Industrial businesses today grapple with the complexity of managing vast and varied data streams generated from their operations.
According to Statista, the volume of data generated, consumed, copied, and stored is projected to reach more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. In 2020, the total amount of data generated and consumed was 64.2 zettabytes.
The challenge, however, lies not only in the sheer volume of data but also in its dispersal across different systems and formats. This fragmentation hinders stakeholders, including operations managers, IT teams, and executives, from achieving the unified, comprehensive view they need to make informed, strategic decisions that align production requirements with digital transformation objectives.
The fragmentation challenge
Fragmented data across different systems creates silos, obstructing operations managers, IT teams, and executives from aligning digital transformation objectives with production needs. This lack of cohesion prevents organisations from fully leveraging their data to drive productivity, resilience, and innovation.
To tackle this, industrial businesses need integrated data fabric solutions that offer a cohesive and unified access to data, regardless of its source or location. This approach breaks down silos and facilitates seamless data flow, thus fostering better collaboration and more accurate decision-making.
Integrated systems can effortlessly incorporate new data sources and applications, allowing organisations to scale their data landscape continuously, capturing value from data that would otherwise be stranded. This eliminates the maintenance of multiple data flows, enabling a robust data foundation for scalable operations across various sites.
Reaping the rewards
A data fabric approach like the one outlined above brings many benefits to businesses as they implement digital transformation strategies. From the outset, organisations can streamline processes, reduce costs, and accelerate the deployment of digital applications. This fosters quick adaptation and innovation, supporting the seamless scaling of digital initiatives globally and ensuring consistent data management at the edge, on-premise, or in the cloud.
By adopting comprehensive industrial data infrastructure solutions, organisations can optimise productivity, enhance operational resilience, and drive continuous innovation. Key to this is the ability to connect people, machinery, plants, logistics, and applications for better communication and collaboration.
The approach relies on real-time, scalable solutions capable of integrating historian data without disrupting mission-critical production systems. Such solutions must stream data securely, contextualising and transforming it for use across all organisational levels, plant maintenance to the executive suite, and ensuring decision-makers have access to actionable information anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
If they get their strategy right, businesses are likely to see escalating rewards over time. Effective data management begins with robust data collection from various sources, including sensors, equipment, and production processes. But that is just the start of it. Solutions that collect, merge, store, and retrieve large volumes of data then unlock new use cases and new business opportunities.
Understanding assets is crucial for optimising performance, and a centralised data management system can create asset models that provide insights into health, utilisation, and maintenance requirements. Efficient data archiving ensures historical data availability for compliance, troubleshooting, and predictive analytics. Yet, transforming raw data into actionable insights is where true value lies for most industrial organisations, with advanced analytics facilitating predictive maintenance and anomaly detection, empowering stakeholders to make informed decisions.
Lessons for the future
In an era where data is paramount, effective management and integration of industrial data are critical. An Industrial data fabric offers a pathway to operational excellence, enabling businesses to optimise productivity, resilience, and innovation. By adopting this unified approach, industrial organisations can future-proof their operations, ensuring they remain competitive in a rapidly-evolving digital landscape.
By focusing on these core aspects, industrial organisations can unlock the hidden value within their data, paving the way for a future where data-driven strategies lead to sustained growth and innovation. In today’s competitive landscape, the ability to harness and utilise data effectively is not just an advantage—it’s a necessity for survival and success.
About the Author
Dwaine Plauche is Product Marketing at AspenTech DataWorks. AspenTech is a global software leader helping industries at the forefront of the world’s dual challenge meet the increasing demand for resources from a rapidly growing population in a profitable and sustainable manner. AspenTech solutions address complex environments where it is critical to optimize the asset design, operation and maintenance lifecycle. Through our unique combination of deep domain expertise and innovation, customers in asset-intensive industries can run their assets safer, greener, longer and faster to improve their operational excellence. To learn more, visit AspenTech.com.
