Cheap and Easy Data Collection/Reporting
Inspector Gadget was impractical. You can’t have at the ready every conceivable device you might need for any possible (or even plausible) situation. And that’s before we get into the size of the contraptions that he seemingly pulled out of his chest.
Batman was much more functional, although hardly any less fanciful. But he had in his utility belt, a number of tools that were extremely useful and effective for the situations he was most likely to find himself in.
At Avanceon, we have been working on our manufacturing insight utility belt and our Christian Bale face. We see so much manufacturing data running around. Much of it uncollected or neglected, often misunderstood and under-utilized, and we yearn to herd, order and harness that potential into actionable information. And being billionaire playboys and girls, we are looking to tackle data of every social stratification and not just that of the wealthy and elite manufacturers.
In other parts of the computing landscape, we have seen a similar transition with the rise of things like Microsoft’s 365 offering. Back in the day, if you wanted your organization to utilize the Microsoft stack, you had to buy and load copies of all of the software on individual’s machines, as well as, setup and maintain servers to house company-wide solutions (e.g. email, SharePoint, Project, etc.) Not to mention, configure and maintain all of the interoperability between Microsoft solutions as well as all of the client and server interconnections. There was a large up-front cost for both software licensing and server/hardware infrastructure. And, a significant support staff was required to proliferate and maintain these systems. Today Microsoft offers these tools on a monthly, per-user basis where they handle all of the back-end maintenance, update and interconnection. As a result, a small startup of just a couple of people has access to all of the same tools and systems a large corporation has at a price point that is accessible to them.
In our ever-expanding world of IIoT, cloud-based solutions and subscription services, we are getting exceedingly close to realizing our ultimate dataBat(wo)man self. Just recently, I was at a new customer doing a workshop on the Wonderware InSight offering. This offering allows one to push data into a central repository that can then be analyzed, dashboarded, integrated- you name it, to allow for better understanding of operations in real-time. Being a subscription-based cloud offering, the solution requires very little in terms of up-front capital or installation effort. It also serves as the backbone for a MES offering that provides many of the basic MES functions in a simple and cost-effective package.
This represents one of the key tools in our dataBat(wo)man utility belt. We are tuning and polishing up some others and are ready to strike fear into the hearts of data,that to this point, has just been allowed to wander around and show up if and when it wanted. Instead, we will capture and wrestle that data with many KAPLOWs and ZOWEEs until it has become useful information. So, if you need us, just call or email; that whole bat-signal thing is very impractical.
Image Source: Freepik