Data architecture for a plant, explained without the jargon

Acquisition: getting data out of PLCs, SCADA, historians, ERP, MES, QMS, PLM, CMMS and spreadsheets. This is where most projects lose their first six months.

Contextualisation: attaching meaning — this tag belongs to this asset on this line making this part on this order. Raw tags without context are numbers nobody can use.

Storage: time-series for high-frequency signals, relational for transactions, object storage for everything else. Most plants need all three and should stop arguing about which one wins.

Logic: the Flows, calculations and business rules that turn contextualised data into metrics and exceptions.

Consumption: dashboards, alerts, apps, exports to BI, and write-back into the systems that own the action.

Centralised gives one truth and one bottleneck. Fully federated gives autonomy and reconciliation arguments. In practice, multi-plant manufacturers do best with shared definitions and governance held centrally, and Flow authorship distributed to the plants that understand the process.

The deciding question is not technical. It is: who is allowed to change a definition, and how does everyone else find out?

A UNS is a contextualisation and distribution convention, not a database and not an analytics platform. It is genuinely useful for OT signals. It does not by itself give you order context from ERP, quality context from QMS or cost context from finance — those still have to be integrated and joined.

Building the full stack in-house gives control and a permanent staffing commitment. Buying a monolith gives speed and a migration you will pay for twice — once to get in, once to get out.

The third option is to connect what exists: leave systems of record in place, add an intelligence and integration layer above them, and keep the Flows portable. This is the only option that lets a plant get value before it has finished consolidating.

Ask any vendor: if we leave, what do we keep? Definitions, Flow logic, transformation history and exports should be yours in an open form. Architecture decisions made without that question are how twenty-year lock-ins begin.