A place for everything, and everything in its place.
These days, architects often go down the path of the “Google approach”, blindly heaping data into a pile, then later arbitrarily grepping through it, and calling it Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Mining. People are used to that approach on the Internet, right? Products blindly position themselves as a catch-all solution, claiming to pull all of your data and processes under one roof.
But wait – here’s the difference between the Internet and your organization’s data:
- In a company, most data is from a trustworthy source, some of it known to be highly accurate, some perhaps dated, but we usually know the precise source, date/age of data and more.
- When a user requests data, we know the context. We can give them results within a project, customer, company division, etc. Search engines have to guess entirely on every search, since they know very little about their own data or your intent.
Quality data is hard to create … isn’t it?
So we know that properly formatted and organized data gives you flexibility in how you use information down the road – but that takes extra work, right? Not necessarily. Data collection shouldn’t be hard – think about how information can be born in the system, and use approval processes to bring it into trusted records when need be.
You can inherently add integrity to your data, not just by collecting accurate information with proper collection methods, but also using the collection method itself for details.
For example, a quick scan of a badge via SFC (OpsStream Shop Floor Control) can tell you physically where an employee is, at what time (and what part of the currently running processes), and of course the actual data you intended to collect. Perhaps they’ve finished the step of the job they’re working on, or they’re reporting an exception (damaged item, etc). In the case of offsite workers, and collecting data via cell phone, we can also track GPS location and travel records, giving us additional data for scheduling, liability, records for payroll, etc. All of this has happened within a few seconds, and is considered to be highly accurate information.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
If you’ve ever been down the path of custom development, you’ve surely found yourself wearing one of two hats:
The Planner: You’ve spent an inordinate amount of time pre-architecting your project, attempting to dream up every possible variant that you may encounter. This of course has a significant impact on lead times and expenses; you’re asking development to re-invent the wheel, designing a framework for features that may never exist.
The Rapid Deployer: You’ve decided it’s impossible to think of everything. You have needs today, and it’s best to just dive in. “We’ll figure it out on the way.”
Of course, both solutions have their advantages – but after a short time in production, you inevitably have users asking for “simple” things, which can change the entire scope of the project.
After 15 years of working in the development industry, explaining the merits of comprehensive design, scopes of each release, etc … I’m happy to say, that’s all changed.
OpsStream gives us the ability to rapidly map out an organization’s current needs – often within hours. We can easily add and remove fields, create hierarchical data relationships, and wrap complex business processes around them. This all happens from within the same user interface that the end-user will use. No development skills necessary, no code, no special tools – just a web browser. As future needs arise or additional systems are consolidated, management within the organization can easily make the changes they need. It’s a complete Operations Execution Systems (OES) that can simply be configured rather than needing to be developed.
We’d love to show you how easy it is to create a powerful system for your organization or enterprise. Drop us a note at info@opsstream.com and we’d be happy to set up a personal demo, tailored to your needs.
