Welcome to the (parallel) dimensions of the Digital Continuity

I’ve been working for more than 3 years for manufacturers with MarkLogic. During these years, we created new concepts, designed solutions, shared a lot with partners and clients and of course we delivered projects.
In the following post, I’ll try to summarise why I’m convinced the data hub and particularly MarkLogic is a key enabler of the digital continuity graal of Manufacturing 4.0.

What does digital continuity mean ?

If you look at the common definition of digital continuity aka Digital Thread, it will refer to the ability to seamlessly collect, share and generate accurate insights from data across the product life cycle from its design to its end of life in order to operate the business.

That’s great, it looks like a perfect use case for an operational data hub : collect any data from ERPs, PLMs, document management systems, then enrich with context, metadata and third party data in order to run-the-business and observe-the-business with accurate 360 views.

This could be called continuity from design to end of life (1)

But wait, digital continuity has many more dimensions which can also be tackle by MarkLogic Operational Datahub.

Continuity from one Part to a Product (2)

This requires to track lifecycle of the individual parts as well as the way they fit into the product. There come the product structure which defines how the parts are linked and under what conditions (see next dimension)

Semantics in MarkLogic can be leveraged in order to describe this structure and can then be queried along with the related data coming from ERP and PLM for exemple in order to generate in context insights.

Continuity from one Product to Thousands (3)

In automotive or aerospace for example, each individual product has its own specificities. They impact every asset from designs to the documentations and are usually associated with the concept of effectivity: under what conditions, a specific configuration is applicable.

In MarkLogic, we designed an highly elegant way to describe and query the effectivity. The effectivity being a boolean expression (of multiples conditions on version, date, serial), the query can be stored along side the data, actually in the data inself (as a serialised json or xml query) and then MarkLogic can perform reverse query where the content of the query is the product configuration and the results are the objects which contain a query positive to the configuration.


Effectivity management in MarkLogic is described in this article: Semantics to increase synergies and move towards the Industry 4.0 Digital Thread

Interesting fact, if you combine this dimension with the previous one, you are now able to query the product structure according to the effectivity and the details are in the second part of the article.

Continuity from structured to unstructured (4)

I already had the opportunity to present what we do with MarkLogic in the ECM space in the insurance market for exemple. But everything is also applicable for manufacturing where the source content are moreover usually in XML/SGML format. A key dimension there when you  produce car maintenance documentation services or aircraft manual for airlines is to tailor the content based on the actual configuration of the product. Here again, we can easily mix the continuity dimensions to deliver the expected value.

Continuity from inside to third parties (5)

Here comes the network of partners and clients. In order to streamline operations, it's important to track lineage. A single product or part can have multiple identities whether as a supplier or a client order reference. Semantics can be used to represent and query these relations.

Continuity from shop floor to client (6)

Combining structured data with IoT coming from shop floor or delivery vehicule can help delivering the right information to the right person at the right time. 

Continuity from individual to community (7)

We must of course not forget the human asset. An operational Data Hub can also manage HR data to supervise skills, availability and optimize business processes (ex: shop floor resource scheduling).

In short

We just illustrated 7 dimensions of the Digital Continuity and you could of course find more. In the past few years, I had the opportunity to design solutions mixing from several to many of them.  They are not so parallel at the end...
It demonstrated how the MarkLogic Operational Data Hub can easily tackle digital challenges in the Manufacturing environment.

Here are some profiles of these projects :