Is your industrial data foundation built to optimize digital transformation?

Posted: February 24, 2025

If you haven’t considered this question lately, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Whether you’re a current data user, someone who needs data access, someone paying for data infrastructure, or an administrator trying to satisfy everyone’s data demands, the features and capabilities of your organization’s data foundation are critical to your success. Dealing with massive volumes of data from diverse sources, setting up secure data access for remote users, and integrating data into new AI and analytic tools is a constant challenge. And, if your infrastructure is not designed to do these things efficiently, it’s difficult to achieve the digital transformation your company needs.

Making it all the more challenging: your data foundation is not a blank slate; your company already has data solutions that work, and people are comfortable using. Change management is always a factor. You’ll want to understand the strengths and limitations of the solutions you have, to decide where new investment is needed. You should also have some questions ready for solution vendors who pitch an exciting story about the benefits of a new solution, conveniently overlooking the switching costs for you.

If you’re a long-time user of AVEVA solutions for capital project engineering, planning, and simulation, or for operations control, asset performance monitoring or process optimization, you may not be aware of AVEVA’s long-time leadership in industrial data. In fact, this area represents one-third of our business, and we have customers who have been using our solutions for literally decades. Through acquisition and our own targeted investments, our portfolio now spans the entire lifecycle, from supporting the design and construction of complex assets (like plants, offshore platforms and manufacturing equipment); to monitoring and protecting daily operations; to optimizing outcomes through analysis and modeling, increasingly done with AI.

What does it look like to embrace industrial digital transformation, while simultaneously maintaining and improving data solutions that have been used successfully for years? Here are some points to consider.

Stay committed to the fundamentals of industrial data management

Today, the industrial world accepts that data is a valuable asset. However, it is quite different from transactional data and processing it requires attending to the Four Vs.

• The volume of industrial data is growing exponentially with better communications technology and the increasing use of sensors and cameras. Can your foundation collect, enrich and store the volume of data you want to use?
  
  
• The velocity of industrial data generation is also significant—some measurements are taken every second. Can your platform process streaming data at the rate required, without dropping or corrupting data? Can your solution answer data queries with enough speed to support real-time operations?
  
  
• Industrial data is generated by a wide variety of hardware and software systems built by a diverse group of vendors—some of which were developed decades ago and are still critical to operations. Can your platform capture real-time data directly from the multi-vendor systems in your industrial environment, out-of-the-box and without custom integration?
  
  
• Finally, industrial data is quite variable and capturing it in its original fidelity is critical to accurate analysis. Can your platform store raw industrial data in its original fidelity and display it in context to support real-time decision-making?
  

Not every data platform has been enriched and adapted to provide value in multiple vertical segments. The strongest solutions are those with a sizable installed base that has demanded and given feedback on new features over a long period of time. Managing industrial data in the renewable energy segment, for example, has benefitted from data solutions used outside the traditional oil & gas segment. AVEVA, having experience and success in segments with heavy decentralization and remote assets, has been able to quickly implement appropriate solutions and make renewable energy a vital part of our installed base.

In addition to the Four Vs, there are other critical requirements for industrial data that must be addressed. Examples are providing data reliability, ensuring availability and recovering from interruptions, supplying meaningful context for real-time data streams, and protecting data security, among others. As a committed provider of enterprise-level industrial software, AVEVA will never stop investing in these essentials.

Invest in expanding and improving capabilities in key areas

To drive digital transformation, however, organizations need their data foundation to deliver more than just the fundamentals. They need efficient ways to use data to identify new opportunities for operational efficiency, to make progress toward their sustainability goals, and to feed the AI and analytics tools that can create new business value.

Sometimes referred to as elements of “data maturity,” a new set of requirements is emerging for making full use of industrial data. Adapting your foundation to meet these challenges offers substantial benefits. The questions we get asked most by customers are:

• Scalability. How can we efficiently scale up our capacity to gather and store data along with its context, and let users ask more complex questions about that data? And, related to this: How can we easily and quickly aggregate data from similar assets distributed around the globe, for deeper understanding?
  
  
• Accessibility. How can we offer secure, real-time data access to new users in any location? How can we give the same access to trusted partners outside our organization’s firewall?
  
  
• User empowerment: We spend a lot of time training and supporting users, and it’s becoming hard to hire qualified staff. How can we help new employees understand the data and develop insight as efficiently as more experienced domain experts? And, related to this: How can we help data users without programming skills get the answers they’re looking for quickly, without the need for IT support?
  
  
• Reusability: Planning for reusability is key to keeping costs low and accelerating time to value in new use cases. We’re also interested in automating analyses where possible to give data users more time to consider the right response. How can we make the custom calculations and data models we’ve already created available to others in our organization as a starting point?
  
  
• Agility: This area really encompasses the others. As our business grows and our data needs change: How can we ensure our industrial data foundation is capable of adapting and serving new use cases? How can we avoid becoming locked into infrastructure that limits our ability to use data effectively?

Evaluating your industrial data foundation against these questions could be the key to unlocking significant new value for your business. AVEVA account representatives are looking forward to discussing your organization’s specific needs.

For additional information on best practices for creating an industrial data foundation, register to watch our recent webinar, “Digital transformation through smart use of industrial data​.”