What is digital engineering?
Digital Engineering represents a transformative approach to traditional engineering practices. By integrating advanced digital technologies and engineering methodologies, digital engineering revolutionizes how engineering projects are conceptualized, planned, and executed.
Digital Engineering Systems, at their core, are about creating more efficient, accurate, and cost-effective solutions. A comprehensive approach to an integrated digital engineering environment enhances strategic decision-making, enabling teams to work more cohesively and efficiently.
Digital Engineering doesn't start and stop with the engineers and their digital tools. It opens the door for communication that informs the entire product development process from beginning to end.
Challenges in the digital engineering lifecycle
Whether your role is in Systems Engineering, Product Development, or Enterprise IT, management of your critical systems encompasses many concerns, and involves many stakeholders and their specific requirements.
Analyzing and visualizing connections through many digital layers, competing concerns, and across time is critical to managing robust products and networks, and critical to guiding team members to the right decisions. If those teams are separated by digital chasms, your digital engineering tools might be working against your goals.
Where is your critical engineering data?
The information that your teams rely on to succeed might live in unexpected places.
Sales and marketing concepts
Sales might be the starting point in identifying customer needs. Can you track these over time and keep your teams focused on solving the customer's problem? Does the marketing plan align with the product's actual capabilities?
Detailed requirements
Are your requirements managed in a special tool? How well are those linked to use cases and implementation plans. Can you see the digital thread that links the requirements to their solution in the final product?
CAD files
If your product includes electronics, hardware, or facilities, you'll have digital geometric design data from one or several different electronic design tools. How do these relate to your supply chain for the delivery of that hardware? How do they relate to the embedded circuits and programmable components?
User interface designs
You have a team working on how to present the details about this system to end users, and inform the design human-computer interfaces you need. Can you keep those designs synchronized with the system as it is being built?
Software design and implementation
Your software team likely uses a variety of tools to document and deliver the software that makes the system work. How readily can you link the software artifacts to the hardware components they control and to third-party tools and interfaces?
Test plans and data
Test teams have their own tools for designing, implementing, and reporting on the results of physical or logical system tests, or simulations of system operations. Can you readily link them to detailed information about the configuration of the system as it was tested?
Resource planning
What resources are assigned to all the moving parts of the development, and what risks do you have in keeping those resources working effectively toward the same goal?
Program planning
From start-to-finish, management needs to stay informed of progress against goals, and spending against available funding. Can you connect all the dots?
Digital threads are the backbone of digital engineering
Digital threads are the vital connective tissue that supports full data transparency throughout the product lifecycle, linking information from design time through end-of-life.
Every product development is a fabric of digital threads that link design intentions to their implementation through to their actuation. The digital thread for that asset on the factory floor might lead all the way back to the source of the steel it was forged with.
Digital threads bring traceability and coherence to the vast collection of data that comprises the full lifecycle of a product. Every digital thread is one path in a graph network of information resources that support your engineering team.
Empower all stakeholders to make informed decisions
A graph-based approach to digital engineering information integration can provide your teams with the power to access the information they need to make sound decisions in a rapidly changing product development landscape.
Quick
Detailed
Interactive
Flexible
Meet the needs of various stakeholders and their concerns
Synchronize logical and physical digital engineering artifacts
Every team must come to grips with the variety of task-specific or discipline-specific tools that are vital to their work, but these digital tools also create data silos that can obscure or confuse the big picture.
Graph-based approaches to digital engineering processes ensure that data is not just collected but effectively used, bridging tools and disciplines to drive innovation and efficiency.
Tom Sawyer Software has the power and flexibility to bring the engineering and product delivery picture into better focus, and bring light into the darkest corners of your digital data landscape.
Tom Sawyer Software worked with Skydea to build a user experience that navigates engineering data across logical and physical layers of the design, including the physical geometry of the aircraft.
Trusted by science and industry leaders
Making connections through digital engineering integration
Demystify engineering diagrams
Engineering diagrams are essential to understanding, but costly to maintain. Different stakeholders need different details. Keeping static drawings up-to-date and consistent is expensive and error-prone. Tom Sawyer Software can rescue your engineering teams from this never-ending cycle and generate consistent and interactive digital engineering diagrams that are always up-to-date.
Connect legacy tools and processes
Providing your teams with the right digital tools for each discipline and stage in the product lifecycle may leave your data stranded where only a few people can use it. Link your tools and your teams with the right processes. Let Tom Sawyer Software help orchestrate processes and provide access to information without disrupting engineering tools that are already producing value for your engineering team.
