How Toyota Motor Europe Developed a Flexible Digital Thread With Systems Thinking

Toyota Motor Europe relied on the manual exchange of complex spreadsheets to share data, an unsustainable process due to the number of architectural variants and related simulations. These spreadsheets were devoid of any connection to the rest of the product data and were not managed under configuration control. The pedigree, maturity, and connectivity of the data were often unclear. Management of the engineering division recognized that the existing process was not sustainable without a new data management platform. The original spreadsheets are now replaced by the “single source of truth,” the digital thread in the Aras platform that covers the engineering data for vehicle dynamics performance. The variant-design-simulation relationships are managed within this system-centric digital thread regardless of where the system and design details are authored.