Everyone is talking about Digital Transformation, Industrial Analytics, IoT, and Industry 4.0. Much of the discussion advocates a crawl, walk, run approach by taking on the low hanging fruit of smaller, limited use cases using Proof of Concepts (POCs). This typically requires a lot of data wrangling to be completed before the use case can even be executed. More often than not, these data wrangling activities enable just one use case. So when things change operationally, applications fail and they lack the scalability to be deployed enterprise-wide.

If you find yourself manually mapping data, building specialized integrations, or manipulating 40,000 row X 26,000 column spreadsheets then you need to consider whether the solution will scale across your organization and provide you with the runway that supports you as your operations and use cases change over time.

Read More

My first article after joining Element was regarding my experience in Europe at OSIsoft PI World and Honeywell conferences in ‘A tale of two cities’. Subsequently, I've considered Element's role in digital transformation, and how agility is pivotal in this fast-paced ecosystem.

It’s been 6 months since I joined Element, and times are a-changing. This February I attended the ARC Advisory Group Conference in Orlando, and one keynote talk that particularly struck me was Larry Megan, Director at Praxair Digital, who began his keynote, “Building DigitalDNA@Scale,” by stating that it can be hard to sort out the hype from the reality. “You hear about the promise, but we all have technology and organizational debt.” He went on to say “It’s important to know your target. Don’t get hung up on the definitions, just what you need to accomplish.” In Praxair’s case, this included real-time visibility, granularity, reduced friction, and ecosystem connectivity. “It’s not about being more digital, but about changing how work gets done,” he said.

Andy provided a great overview about why industrial companies need a 360° view of their assets, why an asset-oriented Data Hub is needed to create that, and what are the requirements that Data Hub must fulfill in order to meet the needs of asset-intensive industries. If you haven’t read it, and are struggling to enable your engineers and operators to become citizen data scientists, I highly recommend you give it a read. You’ll understand why prior analytics strategies just aren’t working.

With that background, Element’s AssetHub is the solution that fulfills this gap. Here’s a quick primer on Element AssetHub:

What is Element’s AssetHub?

AssetHub allows you to build an enterprise data model of your assets, using your existing systems to create a comprehensive view of your instrumentation, equipment and processes. It does this by connecting to real-time, design, and other operationally relevant systems. It then constructs a comprehensive data representation of your assets that we call Asset Twins.

Read More

Having spent the most of my career serving industrial clients’ Information Technology needs, I found the week I spent at the 23^rd ARC Industry Forum very interesting indeed. The conference was entitled “Driving Digital Transformation in Industry & Cities.” The conference was chock-full of presentations on industrial use cases & their potential value to the enterprise. I spoke with many attendees and there is an excitement I’ve not seen in a while, that the industry is producing truly digital outcomes that deliver on the promise of Industrial Digital Transformation.

On the IT side of the business you don’t hear “Digital Transformation” as frequently. It’s a given that the information domains supported by IT – Financial, Supply Chain, People & Customers - are already digital. Large Industrials have delivered on a technology stack to “master” these domains and as a result – for the most part – this data is widely used throughout the enterprise and is easily delivered via highly reliable, secure, scalable & trusted enterprise systems. IT analytics, whether analyzing marketing campaign effectiveness or product revenue trends, is performed with ease by a cadre of data scientists and analysts.

Read More

ARC’s Industry Forum is an annual pilgrimage for operations leaders in global industrial companies and their technology vendors who want to share best practices, stay on top of emerging trends, and catch up with old friends. 950 of us gathered last week in Orlando, FL to address “Digital Transformation,” and the need for asset-intensive industries seeking to adopt modern technologies like cloud computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are increasingly embedded in other industries like finance and healthcare.

This was the perfect venue for us to announce the release of Element AssetHub because industrial digital transformation depends on data, a lot of data, and AssetHub is the world’s first data hub built to address the unique challenges of asset data – all IT/OT data associated with industrial equipment and operations.

Read More