Engineering Process Days 2026

Software defined products are reshaping engineering across automotive, aerospace, and off highway industries. This transformation reveals fundamental shortcomings in today’s document centric and siloed ALM, PLM, and ERP landscapes—particularly in meeting growing demands for lifecycle traceability, regulatory compliance, sustainability, and cross company collaboration. Addressing these challenges requires not only new technical architectures, but also measurable organizational change.
This presentation outlines how Rolls Royce Power Systems AG is establishing an end to end Digital Thread through a staged and adoption focused approach. The technical foundation is laid with Model Based Definition (MBD) using Digital Data Packages (DDP) to preserve engineering semantics across formats, domains, and supply chain boundaries. The scope is then expanded to include Requirements Engineering and Model Based Systems Engineering, enabling consistent cross domain traceability from requirements to realization. Trusted collaboration across organizational boundaries will be achieved through Asset Administration Shells deployed on a GAIA X infrastructure.
Equally important, the Digital Thread is embedded through a structured Organizational Change Management framework. By combining clear change storytelling, role specific value propositions, targeted enablement, and adoption KPIs, the approach focuses on real behavior change rather than tool deployment alone. This alignment of technology, processes, and people ensures sustainable adoption and measurable business impact.
By integrating semantic data structures with organizational change mechanisms, Rolls Royce Power Systems AG establishes a lifecycle spanning Digital Thread that accelerates development, improves transparency, and provides a robust foundation for automation, digital agents, and future digital value creation.