A bearing fractures at 14,200 hours. Traditional root cause analysis takes weeks of manual investigation. Trace walks the product knowledge graph backward from field symptom to design origin in seconds.
Every week spent investigating a field failure is a week the root cause remains unaddressed in the active fleet.
The most valuable question in product engineering is not “what failed?” — it is “why did the design allow this failure?” A bearing fracture is a symptom. The root cause might be a fillet radius reduced during weight optimization. Or a simulation that assumed steady-state loads when the field experiences cyclic loading. Or a material batch whose properties drifted. Trace finds the answer by walking backward through every layer of the digital thread.
Trace performs a reverse traversal of the Axiom product knowledge graph. Starting from a field failure event, it walks backward through the as-built configuration (Lattice), manufacturing process records (Forge ERP), engineering change history (Cascade), simulation validation results (Nexus), requirement specifications (Meridian), and the original design decisions — identifying every decision point that contributed to the failure condition. The traversal is not an investigation. It is a computation.
From reverse graph traversal through simulation assumption auditing to automated root cause report generation — Trace operates eight engines that transform weeks of investigation into seconds of computation.
“Forty-seven seconds. From the field service report to the design decision that caused the failure. The fillet radius reduction for weight savings. The simulation that only modeled steady-state loads. The actual cyclic amplitude from IoT telemetry that was forty percent higher than assumed. All connected. All traceable. What used to take my team three to four weeks of digging through five different systems, Trace computed in less than a minute.”
“We found seven blades with incipient cracking across twelve engine programs. All from the same titanium heat lot. All with elongation values that were technically within specification but statistically anomalous. Without Trace’s batch-to-fleet mapping, we would have discovered those cracks one at a time during routine overhauls — or worse, as in-flight events. The proactive inspection campaign cost a fraction of what a single uncontained failure investigation would have.”
Submit a field event. Watch Trace walk the product knowledge graph backward through every layer — from symptom to design origin — in seconds.