Digital Tools are reshaping how Engineering Design data and information are produced, processed, used, reused, shared, and stored. The Digital Thread prioritizes the flow of design data and information, promoting effective collaboration and process efficiency. While literature showcases the immense application and capability of taking a Digital Thread approach to Product Design, best practices, key features, and benefits of successful implementations remain scarce. Reviewing and understanding successful implementations can assist researchers and practitioners in making informed decisions to effectively implement Digital Threads in their product design processes. This article addresses this gap by reporting a post hoc review of a collaborative Research & Development project that developed and implemented a Digital Thread approach to the design of hydrogen composite pressure vessels. A thematic analysis of the project’s reports and interviews with members of the project team was performed to identify the key features that expedite and improve the design process through an effective Digital Thread implementation. The post hoc review offers valuable insights – in the form of six feature benefits, four potential implementation challenges, three possible extensions, and four best practice recommendations – for companies looking to adopt and implement a Digital Thread approach to their design process.

To establish a coherent Digital Thread, encompassing diverse information obtained during the design process, it is imperative to ensure the traceability of information particularly between engineering and manufacturing teams. A challenge lies in maintaining links between data, particularly in the context of configuration management. Through the principles of complementarity, we explore links between the Engineering and the Manufacturing definitions through a major structural element. We forsee the principles of complementarity as a support for Digital Thread throughout the product lifecycle.

The Digital Thread is a system that connects different phases of the product lifecycle and the related data across one or more companies in the supply chain. This work aims to develop a graph data model of the Digital Thread, in the context of the vision of polyglot persistence, that interconnects the different phases of the lifecycle and their corresponding data models, processes, and IT systems. This work proposes a Digital Thread Graph that integrates a Digital Model and a derived Digital Twin, using object and relation attributes for view creation and filtering while minimizing redundancy.

The ongoing digitization of engineering processes and the increasing prevalence of smart products create possibilities for new business models and services. Digital twins enable the collection of all required data about a smart product in order to make these possibilities a reality. This paper describes a flexible approach towards a digital product twin that is tightly integrated with existing product models while being lightweight and easy to integrate with existing IT solutions.