HighByte and InfluxDB Provide Critical OEE Data for Manufacturing Companies

By Jason Myers / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Jan 13, 2022

HighByte is an industrial software company based in Portland, Maine building Industry 4.0 based solutions that address the data architecture and integration challenges inherent in manufacturing. The company developed the first DataOps solution purpose-built to meet the unique requirements of industrial assets, products, processes, and systems at the Edge.

As industrial manufacturers move to modernize their systems and infrastructure, existing interoperability gaps become apparent. HighByte seeks to provide manufacturers with the critical data and infrastructure that they need to achieve industrial transformation from an Industry 3.0 environment to a next-generation, Industry 4.0 environment by enabling extensive interconnectivity and providing highly contextualized data.

The operational technology stack in an Industry 3.0 context is almost always bi-directional. Each layer in the technology stack only communicates with the next layer in the hierarchy. Compare this to an Industry 4.0 configuration, where virtually any application within the ecosystem can connect directly to any other application. What was a simple and straightforward dataflow can quickly become a spiderweb of inter-connectivity.

Therefore, manufacturers that want the deeper insights into manufacturing operations and overall equipment efficiency (OEE) provided by Industry 4.0 technologies need a way to bridge the gap between differing architectures in Industry 3.0 and 4.0, and Operational Technology (OT)  and Information Technology (IT) approaches to data infrastructure..

HighByte created its Intelligence Hub to close this gap between industrial OT and IT. The Intelligence Hub allows industrial operators to create models or profiles of their equipment, products, and processes. These models reshape and transform the data produced by the sensors and systems on the equipment into something that has the necessary context and adornments to be useful, actionable data in the modern digital factory.

HighByte partnered with InfluxData and uses InfluxDB as a time series database to store and process all this industrial data. As an open-source solution, InfluxDB provides the flexibility for partners like HighByte (and community members in general) to contribute code to enhance the platform’s capabilities. HighByte contributed an OEE package for industrial operators, which is now available in InfluxDB. This package works with the Flux language and contains all the necessary functions for calculating OEE.

To leverage this feature, industrial operators can use the models they create in Intelligence Hub and feed their data into InfluxDB, which analyzes that data for OEE. They can calculate the OEE value for any desired context. That may be for a single machine, a group of machines in a particular location, or for all machines across an entire organization.

This flexibility provides industrial operators with better observability and deeper insights into manufacturing equipment and processes. Being able to harness all the data produced in the modern digital factory means HighByte and InfluxDB enable industrial operators to drive optimization and improvements to manufacturing that was previously unimaginable.

For more details on how HighByte and InfluxDB work together in the IIoT space, see the full case study.