Engineers — particularly those involved in designing and maintaining product lines of expensive, critical machinery such as airliners or mainline propulsion systems for large ships — have unique data access needs. They need to do more than understand the thinking behind a design — they also must know the thinking behind the thinking. What were the discussions designers were having three decades ago? Where did they get inspiration? Which old designs were they remaking, and what could be reused in 2016?
Questions like these require access to multiple streams of data that run much wider and deeper than current enterprises have. The simple task of finding some of the most important datasets related to industrial product lines remains elusive.
It’s tempting to assume that engineers working with ERP, asset management, and non-conformance systems have all the data they need, but it’s just not the case. These systems contain structured information about a design that only accounts for a small percentage of the collective company intellectual property about a product or system. A significant and growing portion of content surrounding a design resides in unstructured form, and may include telemetry or simulation data, AutoCAD files or even design notes that explain the reasoning behind certain design decisions. Ashish Nadkarni of IDC predicts that by 2017 such unstructured data will “account for 79.2% of capacity shipped and 57.3% of revenue.”
Unstructured data is challenging to manage. It doesn’t fit neatly into a row and column database, and may reside in dispersed locations outside of standard repositories. Consequently, it frequently “goes dark” with hardware tech refresh cycles, leaving engineers with an incomplete picture of the decisions that informed a particular design. In an industrial design setting, unstructured data files are often very large and with widely varied formats, making them even harder to aggregate.
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