Bringing DataOps to the Tulip Ecosystem With HighByte

Digital leaders recognize that building an industrial data ecosystem that can scale requires an architectural approach. Between the unique ways that machines structure data, differing processes across sites, and mixes of brownfield and greenfield technology, data access and single-use apps are not enough.

This is where HighByte Intelligence Hub comes in. HighByte Intelligence Hub is an Industrial DataOps software solution designed specifically for industrial data scale and maintainability. The Intelligence Hub and the DataOps approach are perfectly paired with Tulip’s Frontline Operations Platform, providing access to standardized data, enabling app reusability across work cells and sites, and transforming and delivering operations data from apps to cloud services.

In these three use cases, we can explore how the Intelligence Hub prepares and moves data across the Tulip ecosystem at scale.

In manufacturing, every machine and system structures and tags data differently. Some test machines run for specified periods or activity completion before producing reports, while simpler machines may produce fresh telemetry data every 100 milliseconds.

HighByte Intelligence Hub acts as a one-stop shop for standardizing and delivering data to all your Tulip apps. Rather than establishing new connections every time you launch an app or onboard new equipment, simply connect the Intelligence Hub to the app and access ready-to-use data no matter the source.

The Intelligence Hub uses data modeling and flows to appropriately standardize any source data and deliver it at the necessary frequency or event. Additionally, configuration can be templatized for easy replication across the site, so you can easily deploy apps in multiple workstations. The Intelligence Hub can also be deployed across multiple sites, with standardized models enabling rapid, enterprise-wide reuse of apps.

As access to industrial data improves, operations leaders are facing an increasing interest in operations data for cloud analytics systems. These data requests often present challenges, as cloud applications require very specific datasets containing contextualized information from different source systems.

The Intelligence Hub delivers data that cloud applications need, natively connecting to Tulip as well as cloud streaming services and data stores — including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, and the Snowflake Data Cloud. Instead of writing complex integrations or generating reports, simply connect to the Tulip API, and then model and flow data with the Intelligence Hub to bridge the gap.

If business users want additional data from ERP systems, PLCs, instruments, LIMS, or other systems to solve a particular use case, the Intelligence Hub can pull data from each of these sources, blend that data with Tulip app data into single payloads, and then deliver those payloads directly to cloud services. This approach prevents time-consuming, point-to-point integrations — and ensures that data from Tulip reaches the cloud ready for storage or analysis.

The Unified Namespace (UNS) is one of the fastest-growing patterns in industrial data architecture. With native publish/subscribe communication and a browsable, organized hierarchy, it’s no surprise that the UNS is so popular among system architects.

But many on-prem and cloud applications struggle to access and use the UNS because they don’t support MQTT, or they need the data structured differently than the UNS. For example, if you wanted a single payload with the units produced for each of three machines and the shift total every 10 minutes, you would need to subscribe to each machine individually, move the data to a database, separately query the aggregate data, calculate the totals and maintain the shift numbers, and then send data every 10 minutes to the target system.

The Intelligence Hub solves this problem by easily subscribing to the UNS, conditioning the data, merging multiple data streams into a single model instance, and then delivering the data to the required target system. In a Tulip ecosystem, this means the Intelligence Hub can be used to pull data from the UNS and deliver it to Tulip or extract valuable connected app data from Tulip and place it in the UNS for others to access.

Ensuring your data is usable by the people who need it in the systems they use is the key to unlocking digital transformation value. Individual integrations may work for a POC, but as complexity and scale increase, those integrations become impossible to sustainably maintain. Standardizing data sets enables the reuse of Tulip-connected apps and usable data for enterprise analytics. With HighByte and Tulip, you can accelerate your data journey for enterprise-level insights without manual integration.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Intelligence Hub and Industrial DataOps, read “DataOps: The Missing Link in Your Industrial Data Architecture,” a HighByte white paper now in its second edition.