Data Plumbing with OPC UA

I’ve long considered our company to be data plumbers. It’s a silly analogy, but we are just like the raw plumbing in a house. We do the infrastructure so that someone else can put in the shower with the nineteen shower heads, the beautiful kitchen faucet or the fountain in the backyard. None of that is possible unless water moves from the water main to where it’s needed in the house.

We do that with data. We provide access to valuable insights that would otherwise be hidden in devices on the factory floor. Fortunately for us, over the past few decades, data has become more valuable than gold. Nothing in the modern era is more coveted. Data created the first trillion-dollar companies. Massively successful companies like Tesla, Polaris, Haribo, Dow Chemical, Brady, FANUC and others are getting unfathomably rich using our kind of solutions.

Data from the factory floor on its own isn’t very useful. That’s such an important point that I am going to repeat it: Data from the factory floor on its own isn’t very useful. For example, reading the input voltage on a motor over EtherNet/IP or PROFINET isn’t terribly valuable until it is massaged, combined with other data, and transferred somewhere where it can be used.

It becomes valuable when it is refined into information. As information, it can be visualized to determine when a part is wearing out, what components of a product are defective, where there are bottlenecks in a production process and much more. The efficiency gains from these kinds of insights increases profit margins, meaning more factories are built, more people are employed, and more consumers are satisfied. And that leads to even more data being gathered. This cycle can scale a business from perhaps $10m to a $100m enterprise and beyond.

Many small businesses stagnate because they cannot get this momentum going. They have data on their factory floor, and they may even have access to it, but they don’t know how to make sense of it. If that’s you, then you need to know about OPC UA. It’s your key to using that data. UA is the next generation of OPC technology – a more secure, open, flexible and reliable mechanism for moving information between enterprise systems and the kinds of controls, monitoring devices and sensors that interact with real-world data.

If you’re one of those automation engineers who’ve been ignoring OPC UA and the whole IoT and Cloud business, it’s time to get serious about it. Yes, it hasn’t been our bread and butter in the past, but the times, they are a-changing. Seeing pieces drop out of a mold, packages flying down a conveyor line or bottles and cans being precisely filled is now only part of our job. Getting the data we need to operate more productively and efficiently is the new job, and leveraging the OPC UA architectures is a tool you’ll need in the future!