Data Collection In Industrial IT

Data is becoming more and more essential to support decisions in the industry. Performant companies are making decisions based on facts (numbers, KPIs) and no more on feelings.

There are different tools in the industrial IT market for data collection in production to improve the decisions of operators, engineers, and managers.

ERP was the first system to bring data management to support financial and planning decisions. MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) is deployed to collect data to support activities in production, product tracking, asset health, performance monitoring, quality, management - SPC, and traceability.

Process historian is another tool used to collect process/production data to support decisions and analysis by providing access to historical data for analysis and real-time data for life decisions.

IoT (Internet of Things) and Cloud solutions (Cloud hosted databases) have recently entered the industrial space to deliver data from connected devices in situations where automation systems are not present or too old to provide accurate data.

Those tools provide different services (a process historian is a pure monitoring solution whereas an MES can also execute production requests, meaning impacting the process) and use other technologies, so an efficient solution for a plant would combine a set of tools,…