Every product begins as a requirement, becomes a design, evolves through engineering changes, materializes on the manufacturing floor, and lives in the field generating data. Forge Axiom connects every stage into a single digital thread — so the intent behind every design decision is traceable from the first requirement to the last service bulletin.
Siemens spent $10.6 billion acquiring Altair to bolt simulation onto Teamcenter. PTC has 12,000 customers running Windchill on architectures designed before cloud computing existed. Dassault's 3DEXPERIENCE platform is so complex that implementation requires a small army of consultants and 18 months of configuration. And underneath all of them — underneath the modern UIs and the AI copilot marketing — is the same fundamental problem: PLM systems that were designed to manage documents, not to enable a digital thread. They store files. They manage workflows. They enforce permissions. But they do not connect requirements to designs to simulations to manufacturing instructions to field performance in a single, queryable, version-controlled thread. Forge Axiom does.
Axiom is not a document management system with engineering workflows. It is a digital thread engine — built in Rust for performance, native to the Forge ERP and Vault database for manufacturing integration, and architected from day one to connect what you intend (requirements) to what you design (CAD), to what you prove (simulation), to what you build (BOM/manufacturing), to what you learn (field data). One thread. One truth. One platform.
Traditional PLM manages files. Axiom manages the truth about your product.
From the first requirement to the last field service event — Axiom manages the complete lifecycle of everything you design, build, and support.
Engineers should never be forced to change their CAD tool because of their PLM system. Axiom manages CAD data from every major platform natively — storing native files, extracting metadata, maintaining assembly relationships, and providing web-based 3D visualization that lets reviewers, procurement, manufacturing, and quality interact with product geometry without a CAD license. The system provides concurrent engineering support with check-in/check-out, branching for design exploration, automatic thumbnail and lightweight visualization generation, and deep integration with each CAD system's native data model for accurate BOM extraction.
The BOM is the single most critical data structure in manufacturing — and it is the data structure that PLM systems manage worst. Most PLMs maintain a single engineering BOM and then rely on middleware to translate it into a manufacturing BOM. The manufacturing BOM drifts. The service BOM is maintained in a separate system. The as-maintained BOM for field assets is in Excel. Axiom manages all four BOM views in a single data model: eBOM (as-designed), mBOM (as-planned for manufacturing), sBOM (as-serviced for aftermarket), and aBOM (as-built for serialized traceability). Changes in any view propagate to affected views with configurable reconciliation rules. Variant and options configuration supports product families with millions of valid combinations — resolved in milliseconds.
Engineering changes are where PLM systems either prove their value or reveal their limitations. A material change to one component can cascade through assemblies, affect procurement orders, invalidate qualification test results, require updated manufacturing instructions, and trigger regulatory re-certification. In traditional PLM, this impact analysis is manual — an engineer traces through the BOM and sends emails to affected stakeholders. In Axiom, impact analysis is instant and complete: the system automatically identifies every affected assembly, every open purchase order, every manufacturing routing, every qualification test, and every regulatory submission — presenting the full scope of impact before the change is even submitted for review. Approval workflows support parallel routing, conditional logic, digital signatures, and audit trail compliance for FDA, AS9100, and IATF 16949.
Requirements live in one system. Designs live in another. Tests live in a third. And the question "does this design satisfy the requirement?" is answered by someone opening three tabs and making a judgment call. Axiom integrates requirements management directly into the product data model — each requirement is linked to the design artifacts that implement it, the simulation results that validate it, and the test procedures that verify it. When a requirement changes, Axiom shows every design artifact, simulation, and test that must be re-evaluated. When a design changes, Axiom shows every requirement whose satisfaction may be affected. This bidirectional traceability supports Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), V-model development, and agile hardware development methodologies.
The digital thread is not a buzzword in Axiom — it is the architecture. Every artifact in the system exists as a node in a product knowledge graph: requirements, specifications, CAD models, simulation results, test reports, manufacturing instructions, quality records, supplier certifications, and field service events are all connected through typed relationships that capture why each artifact exists and what it depends on. This enables queries that no file-based PLM can answer: "Show me every field failure that traces back to a design change made in Q3" or "Which requirements are satisfied only by components from single-source suppliers?" The digital thread turns your product data from a filing cabinet into an intelligence engine.
Simulation has become central to product development — but simulation data remains the most poorly managed artifact in most PLM systems. Models are stored on local drives. Results live in email attachments. The connection between a simulation result and the design iteration it validated is documented in someone's notebook. Axiom manages simulation data as first-class artifacts: models, mesh configurations, boundary conditions, solver settings, results, and post-processed outputs are all versioned, linked to the design geometry they analyze, and connected to the requirements they verify. Integration with Ansys, Abaqus, COMSOL, and OpenFOAM enables automated simulation workflows — run a parametric study, store results, and automatically update the requirements verification matrix. Generative design tools connect directly to Axiom's constraint and objective framework, enabling AI-driven design exploration within managed lifecycle boundaries.
