← Back to Resources

Connecting Data Sources to create a comprehensive PI Asset Framework

Currently, most OT data systems have their own hierarchical structure on how they organize data. For instance, your organization may maintain separate hierarchies for your work management system, engineering specifications, production deferrals, process historians, and failure databases, just to name a few. This classification is adequate when your data is contained within a single system but fails when data spans multiple systems and organizations.

What if all this data could be unified and harmonized in an asset-centric common data model that provides a consistent organizational structure? What if your PI Asset Framework was synced to your SAP Asset Registry?

The case for an integrated view

The benefits of a comprehensive asset-centric model are many: we can anticipate health, safety, and environment events, we can sweat our assets longer, and we can optimize a range of operational requirements. This is a critical need to get the most out of the PI Asset Framework.

An asset-centric, common data model has a shared ontology across several systems to create a 360° view of your assets. Using information from designs and tying that to the PI System data, you can enforce a new level of asset integrity policies to ensure you are operating within your defined safety limits.

Tying your PI data to your work and asset management system provides you insights into activities that directly impact your operational performance. With the two integrated, users can filter different views of the same data to meet different organizational demands and use cases.

By joining other data sources to the data-rich PI system, Element AssetHub™ provides enhanced ROI. To do this, users need to have a live connection between these other systems and PI Asset Framework, to ensure any change is automatically available.

The solution: Announcing Asset Connect

With so many obvious benefits, why do organizations balk at developing a single asset-centric data model? The answer is simple: the challenge of integration. Integrating different systems is extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. More importantly, until now, there weren’t enough adequate tools to meet the needs of industrial data.

Starting today, Element is announcing the general availability of Asset Connect, a module bundled with Element AssetHub. Asset Connect provides users with the capability to easily connect to their most important IT and OT systems.

What is Asset Connect?

Asset Connect is an integration platform that connects the enterprise asset model management capabilities of AssetHub to producing systems of record.

As an integration platform, building integrations to static text files, spreadsheets, XML files, custom SQL databases, or even IT/OT systems of record takes minutes or hours, not months or years.

Along with Asset Sync, Asset Connect keeps a persistent connection to any of these producing systems. Whether the system is on-premise or in the cloud, agents built using Asset Connect sit alongside the source system and immediately stream the metadata about the data source to AssetHub.

This ensures that your Asset Framework is automatically maintained, and enterprise-grade as it gets its structural hierarchies defined by sources of truth like SAP, Maximo, Hexagon, Inteletrac, and others.

Get more information

Looking for more details on how Asset Connect works? Or, what you can now connect to AssetHub?

Get answers to all this and more from our Connectivity Datasheet.