Engineering data should be connected to a single authoritative source of truth, with changes communicated to all. That’s the real power of the digital thread.
The Latest from XSB
Transform Manifesto Principle #1: Documents and Content Are Out. Data and Context Are In.
Individual pieces of data must be liberated from the static document and free to be used where and how end-users need them. This is the first in a series about the principles of the Transform Manifesto. If you want to start at the beginning, go here. When you're ready...
The Digital Transformation Manifesto
Engineers do too much manual labor, which takes too much time, and produces too many errors. It's time for a paradigm shift. Engineering documents have largely been left behind in the wider quest for digital transformation, but as more companies are seeing...
2024 Procurement Landscape Updates
As the new government fiscal year is underway, we’re tracking several acquisition policy issues and opportunities that may impact your public sector sales strategy. The Federal government has been running on a series of continuing resolutions (CRs) since the...
GSA FCP Transition in Full Swing
If you hold a GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) contract, you’ll want to pay attention to updates on the on-going rollout of the Federal Acquisition Service Catalog Platform (FCP). The new platform provides a modern framework for suppliers to provide Contracting...
The Future of Fair and Reasonable Pricing Policy
In public procurement, pricing decisions are governed by the ‘Fair and Reasonable’ litmus test; however, procurement regulations (i.e., the FAR) don’t explicitly define ‘Fair and Reasonable’. While buyers and sellers likely have different ideas about what constitutes...
GSA Commercial Platform Program Update
In 2020, GSA (in partnership with OMB) awarded three commercial eMarketplace contracts to Amazon Business, Fisher Scientific, and Overstock Government. These contracts enable government purchase card holders to buy commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) items through...
Insights on FY23 Government eCommerce Sales
Improve your sales by understanding the latest trends in federal eCommerce sales.
Actionable Intelligence for Selling to the Government (aka “How to Boost Your Government Sales”)
Every government supplier — small, medium, or large — can improve their sales by better understanding how the government’s purchasing system works and optimizing their selling strategies. This post shows you how.
“SynthAI” Will Make the Difference in Engineering Industries
Generative AI is all the rage for its prolific content creation abilities. But in technical environments, more is not always better. "SynthAI" digests massive amounts of information and distills it to what you need to know. We recently read this interesting view...
The Digital Thread for Engineering Requirements
“Digital thread” is probably a term you’ve heard many times, but it’s not always clear what it means, and often has different nuanced definitions depending on the industry. In this quick primer, we’ll define the digital thread and then focus on one way to make your...
Document, Models, and Twins, Oh My! What is a SWISS Digital Model – Part 2
In Part 1 of this series, we defined digital models, digital twins, and the process of change management, impact assessment, and requirements management. We also described the challenges that static PDF documents pose to modern engineering workflow, i.e. they don’t...
Document, Models, and Twins, Oh My! What is a SWISS Digital Model – Part 1
Our readers have varying degrees of familiarity with the terms “digital models” and “digital twins,” from experts to novices and everything in between. People and companies like to bandy these words about under the general rubric of “digital transformation”, but they...
Digital Models in Department of Defense Procurement
The United States Department of Defense manages one of the largest procurement budgets in the world. Of the department’s $700 Billion annual budget, more than $200 billion is spent on goods and services from contractors.1...
Using AI to Boost Engineering Productivity with Smart, Connected Documentation
XSB founder and CEO Rupert Hopkins recently talked with Stardog's Alison Goodrum to discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge graphs are fundamentally changing the way engineers, designers, and project managers interact with complex networks of...
SWISS®: Bringing Graph Thinking to Engineering Documents (Part Two)
In our last post, we provided an introduction to graph thinking and the concept of nodes (or vertices) and edges (or links) as a way to describe networks. As examples, we pointed to Facebook (a social graph with connections between people and the things that people...
SWISS®: Bringing Graph Thinking to Engineering Documents (Part One)
Graph thinking, derived from a branch of mathematics called Graph Theory, is all the rage in Silicon Valley. For instance, in August, Gartner identified knowledge graphs and graph analytics as two of 29 emerging technologies CIOs should experiment with in the next...