Putting it in Context
"With the proliferation of devices out there bringing us information, we now have the ability to capture more data than ever before at the manufacturing level," says Mike Caliel, president and CEO of global technology giant, Invensys.
"What is critical from there is the ability to contextualize and act on that information in a way that will drive safety and drive reliabil
ity in the manufacturing and business processes," he explains.
Invensys Vice President Peter Martin calls this movement the "holy grail" of analytics.
To him, the way we handle data in the manufacturing world should be no different than the way we use it on our smartphones every day.
"You start up Google maps on your phone and it immediately knows where you are. You click a box and it can show you exactly the traffic from here to the airport," he explains. "Hungry? It can pull up restaurants along the way that serve the food you like. It'll show you the menu, find you an open table."
The data behind that functionality -- the ability for the system to pull together your location, preferences, and real time environmental information into a sensible, user-friendly interface -- is just absolutely mind boggling, he says. But it is so commonplace that we don't even think about it anymore.
"Take that back to manufacturing and we have the same situation," he says. "All of that information is available to us, but instead of looking for restaurants and traffic, you're looking for best batch, optimal production run variability, without a lot of custom code or fussing about."
A good system today, he says, "has to show me what's out there, show me the information available, what it means, how to react to it and then help me predict what's coming next," he says. "That's where we're going in the industry."
And that is exactly the vision Schmidt is puzzling out at Dell as he translates the long-standing and battle-worn PC staple into a new analytics-driven powerhouse.
