, we are in an airplane hangar, we're at One Aviation in Albuquerque and One Aviation makes an aircraft that they call a very light jet, we've got one behind us, this is an Eclipse 550, so it's an example and we are going to go on a journey to think about how is this jet designed and tested and actually put into the air? And we're going to do that by following a very particular part,

00:01:20 this is called a bell crank, and it actually lives in the nose gear of this aircraft and, of course, the nose gear's pretty important if we want to, oh I don't know, take off and land and so we want to make sure that we get it right. So, what we're going to do is use this as our device to follow the digital thread which exists in four stages, so, we've got scan, design, and analyze. We've got build and monitor. We've got test and validate

00:01:43 and we've got deliver and manage. - So, for the novices among us, including me, digital thread is basically the reconceived value chain of this part, is that correct? - Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. We can refer to the digital thread as a technology but we can also recognize that it's a technology made up of technology, so, at Deloitte we talk a lot about building an ecosystem, right?

00:02:05 We recognize that it's hard to do things alone. There's lots of different dimensions to the problems that we're trying to solve. So, we're going to look at a whole bunch of individual technologies and we're going to use the concept of the digital thread to recognize that there's an integration here that creates a process through which we achieve this higher level of let's call it value, that we're seeking.

00:02:29 - So, our viewers from manufacturing, I think, will intuitively understand why this is such an important innovation. I'd love to kind of just raise this up and do what we call a head fake in the editorial world and just give people kind of an indication of where this story may take us in terms of the ramifications for how we think about process and organizational structures that will emerge from digital thread.

00:02:50 - Yeah, well, in order to think about that, I think you can go back to the lean example, right? Where we saw lean manufacturing emerge from a manufacturing context but then it over time took on a life of its own and sort of evolved into a concept that we can apply to service settings, to all different kinds of settings, and we think the digital thread can be very similar to that because

00:03:11 we go back to that idea of ecosystems, to the recognition that there are lots of technologies that organizations need to figure out how not just to integrate but then to weave into a business process that allows them to achieve their value proposition. - Great, thank you, Mark, I look forward to the journey. - It's going to be a great trip. (upbeat electronic music)