From Requirements to Resilience: Architecting a Digital Thread Across Engineering and Supply Chain Using MBSE and PLM
Keywords:
Digital Thread, MBSE, PLM, SysML, Supply Chain Resilience, BOM Transformation, Semantic Mapping, Digital TwinAbstract
Modern engineering enterprises invest heavily in CAD environments and PLM platforms, yet supply chains continue to fail at the point where design decisions meet operational execution. The root cause is rarely a logistics breakdown — it is an architectural one. Most enterprises begin the digital thread in CAD, after system intent has already been established informally, without structured traceability. The absence of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) at the origin of this thread means that requirements, functional allocations, and supply chain constraints never enter the product lifecycle in a machine-readable, queryable form. By the time geometry is committed, the decisions behind it are invisible to any governance mechanism. This paper proposes an enterprise architecture blueprint that repositions MBSE as the authoritative anchor of the digital thread, establishes a formal Semantic Mapping Framework to bridge the logical-to-physical boundary between MBSE and CAD, and uses PLM as the backbone that synchronizes both layers across the full product lifecycle. A RACI-based governance model enforces data ownership at every thread boundary. A five-level Digital Thread Maturity Model provides a structured adoption roadmap. The central argument is that supply chain resilience cannot be achieved operationally when it has not first been built architecturally — and that architecture begins in MBSE, not in CAD.
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