Information Integration

Nowadays, companies are absorbed in a highly competitive environment where strategic and business decisions make a big difference in the race towards permanence and business success.

We could say that, the efficient management that leads us to this success, is based mainly on decision-making, being the use of knowledge, data and available information its cornerstones.

At the peak of Big data technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT), we are exposed to more and more information from multiple data sources. Therefore, it is necessary to integrate the information that brings all these origins together in a single platform.

Data integration is a process that allows you to combine heterogeneous data from a multitude of different sources in a single application. This process makes easier to have different types of data for personal use available for the user, and their integration in business processes or functions, which positively affects the productivity levels of the worker.

The importance of data integration

It could be said that a good integration of information leads us, entrepreneurially, towards the word “savings”. Often, business analysts spend a lot of time collecting, filtering and calculating the huge amounts of data that goes into the companies every day.

Giving to these analysts a direct and orderly access to this information reduces considerably the time spent in the work of these study, which often triggers the discovery of new correlations between data from different sources that allow decision-making based on indicators that previously had never been contemplated.

Although it is important to make a good integration of a corporation data, often this is not enough, since obtaining and analyzing the information from this gross data seem like a very complicated task if that do not appear in the right way to the user.

A correct treatment or processing is essential at the time of obtaining benefit from the integration phase. It is essential to support gross data with all kinds of charts, dashboards, synoptics and key performance indicators that allow the user to maximize this exposition of the information and extract as many conclusions as possible, making easier to take decisions.

IDbox as centralizer of SCADAs data

It is very common in industrial environments to have multiple and heterogeneous sources of information, a result of both the different PLCs and sensors that we find in the plant and the different proprietary software provided by the manufacturer to access their data. It is, therefore, a recurring problem that the information in these environments is fragmented, distributed and only accessible to a small part of the business.

This problem of accessing distributed information does not only occur with PLCs and sensors. We often come across scenarios in which the difficulty of accessing data lies in the problem of accessing the information found in the different SCADAs of a company.

These SCADA softwares tend to be not very flexible when connecting to new data sources, so it is quite common that, either in a single plant or distributed throughout various parts of the geography, companies end up with a large number of these platforms with which to intervene in your business processes.

This situation, added to the fact that many of these softwares have limited storage capacities, makes access to the information very difficult, being, in general terms, only accessible to the users of the control center in charge of managing each one these SCADAs.

Thanks to the use of IDbox as a centralizer of SCADA data, these companies have a single platform that normalizes and consolidates all this data, allowing any user with the necessary privileges to access it.