Regulated industries — medical devices, aerospace, automotive, defense — spend enormous effort assembling compliance documentation from PLM data. Design history files for FDA. First article inspection packages for AS9100. PPAP submissions for IATF 16949. In traditional PLM, this is a manual assembly process: someone extracts documents, compiles evidence, and builds a submission package over weeks. Axiom generates compliance packages automatically from the product data model — because every requirement, design decision, change, verification, and approval is already captured in the digital thread. The system provides electronic signature compliance (21 CFR Part 11), complete audit trails, ITAR/EAR access controls for defense programs, and submission-ready document packages that map directly to regulatory frameworks.
The product lifecycle does not end at shipment — it begins a new phase of learning. Warranty claims, field failures, customer complaints, and IoT sensor data from connected products generate intelligence that should flow directly back into the engineering process. Axiom closes this loop: field events are linked to the specific serial number, BOM configuration, manufacturing lot, and design revision that produced the product. Pattern recognition identifies systemic failure modes across product populations. Root cause analysis traces field failures through the digital thread to the specific design decision, material selection, or manufacturing process that contributed. This closed-loop intelligence transforms field data from a cost center (warranty processing) into a design improvement engine that reduces future failures and accelerates product evolution.
An A&D structures manufacturer running Siemens Teamcenter for 11 years deployed Axiom to manage their ITAR-controlled product data. Migration of 240,000 product records completed in 10 weeks. Engineering change cycle time dropped from 14 days to 5.3 days through parallel approval routing and automated impact analysis. AS9100D compliance documentation that required 3 weeks of manual assembly is now generated automatically in hours. The digital thread enabled complete traceability from customer requirements through first article inspection — satisfying DCMA audit requirements that had previously consumed 400 engineer-hours per program.
A Class III medical device manufacturer was spending 6 weeks assembling the Design History File (DHF) for each FDA submission — manually extracting requirements, linking to design outputs, compiling verification and validation evidence, and assembling traceability matrices. Axiom's digital thread eliminated this effort entirely: the DHF is generated automatically from the product data model because every requirement, design decision, test result, and approval is already connected. 21 CFR Part 11 compliance — electronic signatures, complete audit trails, version control — was achieved on day one without customization. Time from design freeze to FDA submission preparation dropped from 6 weeks to 3 days.
An engineer-to-order industrial equipment manufacturer was running three CAD systems (NX for structures, Creo for mechanisms, SolidWorks for sheet metal) with product data scattered across network drives, a legacy Windchill instance, and Excel-based BOMs. Axiom unified all three CAD systems into a single managed environment — with web-based 3D visualization that let procurement, quality, and manufacturing review geometry without CAD licenses. BOM accuracy improved from 91% to 99.7% through automated extraction and reconciliation. Engineering change impact analysis that previously took a senior engineer 2 days of manual trace-through now completes in under 10 seconds. Annual cost of quality improvement from BOM accuracy alone: $1.8M.
We spent eleven years in Teamcenter. Eleven years building custom workflows, writing BMIDE code that nobody understood, and paying Siemens consultants $280 an hour to configure things that should have worked out of the box. Our engineers hated it. They called it "the system" — always with dread. Axiom replaced it in ten weeks. Ten weeks. Our engineers now search for parts the way they search Google. Our ECN cycle dropped from fourteen days to five. And the DCMA auditor — who had spent three days reviewing our traceability last year — completed this year's audit in four hours.
The Design History File used to take six weeks. Six weeks of my regulatory team extracting documents, cross-referencing requirements, building traceability matrices in Excel, and assembling a submission package that the FDA would accept. With Axiom, I push a button. The DHF generates itself — because the traceability already exists in the digital thread. Requirements link to design outputs. Design outputs link to verification. Verification links to validation. It is not a document assembly exercise anymore. It is a query against a complete product knowledge graph. Three days instead of six weeks. That changes everything about how fast we can bring devices to market.
Our BOM accuracy was 91%. That sounds acceptable until you realize that 9% of incorrect BOMs translates to $1.8 million annually in scrap, rework, wrong-parts-ordered, and production delays. We had three CAD systems, a legacy Windchill install, and Excel BOMs that were the actual source of truth for manufacturing. Axiom unified everything. The BOM is now extracted automatically from CAD, reconciled across engineering and manufacturing views, and shared with the ERP in real time. Accuracy went to 99.7%. The $1.8 million in quality costs essentially disappeared. That alone paid for the platform for the next decade.
Schedule a demonstration of Forge Axiom — configured for your CAD environment, your compliance requirements, and your product complexity.