The Transformation Manifesto for Engineering Documents

The Transform Manifesto from XSB outlines our key principles for how to transform your engineering documents and drawings into actionable intelligence with new capabilities that reduce time, cost, and risk through the entire supply chain.

Engineering documents and drawings are full of essential data like requirements, tables, equations, part/material/process attributes, and more – critical for ensuring safe, high-quality, compliant products.

Most of these documents are in flat-text PDF format which is a poor container for data that hasn't changed in 30 years.

Wading through PDF files to find answers and then copying, pasting, and manually rekeying content into other applications requires tedious, time-consuming manual labor resulting in a lot of errors and rework.

And yet, engineers and technical professionals are forced to do this every day, all over the world.

It's time to shift to a new way of using engineering information.

Transcript

1. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 1 The Digital Transformation Manifesto* The Principles for Transforming Engineering Documents and Drawings into Actionable Intelligence for the Digital Thread *aka The Transform Manifesto Invented by Better Decisions, Faster The Digital Thread for Engineering Documents
2. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 2 And yet, engineers and technical professionals are doing this every day, all over the world. Wading through PDF files to find answers and then copying, pasting, and manually rekeying content into other applications requires tedious, time-consuming manual labor and creates too many errors. Most of these documents are in flat-text PDF format which is a poor container for data that hasn't changed in 30 years. Engineering documents and drawings contain essential data like requirements, material and process attributes, references, and more – all critical for ensuring safe, high-quality, and compliant products. Why We (and You) Need a Manifesto In a word: status quo. Ok, that’s two words, but one concept. Follow these principles to transform your critical content into actionable intelligence with new capabilities that reduce time, cost, and risk through the entire supply chain.
3. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 3 . Most engineering information is delivered as a document, but the real value is in the data that engineers use to derive answers and conclusions. By turning documents into data, we can extract and deliver the contextual and actionable intelligence that users need to make better decisions, faster. Shift from Documents to Data, and from Content to Context.
4. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 4 In a true digital thread, all stakeholders have access to current, complete, and authoritative information. Each IP owner/author manages and controls their respective data, and any changes at the source are automatically communicated up and downstream to all relevant users. Engineering data should be connected to a single authoritative source of truth, with changes communicated to all.
5. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 5 Engineering data should be interoperable across IP owners, users, and software applications. Most engineering documents reference others, but it takes tedious manual labor to ”silo-hop” between repositories and applications to find and extract required data. Building interoperability between data and concepts can supercharge efficiency and help users get the answers they need faster.
6. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 6 Engineering data must be machine-readable. In the future, machines – not humans – will be the primary consumers of information. But today, hard coding data from PDF into machines is time-consuming and prone to human error. As we shift from documents to data, each element (equation, table, etc) should be structured for a machine to read, interpret, and execute. Reducing manual labor and increasing automation depends on it.
7. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 7 Engineering information should be delivered at the point of need, anywhere in the enterprise, through APIs. Engineering professionals don’t want to learn another application, visit another workbench, or modify their existing workflow; they want actionable intelligence *delivered into their existing applications*. APIs can deliver data into enterprise applications to give end-users the answers they need right when and where they need it.
8. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 8 AI can be used to derive insights and intelligence from unstructured text. But AI must be used responsibly to ensure high accuracy and transparent sources. Many companies make wild claims about their AI (“500 years of combined AI experience”?! Ummm, no.) AI is not a magician, it’s a scalable enabler of insights that makes humans smarter and more efficient. But we must recognize AI’s limits and apply it carefully with clear validation – so you can trust the results 100% of the time.
9. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 9 Data contained in documents must be available as authoritative and reusable data objects. There is no greater waste of time than people manually copying, pasting, and rekeying data (like requirements, tables, equations) and then others repeating it throughout the supply chain. Engineering data should be easy to embed in other applications with live links to sources so changes can be broadcast throughout the digital thread.
10. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 10 1. Shift from documents to data, and content to context 2. Build a single authoritative data source 3. Prioritize interoperability 4. Make data machine-readable 5. Deliver knowledge to the point of need using APIs 6. Apply AI responsibly 7. Create reusable data objects (and reuse them!) Summary
11. © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved 11 © 2023 XSB, Inc. All rights reserved THANK YOU Andrew Bank Strategy & Business Development 734-476-8489 a.bank@xsb.com www.xsb.com/swiss The Digital Thread for Engineering Documents Invented by Better Decisions, Faster