Last month’s technology evening was hosted online and presented by Jaco Markwat and Leonard Smit of Element 8. The theme ‘Where’s my data?’ related to improving communication between different organisational components and departments.
Jaco Markwat, the founder and managing director, spent 15 years at an industrial software distributor leading the sales and marketing team. He is passionate about building communities and strives to deliver intuitive technologies to the industry.
Jaco Markwat.
Leonard Smit is currently the customer success and support manager at Element 8. He boasts experience in MIS/MES solutions and guiding client’s data requirements to actionable KPI information. He is responsible for delivering excellent customer experiences and tries to implement technology to its full potential.
Jaco and Lenard started the presentation by providing a brief overview of what technologies are relevant today. They stressed that most operational data is not in a form that can easily be accessed by IT systems or used in the enterprises’ reporting software. This is complicated by proprietary protocols, different data formats and the fact that most of the information is useless and out of context. They explained how many of these problems can be resolved by implementing a Unified Name Space and by using open modular systems to improve communication. These concepts improve the quality of data and transform it into information before conveying it to other systems.
Leonard Smit.
The presentation included a live demonstration showing how a Unified Name Space can be implemented. The demonstration used a combination of MQQT, with the Ignition software. They demonstrated how they changed ‘dumb’ data into ‘intelligent’ information by including meta data with the signals. This allows other users easy access to the information and existing values do not have to be re-entered. The demonstration showcased the advantages described in the presentation by putting them into a real-world example. It showed that with little planning, information can easily be captured into a reporting tool.
This presentation was highly relevant and a pleasure to watch. The branch thanks Jaco, Leonard and Element 8 for making the event possible.
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