Digital Threads: Connecting Actions to Outcomes

As an innovative organization, looking for opportunities to learn and analyze is nothing new - it’s how you continue to push the needle on operational improvement. However, just as there are more optimized methods for running your lines, there are also more optimized methods for uncovering key insights and interpreting what they mean for your operations (at scale).

In recent years, tools like plantwide data historians and downtime analysis modules have become powerful tools in the quest for driving greater efficiency, quality, and effectiveness. As processing power and bandwidth has increased prices have steadily decreased, removing the barriers to entry for a more advanced approach to operations. The newest (and most powerful) resource available to engineers, plant managers, and operations pros today is predictive operations platforms, and the concept of digital threads is central to understanding how they work and the benefits they provide. 

Digital threads are no-code logical workflows that are used to automate calculations or operationalize actions. Threads are automatically running in the background and evaluating all anomaly conditions. The actions represented by a digital thread could be a trigger of something that can happen when an event occurs, such as sending an email directly to the service team or calculating actions back to the data source to create an automated setpoint change.

Deployment actions, represented by digital threads, are scalable across millions of assets and can be easily managed by domain experts on a single platform. Adding intelligence to operations in this way is very quick and effective.

In terms of proving value quickly, the speed at which digital threads allow your engineers to interpret real-time data and act upon what they are learning ensures that if there are measurable results to be realized, they will be promptly.

Ready to learn more? Download our “Optimization for All” whitepaper and see how predictive analytics can transform your business.