Bill is leaving Acme Manufacturing Corporation

Time to read: 4 minutes

Posted by Omar Ahmed

Bill is leaving Acme Manufacturing Corporation. And when Bill leaves, he will take with him a tremendous amount of the tribal knowledge that he accumulated over the last 10 years at Acme. Bill has spent the last decade building out all of the industrial data systems and all of the individual connections between these disparate systems. Bill is the only person in the entire facility who has knowledge of the custom connections and interdependencies between OT and IT systems. With Bill leaving, the team at Acme is challenged with picking up the pieces and trying to gather up all of Bill’s tribal knowledge in order to maintain connectivity and prevent system downtime.  The OT and IT teams must go deep into the custom code to try to understand and replicate what Bill has done. This is a challenging and cumbersome task, especially when troubleshooting broken integrations.

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Situations like this are not limited to Acme. Across the United States, manufacturing companies are relying on home grown solutions that have been continuously patched up over the course of years (if not decades) by seasoned and established workers. It is extremely challenging for someone new to the company to understand the complexities of these systems. However, the biggest challenge is tribal knowledge and how to extract that knowledge from people like Bill. Industry Week estimates that about 25% of the 12 million manufacturing employees living in the United States are over 55. They also note that most knowledge about products and processes is not written down but rather siloed in workers’ heads. There are many facets to this challenge, but one major aspect is that this tribal knowledge can come in the form of technical deployments and custom coding. Any attempt to alter these system connections without the proper knowledge can result in critical errors impacting an entire organization.
 
The team at HighByte recognized that with the proliferation of manufacturing systems, tribal knowledge attrition, and antiquated ways of connecting the data between disparate systems, there needed to be a better way. HighByte Intelligence Hub is a tool to minimize the risk, time, and complexity of connecting and exchanging industrial data in a codeless environment. The hub eliminates the need to create custom connections between individual systems and prepare data multiple times for consuming applications.
 
HighByte Intelligence Hub allows users to create data models for an entire manufacturing architecture in one place for every system within your organization. Being able to create a Unified Namespace of informational industrial data models prevents users from writing individual data models and data structures for each end application. Therefore, if Bill leaves the plant, Acme has a better structure to continue to optimize processes and production without interruption. If you are interested in learning more about the HighByte Intelligence Hub, please check out this short video or schedule a meeting with me.