A customer calls about a cracked shaft and asks one question: which heat of 4140 was it cut from, and does the mill cert prove it met spec? In most shops the answer lives in four places. The material spec sits in CAD notes, the cert is a scanned PDF in a shared drive, the lot number was typed into ERP at receiving, and the traveler that says which bar went to which job is in a binder at the saw.
Finding that answer takes a day of email. Finding every other part cut from the same heat, so you can contain it, takes longer. Nothing in that chain is linked; it is held together by people remembering file names.
In N23D, the material spec is part of the released part revision. The cert and heat number are attached to the lot at receiving, the MES operation records which lot it consumed, and QMS can query every serial built from that heat in one step. It is one native Rust binary, local-first, sign-in with Entra, permanent license.
One platform. Full digital thread. If containing a bad heat starts with searching a shared drive, the thread was never there.
Photos: Johann H. Addicks, GFDL 1.2; Cdang, public domain; via Wikimedia Commons.