Inform and empower stakeholders
Many important stakeholders are not engineers. Tom Sawyer Software can help you provide the information they require from digital engineering systems, in a format they can digest. Give engineers and business stakeholders the tools they need to communicate effectively at the right level of detail. Eliminate confusion and waste by automating the processes that translate engineering data into formats that serve other stakeholders needs.
Reveal hidden insights
Significantly reduce hours spent tracing related information from adjacent digital tools in your enterprise. Tom Sawyer Software can connect digital platforms at run-time with our graph-based, in-memory model. Use clustering and other graph analytics to analyze networks, separate concerns, call out inconsistencies, trace root causes, or analyze upstream and downstream effects of production and delivery issues.
Navigate and analyze connected data
Tom Sawyer Software's native in-memory graph provides just-in-time integration of the latest data from various tools in your digital engineering environment. Provide ready access to information from design-time to run-time. Enable smooth navigation in any direction you need to explore, even without an established data lake. Use clustering and other graph analytics to analyze networks, separate concerns, call out inconsistencies, trace root causes, or analyze upstream and downstream effects of production and delivery issues.
Improve engineering quality and lower costs
Discover and address inconsistencies that plague your development and maintenance teams at any stage of the product development lifecycle. Tom Sawyer Software delivers seamless traceability through the unique collection of digital systems you depend upon. Help your users find their way to the information they need: manage complexity with swimlanes, group and collapse information, trace upstream and downstream effects, and flag non-compliant elements for resolution. Deliver faster, more effective resolutions with fewer side-effects.
Explore and evaluate a digital twin
Building an accurate digital twin with the resolution your operations require can be a challenge. Making a digital twin readily accessible to the people that need it can be even more difficult than building one. Tom Sawyer Software can work with you to unlock real business value from your digital twin, providing users with the graph-based navigation and analysis that is key to delivering new insights from your connected digital engineering data.
Make informed decisions
Graph-based integration of your digital engineering data delivers the freedom to follow connected data trails that describe complex systems from cradle to grave, and across the data silos created by separate tools. Tom Sawyer Software enables the insights that support sound decisions and illustrate the impact on cost, quality and risk. Leverage the power of graphs to explore your options, compare possible solutions, and make the right trade offs when there are difficult decisions to be made.
Extract more value with less engineering effort
Experience shows that engineers can spend up to 80% of their time making better drawings for various stakeholders. Our high-precision automated drawing capabilities can reduce that workload to 5%!
Engineers are your company’s most critical resource. Hiring and retaining great engineers is more challenging every year. Help your engineers to spend more of their day on value-added engineering tasks to meet aggressive delivery goals.
A model-based approach for visualizing technical data will rescue your engineers from countless hours manipulating incomplete and inelegantly arranged drawings to meet the demands of various stakeholders.
Make your digital engineering platforms work for you, not against you.
Solutions to match your digital engineering challenges
Tom Sawyer Software has helped many teams transform their engineering practices by providing the right tools for key stakeholders. Take a sneak peak at our off-the-shelf solutions, or talk to us about custom options to solve unique issues in your digital engineering environment.
Model-Based Engineering
Our Model-Based Engineering product for CATIA™ and SysML1.X can handle complex diagrams with thousands of elements and relationships by rendering interactive diagrams directly from underlying model definitions.
Learn more about how to use it with Teamwork Cloud on the web or with Cameo or MagicDraw on the desktop.
SysML v2 Viewer
Leap into the future with the newly ratified SysML v2 modeling language. Our SysML v2 Viewer instantly generates clear and readable visualizations of systems models in any SysML v2 API-compliant repository.
Learn how SysML v2 Viewer can save hours of time and enable stakeholders to participate more readily in the modeling effort.
Perspectives custom solution
If you use other tooling for your engineering, talk to us about support for IBM Rhapsody, Open MBEE, or other data and service providers in your environment.
Learn how a custom Perspectives solution can improve productivity, decrease waste, and improve the quality of your final product, by leveraging the investments you've already made.
Investing in the future of digital model-based engineering
Our commitment to SysML v2
SysML v2 is an important step for the future of Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE). We are delighted to have been part of the team that is shaping the future of digital system engineering through the leadership of the Object Management Group (OMG).
Every system is a graph, and automating graph visualizations based on digital engineering data plays a large part in helping humans to understand both the system design and operation at every level of detail.
Read more about how SysML v2 was informed by the benefits and challenges of SysML v1.
Tom Sawyer SysML v2 Viewer instantly generates clear and readable visualizations of systems models.