Industrial Data Traceability

The main challenges of data traceability

To help you better understand what industrial data traceability is, here is an overview of its main challenges:

Quality

Ensuring traceability means being able to quickly identify and correct errors or inconsistencies at every stage of the product lifecycle. This reduces the risk of defects and improves the quality of delivered products.

By eliminating duplicates and ensuring that each team uses the correct version of the data, manufacturers can minimize costly human errors and make the entire creation process more reliable.

Compliance

In many industries (pharmaceuticals, aerospace, or even manufacturing in general), traceability is essential to meet regulatory requirements. A PLM/PDM software solution provides full visibility over all modifications made to a product, from design to production, ensuring that every change is documented and that the final product complies with applicable standards.

In the event of an audit, or even a product recall, this traceability makes it possible to immediately identify the affected batches or components and take appropriate measures.

Innovation

A good technical data management system is not just an administrative burden. It is a catalyst for innovation: by centralizing and recording all product information, teams can reduce the time spent searching for files and instead focus on high-value tasks, thereby accelerating innovation.

Data security

A product’s technical data represents the core of a company’s intellectual property. Ensuring their traceability goes hand in hand with ensuring their security. PLM/PDM solutions function as true digital safes, where information is centralized, backed up, and protected against unauthorized access through secure authentication systems and data encryption.

Collaboration

In industry, multiple teams work on the same product, either successively or simultaneously. Data traceability, ensured by a common repository, aims to align each of these groups around a single source of truth.

How do PLM/PDM tools ensure data traceability?

PDM and PLM software integrate features that guarantee industrial data traceability. PDM is a system dedicated to managing product data, while PLM covers the entire lifecycle processes in addition to the data itself.
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But concretely, how do PLM/PDM tools ensure data traceability? First, in most software, every file or document is saved with a version or revision number. Older versions are archived and accessible, making it possible to retrieve the state of data at a given moment. No one works “off-version”: within the system, the latest approved version is clearly identified.
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Every change is also tracked within the software. Each contributor can therefore see who made the modification, when, and what the nature of the change was. This change log provides a complete audit trail, useful for understanding the origin of a problem or justifying a technical decision afterward.
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PLM/PDM tools also allow precise definition of user rights according to their role. For example, only certain profiles can validate a modification or access confidential data. This ensures that critical data is only accessible to authorized individuals, which reinforces both security and data reliability.

All these features ensure that the product lifecycle is fully documented. This way, industrial companies can rigorously track the digital continuity of their products and, as a result, commit to a genuine approach to industrial data traceability.

Now that you know how PLM/PDM tools ensure data traceability and the key challenges of this traceability in industry, Aletiq recommends taking a look at these articles:

• Industrial traceability software
• Spare parts component traceability
• Production data management system software