Purpose-Built Analytics for
Manufacturing and Industry

Transform historic and real time data into
calculated tags, KPIs, and events—at scale

Flow makes it easy to combine and analyze siloed data with different sources and formats... time series, transactional, real time, and manually entered.

No code and no scripting required, if you can use Excel, you can use Flow.

"It turns tons of data into analytics-ready information"

Your Success is Dependent on Having the Right Tools

These three tools are necessities for turning manufacturing data into shared information. Each is included with every Flow license and is the secret to building analytics architectures that actually scale.

1. A Templatized Data Model

Flow is ideal for building an information model of metrics to improve production efficiency, increase quality, drive maintenance decisions, measure utility or material consumption, understand downtime, and monitor adherence to production plans. Templatized Flow models are centrally managed, honoring enterprise-established business rules and providing governance, while remaining flexible. Operations deploy template instances and add their own site-specific context. Since Flow information models are not hard coded to specific data sources, each deployed instance is adaptable to the site’s environment, regardless of the system architecture.

2. A Robust Calculation Engine

Flow’s data engine excels at KPI calculations and was built specifically to address the challenges found within manufacturing environments. Connect operational databases and servers to Flow and the engine is ready to join data points from different systems and databases, cleanse your data, and slice it into context rich KPIs. Flow handles the rerunning of calculations, versions results, and allows for KPI interrogation, even letting users drill down and examine the raw data within the original source. Trust is everything, and with Flow you can be confident that the information driving your daily meetings, supporting your people, and strengthening your operations is solid.

3. An Open and Interoperable Information Hub

With new calculations and KPIs created, Flow becomes your hub to share contextually rich information with other applications and people at your plants and within the entire enterprise. A corporate Flow instance connects your site deployments, and all underlying data sources, to your data teams and advanced applications. Flow unifies a myriad of operational database formats that can be queried without requiring knowledge of their structure and return results in a single standard schema. As more and more subject matter experts use Flow, their expertise further enriches the information before additional analysis or data warehousing is completed.

Is Flow a Manufacturing Data Hub or a Unified Analytics Framework?

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.

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Model

Consolidated modeling to abstract and unify multiple underlying namespaces

Connect

Connection into multiple data sources, including OT, IoT, IT, and manually entered

Transform

Calculation services to clean, transform, contextualize, and combine time-series and transactional data

Visualize

Decision support via browser- based visualization, reporting, dashboarding, and notification

Bridge

Data collection and bridging via industry standard -protocols, including MQTT and REST
For scalability, Flow provides a modeling and configuration environment with an open architecture and templating. Leverage the work you have done in your existing systems while using Flow's self-service no code/low code approach.

"I don't know how we lived without Flow"

"It turns tons of data into analytics-ready information"

"The link between our historian and the boardroom"

"Analytics for our Industrial Operations"

"A foundation upon which IT can build value-adding apps"

"When I arrived at ABInBev, my concept of data transmission was an excel file on a USB flash drive. That has changed drastically with the incredible need for easily accessible, accurate and real-time information. Flow has become the standard tool within ABInBev Africa, with all our breweries using Flow for real time information and reporting", Rowan Ray, Tech Supply Specialist, ABInBev

Industrial data management is hard. Which ways have you tried?

Let's move everything to the cloud, to our data lake

Ever heard this one? Is the data in the lake structured and modeled? Is it accessible to all your people? Are your analysts spending half their time searching for and massaging the data? What about bandwidth costs? Is the lake actually being used, or has it turned into an unusable swamp?

Let's keep using our spreadsheet system

How about this one? How often is the spreadsheet incomplete in your morning meeting? How often do the spreadsheet files become corrupted? How do you know a key value being reported hasn't been changed without you knowing? In the end, how many versions of the "truth" do you have?

We'll get our historian vendor to build the extra functionality we need

This one happens a lot! You get your historian vendor to build a new chart type, one you've always wanted, great! Now you want to use this shiny new chart to show some data from a different database. Can you get that data into your historian? Does it make sense to duplicate your transactional data into a time-series format?

Let's custom build it; it won't take long

This is a common one. But, do you know how long it will take? Six months, a year, maybe two? Will you need a dedicated development team? Will they keep up with new requests? What if they resign?

Time to learn more about Flow?