Today, we live surrounded by immense amounts of data that may not make any sense in the first place. However, if we manage to decipher and sort them, they are a highly valuable source of information. This is why having unified and structured data will provide any company with an infinitely more complete and accurate picture of its status and operation. Transforming data into knowledge brings value to the company, it is already the present.
Currently, the vast majority of databases and systems are isolated and not interoperable. There is a great technological incapacity to execute a transparent data standardisation for the company, and this makes the maintenance of the systems quite complex and expensive. This affects production, so that different functions operate in silos with various partners, resulting in unplanned delays, reduced operational efficiency and key parts (workers/machinery) that are disconnected throughout the production life cycle.
Now, for the first time, there is adequate technological capacity to solve a problem of global scale.
What is structured data?
Structured data are clearly defined data whose pattern makes them easy to search and find and are accessible through relational databases.
Structured data allows you to search eminently both human-generated queries and queries with algorithms, such as alphabetic or numeric, currency or date.
Their analysis is much more viable than that of unstructured data and therefore has much more value for business intelligence.
What is unified data?
Unified data is data that brings together disparate data sources to present a single view of an enterprise’s data. The term most often refers to a combination of both local and cloud-based data that can be virtualised through a unified layer.
Non-unified data is the opposite. They make it difficult to correlate with each other, do not speak the same language, and therefore lose a lot of value and time in comparing, analysing and sharing it with other departments or applications in the enterprise. With unified data, a company can pursue key objectives such as those related to standarisation, efficiency, security and transparency.
Why is this data indispensable?
The ecosystem of fragmented data that can be found today in different companies and sectors has numerous negative effects on technological innovation and scientific research. The lack of unified data is harming companies, consumers and our planet. Data brings knowledge and value to organisations and companies.
The emergence of blockchain technology over the last decade has opened up new possibilities in the areas of data management and automated execution processes.
Its benefits are many, and we want to tell you about them.
Unified data benefits
Data that can be easily processed and cross-referenced for correlative trends is a valuable resource with significant advantages. The best benefits of unified and structured data are:
- The opportunity to easily incorporate data sets collected by other companies. The possibility of being able to benchmark, a much more comprehensive analysis of the context and more informed decisions.
- More sophisticated algorithms and greater data consistency. Better mapping of data correlations allows companies to produce more robust functionality of their products and better results.
- Reduced costs in the development of data acquisition. There is no need for hyper-complex operations or engineers available to reformat acquired data sets Unified data platforms simplify data acquisition, unification and structuring.
- Better organizational alignment. The more all stakeholders can see what’s going on across the organisation and consume and analyse the transparent data, the more they will feel part of the project and the more they will be involved. Trust makes it possible to create and execute consultations quickly and become more effective.
- Increased productive performance. Data warehouses are built specifically for analysis and retrieval rather than for individual record keeping, and this results in faster and more efficient analysis.
- Achieve scalability. Structured and unified data is infinitely more useful and accessible, and therefore databases are able to remain efficient when the business demands more resources.
How Nexus Integra helps you unify data
Nexus Integra, the integrated operations platform allows to unify and structure the data captured from different facilities, equipment, systems, databases and tools from different manufacturers in a single point to interoperate, compare, analyse, visualise and track globally in a quick and easy way. All this is possible due to its powerful three-layer structure:
- Nexus Connect receive large amounts of data generated by the control and monitoring elements (sensors, PLC, SCADA) and databases, which are dispersed and non-standardised, to unify and store them in the easiest possible way, so that they can later be visualised and exploited. Helping companies to integrate and acquire also unstructured data.
- Nexus Core is the database engine and is in charge of standardising and unifying all data captured by the connectors. Its function is to translate all these languages into one, creating a great ocean of data that companies can exploit with the help of the third layer.
- Nexus Apps offers the necessary tools in a global environment of operations to manage and display data in a safe and simple way, facilitating the maximum exploitation of data. It integrates vertical applications developed on Nexus Core and also completely external such as ERP, MES, SAP, CMMS and Machine Learning, through a public Rest API.