The Johannesburg branch held its technology evening on 13 April. Malcolm Heathfield from Adroit gave a presentation titled ‘Intelligence from Data’ based on his insight as an automation information system developer. Malcolm runs the Scada Intelligence Products business unit at Adroit, driving the new product range including Adroit Scada Intelligence and Alarm Analysis.
Data analysis is the process of gathering, modelling, and transforming data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions and supporting decision making. Business intelligence (BI) systems offer an integrated set of tools, technologies and software products that are used to collect heterogenic data from dispersed sources in order to integrate and analyse data and make it commonly available to support informed business decisions.
Some BI challenges highlighted were collecting data of different source, context and type, which becomes difficult to interpret if business rules are not applied. International standards such as ISA-95 and ANSI/ISA-88 have to be implemented to give a better return on investment when specifying an automation system and its respective information components. ISA-95 is the international standard for the integration of enterprise and control systems and ANSI/ISA-88 is a standard addressing batch process control.
Some of the tools, rules and methodologies mentioned were relational databases, data warehousing, OLAP (on-line analytical processing, in this case cube data OLAP to facilitate the process of data acquisition and transformation), information repositories and modelling, and finally, the business presentation layer as a real-time data source.
Branch of the year
At the recent Council AGM, the Johannesburg Branch was announced ‘Branch of the Year for 2010’. We would like to thank all the committee members for their support and dedication which enabled us to achieve this award.
Annual golf day
Looking forward into 2011, our annual Golf Day is scheduled for 29 July. Companies interested in sponsoring in the form of golfers or watering holes are urged to contact Roxanne on 086 177 6237 or [email protected] as soon as possible. This popular event is already 50% sold out!!
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