If your OT data is bad, then your business data will be worse

I visit a lot of factories. I recently went to one that was not the most modern but it had benefited from substantial automation investment. As is often the case, the factory managers and owners believed their technology conformed to modern best practices.

However, the digitalization capabilities in scenarios like this are often quite basic compared to what is now possible. In that particular factory, no automation processes were visible to cloud apps, nor was the valuable data that could potentially flow from them. That was just one of many lost opportunities. There was plenty of real-time data, but it was all blocked at the shop-floor level. As the data emerged, it was gone, replaced by new data. There was no means of storing, let alone leveraging a data history.

This wasn’t specific to that factory. It’s a situation I see again and again. Until very recently, factories were not typically built to handle real-time data, use case-driven data models and data warehousing, or be scalable and modular for agile operations. On top of that, we usually have challenges knowing precisely what assets are in the factory. Then there’s the lifecycle management of those assets, consolidation and harmonization of data involving multiple protocols, and transferring data from the edge to the cloud. And then there’s cyber security, which underpins just about everything.