What data should I gather to not be a pool of useless data?

Suppose that you know our factory needs data insight, the first step is to find out where to monitor, the big question is: What data should I gather to not be a pool of useless data?

does it matter to just gather data?

Believe us, we know many companies that collect data and they keep drowning every day despite the fact that they set many people to gather data, what's their problem? before any data gathering, you should first set your goal!

it is obvious, we are going to increase the profitability of the factory and decrease the downtime, but we don't know where to start!

Said one of the big producers of CAN Continaer for vegetable oil,

Chats are a good source of data to point out issues

here is how we understand where is a good point to start, any factories understand something not going well, so they ask some people to provide them with reports, some with papers, and some with messages in a messaging app, then they ask somebody else to convert these raw data to something more structural like excel

that's a good point to start, we sometimes suggest connecting to their messaging app or their Excel repository and converting all of those unstructured data to something more structural

PLCs and Electronic signals

many factories check their health by checking the data coming out of PLCs and signals, the main issue of many distributed PLCs is to connect these data to something more insightful and integrated in one place,

In many cases, the PLC HMI is locked by the programmer or it is not permitted to connect PLC as it will void some licenses or restriction

How to choose where to gather data from?

It is hard and time-consuming to gather all data in the production line, as to Pareto law, 80% of those data will do just 20% of the needed insight, first start by those stations which are critical in the production line by analyzing the data of your current solution sources and then installing Watcher to gather data automatically and get the data online in your mobile phone and expand it in future.