Industrial automation has dramatically streamlined operations, increased efficiency, and cut costs. Through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), vast amounts of data relevant to all levels of business are becoming available in real time. Yet without a holistic strategy that unifies and contextualizes such volumes of data, it can be challenging to extract relevant insight and coordinate rapid action. An edge to enterprise approach to industrial data management provides the needed framework for unified command and control at all levels of an organization.
Digitally mature companies use an edge-to-enterprise approach to unify data and tools throughout all levels of their organization – unifying operational live feeds of asset conditions and processes (edge) with management of personnel and/or financial and business goals (enterprise) information. A unified, organized, contextualized approach to industrial data management and control provides teams with new levels of clarity and efficiency to make faster, more informed decisions and drive improved productivity and increased revenue.
Leading industries are embracing digital transformation throughout their industrial processes and enterprisewide systems to create tight, secure connections between subsystems at each layer of their business. Achieving successful transformation is not a straightforward process. Unifying diverse data streams such as alarms, power management, maintenance schedules, work schedules, production data, financing data, revenue, expenses, inventory information silos, supply chain, engineering information, and more takes time and domain expertise. Without a comprehensive solution for extracting relevant information in an organized manner, the sheer magnitude of uncontextualized data becomes an obstacle, making it difficult to organize teams to make the kind of agile decisions needed to maintain productivity, especially in dynamic circumstances.
Edge computing provides logic at the source, making machine data available in real time. HMI/SCADA software gives operators and managers visualization and control of operations on or off premise, while cloud and on-prem historians provide a means to unify and analyze multiple data streams at once. An operations management interface (OMI) that provides a flexible and extensible toolset and is completely hardware and software agnostic can combine these disparate data streams together with enterprise level data such as market conditions and business KPIs to provide a rich, concise and actionable set of insights that is contextualized for people at all levels of an organization, to enable them to make better decisions.
Edge-to-enterprise is an operational paradigm that transforms industrial and enterprise operations by tightly integrating business systems from top to bottom. Traditional businesses operate in different layers, and the functional data collected is not always available between layers at the right time or in the right context. For example, legacy HMI and SCADA systems cannot always provide volume data in the context needed for making longer term decisions. Outdated systems require operators to sift through large chunks of siloed data and manually aggregate and perform calculations to extract relevant information. Without the ability to holistically analyze trends between systems and sites in real-time, it becomes difficult to proactively identify and address potential issues. Plant managers are often forced into a reactive mode, unable to properly plan or make strategic decisions that could benefit the longer term health and productivity of their operations. A comprehensive digital approach that spans beyond edge device management and HMI/SCADA can help solve this challenge and support more agile operations.
A unified approach to system design makes it possible for teams to leverage data collected at all operational levels into a rich resource of concise, actionable information, contextualized for people’s different roles within an organization. Key performance indicators and data sets from all parts of an organisation can be tracked in real-time and made available in easy-toaccess dashboards that dynamically serve up relevant data based on user role regardless of the location or device they are using. Whether the user is an engineer managing process operations at a plant, or a business leader looking for opportunities for increased efficiency and growth, it is critical to have a technology partner that incorporates the breadth of tools and services needed to support the entire organization.
Establishing a foundation for integrating realtime data across an enterprise can drive a wider digital transformation throughout your industrial operations, including engineering, planning, scheduling optimization, and asset performance management. Iterative development, a templatized approach, and data-driven system development are a critical foundation for the development and deployment of an edge-to-enterprise system that drives value across the entire asset and operations lifecycle. Advances in computing and industrial automation technology are increasingly providing industrial companies with the opportunity to collect large amounts of real-time data and transform it into actionable insights that enable the business to operate much more efficiently and productively. Broad, flexible solutions are needed for edge-to-enterprise continuity:
- Data-and hardware-agnostic system framework
- Flexibility and secure network capability to scale across assets, sites and geographies
- Expert industry knowledge to design your systems and processes to meet your exact requirements
- Agile framework to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time
- Scale to connect every layer of the organization into an efficient, collaborative, and productive environment.
Source: AVEVA
