Current digitalized manufacturing systems do not yet achieve the goal of smart manufacturing: precise con-trol and agility under unexpected disruptions. Push-Pull Digital Thread is a solution concept to enable contex-tual data and knowledge exchange across operational and functional units in a manufacturing enterprise. The extraction of decision reasoning and functional information can be facilitated by Large Language Models proc-essing information obtained from a decision maker at the point of decision. This concept shows a potential to address critical limitations in previous endeavours for smart manufacturing systems by building a semanti-cally searchable and sharable knowledge base in manufacturing systems and beyond.