You might have noticed smartphones and wearable technology made for the average consumer now being integrated into manufacturing facilities.

It's 2018, and Nukon is making waves – and not the kind that you see at the beach. Its unique offering is whetting the apatite of some big brands: Murray Goulburn, Fonterra, Coles, Coca-Cola Amatil, TasWater, and Melbourne Airport to name a few.

Digital transformation technologies have the potential to give businesses more transparency, agility, and competitive advantage to name a few. So what’s stopping Australian businesses from adopting digital technologies now?

We are in the midst of a digital revolution, dubbed by founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

Amazon has undergone constant digital transformation, from its beginnings as a small mail-order bookstore in 1994, to a global organisation boasting $38 billion in revenue in 2017. How does it continue to stay ahead of the pack and harness the latest digital technologies to improve its own business processes?

Arguably, the concept of ‘digital transformation’ has not always been easy to understand. It’s been thrown around for the past few years to describe anything from implementing disruptive technologies, moving from paper to digital, or simply applying digital technology to any aspect of business.

Now more than ever, industrial operations and manufacturers are racing to ‘unlock’ process data to leverage their plant-floor information. It’s the challenge of the decade. In order to address this challenge, we need to be looking at what time-series databases and data historians can do.Correct use of these database technologies will mean the difference between simply having data, and being able to analyse and use data to maintain operations and improve the performance of the plant.

The world has more data than it knows what to do with. The statistics are incredible: IBM says the world creates two and a half quintillion bytes or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data EVERY DAY.

Process historians have been used to monitor processes in the industrial sector for more than 20 years, and yet many companies Nukon talks to don’t have them. 

There’s no question that digital operations are transforming manufacturing. A range of innovations that fall under the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 umbrella all point towards more computer-integrated manufacturing operations or the ‘connected enterprise’.