It’s always very annoying when I try to perform what seems like it would be fairly routine maintenance on a home appliance or worse – my car – only to find out that this seemingly simple thing I would like to do is actually quite difficult with the tools at my disposal. A little bit of research usually reveals that it actually is quite simple; I just have to buy this proprietary tool from the manufacturer for what seems like a ridiculous price, and then I can proceed.
Of course, it’s easy to understand why the manufacturer doesn’t want to make it easy for end users to service their product. They want you to buy a new one, or at the very least buy this overpriced tool from them so they can scrape every morsel of profit afforded by their built-in obsolescence.
It really makes me appreciate the simplicity and widespread application of some of our more traditional tools. Take a hammer, for instance. If you need to drive a nail into wood, it doesn’t matter if it’s a big nail, a little nail, a long nail, or a short nail. It doesn’t matter who manufactured it or when. All that matters is that it’s a nail. Just get a hammer; you’ll be fine.
This got me thinking. What if we had a hammer for every type of nail available? What if each hammer was perfectly sized, shaped, weighted and balanced for each particular nail? And what if that perfect hammer was always available to you every time you needed it. This isn’t realistic, obviously, but it reminds me of some of the things I hear from our customers.
One of the great benefits cited by our end users is the ability to create custom dashboards for the different work responsibilities in their organizations. The same system is used to create maintenance dashboards for technicians, control panels for operators, system overviews for managers, reports for analysts, and even special dashboards for contractors and vendors. By providing every member of the team with a real-time view of exactly the information they need to do their jobs and nothing more, each person is empowered to do their jobs with the utmost efficiency – improving the speed and accuracy of decision-making as well as increasing the capacity for planning.
In the past, so much of our data visualization was tied to the device from which the data was drawn. If you wanted to know something about a particular machine, you had to look at the same picture as everyone else, regardless of what you needed to see.
Some modern software platforms like B-Scada’s Status products eliminate this need to tie visualizations to the device from which the data is drawn. It is now possible to visualize data from multiple devices at multiple locations through the same interface. This allows for a new concept in user interface design: rather than displaying all available information about this particular thing, you can now display all information relevant to a particular task or set of tasks.
It’s not quite “a hammer for every nail”; it’s more like a complete tool set tailored to every job, containing exactly the tools you need and nothing more. It’s really been a transformative development for many organizations.
B-Scada recently released a case study detailing how one prominent North American electric utility used Status to create a system of customized views for their operators, managers, and analysts, providing specific insights into the real-time status of their generation resources:
Read It Now**B-Scada specializes in data acquisition and visualization solutions, and has developed custom user interfaces for customers in various industries around the world. Learn more at www.scada.com.
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