The Great Data Integration Schlep - by Sarah Constantin

This is a little rant I like to give, because it’s something I learned on the job that I’ve never seen written up explicitly. There are a bunch of buzzwords floating around regarding computer technology in an industrial or manufacturing context: “digital transformation”, “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, “Industrial Internet of Things”. What do those things really mean? Do they mean anything at all? The answer is yes, and what they mean is the process of putting all of a company’s data on computers so it can be analyzed. This is the prerequisite to any kind of “AI” or even basic statistical analysis of that data; before you can start applying your fancy algorithms, you need to get that data in one place, in a tabular format. In a manufacturing context, a lot of important data is not on computers. Some data is not digitized at all, but literally on paper: lab notebooks, QA reports, work orders, etc. Other data is is “barely digitized”, in the form of scanned PDFs of those documents. F

This is a little rant I like to give, because it’s something I learned on the job that I’ve never seen written up explicitly. There are a bunch of buzzwords floating around regarding computer technology in an industrial or manufacturing context: “digital transformation”, “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, “Industrial Internet of Things”. What do those things really mean? Do they mean anything at all? The answer is yes, and what they mean is the process of putting all of a company’s data on computers so it can be analyzed. This is the prerequisite to any kind of “AI” or even basic statistical