Data Foundations
Service Offerings
Operations Technology (OT) Data Liberation
BENEFITS
An operations technology data liberation initiative can have significant benefits and outcomes for industry. These include:
-
Better visibility and transparency: By integrating and consolidating data from disparate systems, manufacturing companies can gain a comprehensive view of their operations, enabling them to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and other issues that may be hindering their performance.
-
Better decision-making: By making data accessible and actionable, you can make more informed decisions that are based on real-time data and insights, rather than intuition or guesswork.
-
Increased efficiency and productivity: By streamlining operations and identifying areas for improvement, manufacturing companies can reduce downtime, improve throughput, and boost productivity.
-
Enhanced quality control: By monitoring and analyzing data from production processes, manufacturing companies can detect and address quality issues before they become larger problems, reducing waste and improving quality and safety of execution.
​
CHALLENGES
While the benefits of performing these initiatives are many, there are often challenges that need to be overcome. These can include:
-
A need to access variable OT source systems by plant / facility, each in varying levels of upkeep & accessibility
-
A need to access source systems without disrupting plant operations / production, and without jeopardizing plant-level reporting activities
-
The OT data liberation project can identify problems & errors in existing OT data sets & systems that may need to be remedied before the data liberation project can be delivered
-
Cyber-security best practices must be followed to ensure that overall risk is kept manageable and that potential risks don't outweigh benefits
-
Ensuring that plant OT/IT staff are provided tools & training for maintaining the delivered data integration solutions, analytics & reports
-
Ensuring that the delivered solution can perform from a cost / benefit perspective and that cost forecasting can be accurately performed to understand full lifecycle costs of the delivered solution
Activities & Deliverables
Our execution framework for OT Data Liberation can include some or all of these activities & deliverables:
-
Identifying the various data sources within the organization that must be tapped in to deliver the data liberation use case and developing a plan to integrate and consolidate them into a single, unified data platform.
-
Designing the data integration solution that will access the required OT systems (typically in the L2/L3 network) & forward data to the required endpoints for analytics/visualization / reporting
-
​Identifying the exact tags, batch identifiers, production records, alarms & events and/or maintenance events that need to be mapped in order to deliver your use case & helping you come up with an overall data model.
-
Data cleansing and validation: This involves ensuring that the data is accurate and complete by removing duplicates, inconsistencies, and errors. We understand the limitations & gotchas around industrial time-series data deeply and can help you craft solutions that will avoid common pitfalls that can cripple IT-centric solutions
-
Data analytics and reporting: We can lead, or assist your internal team, in developing tools and processes for analyzing and visualizing the data, allowing operations & engineering users to gain insights and make informed decisions.
-
Training and support: Ensure users and stakeholders can effectively use the new data platform and tools.
-
Continuous improvement: Monitoring and analyzing the performance of the data platform and making ongoing improvements to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of the organization.
