When I was a little boy, I wished for a magic wand. Oh, the things I could do with that magic wand. Turn my bike into a motorcycle. Turn every vegetable into cherry pie. And, of course, have my own computer. I grew up in an age when computers were in data centers and you needed a raised floor to run all the cables.

When I read about some of the Smart Manufacturing solutions out there, I’d get the feeling that these companies must’ve had a magic wand. They completely ignore one of the dirtiest jobs needed to build a Smart Manufacturing system: Data Conditioning.

It’s unfortunate that all data is not created equal. It comes in a variety of formats, sizes and nomenclature. Take tank level for example, glue tanks, water tanks, medicine tanks…etc. There are lots of tanks around a manufacturing plant. The tank levels can be in feet, inches, millimeters or even a percentage. Sometimes, it’s analog and the output of a sensor that generates a 0-5, 0-10 or 0-24V signal. If it’s digital, it might be expressed as a floating point, an unsigned integer, binary coded decimal value or even a string of ASCII digits.

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