Step 1: Model →
Flow was built from the ground up to make it easy for you to control your data and engineering governance, bring your varied data sources together, and ensure that the information you need is reliably transformed and distributed.
Avoiding custom scripting and code means you can scale.
Avoid vendor lock and ensure your data can flow freely.
Establish central data and engineering governance.
"We unified our data sources, our data treatments, and our data experts. Then we sent context rich information to our data warehouse."
Model
An information model defines the key data an organization focuses on and establishes governance for how that data is created, managed, and used.
The model contains the business rules for how data is transformed into useful information and then distributed.
Follow standards like ISA-95 or use your own structure. The model is yours to define.
Identify process and calendar events, and determine how KPI measures are aggregated.
Using a template-first approach ensures you can easily scale and manage your solution.
Connect
Make it possible for your engineers and managers to work with data from across many systems in one centralized location. Every Flow system includes data connectors so you can easily connect to historians, SQL databases, OPC servers, MQTT brokers, cloud solutions, and more.
Cloud applications and databases can connect too!
Unite your manufacturing systems in one view.
Connect to the latest and greatest open source databases.
Transform
Flow Software includes a suite of powerful engines designed to execute the business rules established in the Information Model, ensuring that data processing is consistent, efficient, and aligned with organizational goals. This integration allows for precise data management and effective decision-making.
Purpose built to address the unique challenges of manufacturing.
When underlying data changes, all calcs and their dependents automatically rerun.
No values are ever discarded, allowing a full version history of any previous records.
Visualize
Choose to visualize your data using Flow's included web based dashboards or connect your existing dashboard application to Flow's data feed or API. The choice is yours.
Either way, your decision makers will have information readily available that they can trust when it matters most.
Add comments to any data and it will be annotated to the original data point.
There is never a licensing restriction on the number of users or dashboards.
Investigate any data point, even the expressions and data behind the values.
Bridge
What really sets Flow apart is the ability, and willingness, to freely publish every piece of information we create out to other systems and data warehouses. Nothing you do in Flow is held captive, and everything is designed to be securely shared.
A single endpoint to query normalized data from many systems.
Push datasets on a calendar period interval like hourly, daily, weekly, etc.
Use specific events to trigger the publication of information or notify your team.
Flow believes in a Unified Analytics Framework, but you might have read about a Manufacturing Data Hub as well. What is it? It's an architecture that is designed to take your Unified Namespace (UNS) and expand the collection and sharing of real time data to include calculated KPIs and access to historic databases.
Imagine what you could do if you had a scalable platform built specifically to transform OT and IoT data streams into analytics-ready information. A way to connect all of your data producers and consumers, already plugged into your UNS, to all of the raw historical data living in other databases. With Flow in your architecture, this is possible today.
The need to manage your information is not new. In fact, you've probably been trying to do it a number of ways for a long time, possibly without knowing you were creating a process or strategy.