What is Litmus Production Record Database
When providing value to their customers, organizations (companies) will execute a wide range of often interlocking processes (examples: sales, manufacturing, shipping, service, maintenance) to achieve this goal. Today, technology (examples: PLC/DCS, sensors, scanners) are used to assist with this process execution.
Every executed production process consumes data from other processes as input and provides data as output for other processes. These data are describing events related to this production process and are what will tell the story of that process.
These events are not limited to intended events like executing maintenance, making an order or shipping an order. Included into these event are also unintended events such as a downtime, breakdown or missing raw material event.
This understanding of the existence of these production events, is the core idea behind Litmus Production Record database, which is able of recording these production events to assist in providing an overview about all events which have an impact on the performance of a production process and in the end having an impact on providing value to a customer.
Being able to record these production event records and organize them according to a data model, is one of the core requirements to be able to make decisions based on these data.
Litmus Edge is designed to seamlessly collect the input and output data consumed and generated by production process, typically from IoT devices and OT systems which are used to assist with the control of these production processes. Litmus Edge then allows to integrate these data with IT and other OT systems through its many integrations data streaming capabilities.
This does provide a very powerful tool to gain access to a large variety of data collected by an organizations executed processes.
Litmus Production Record Database was developed to work in conjunction with this powerful data collection by providing a very customizable yet based on standards solution to organize and model the data collected by Litmus Edge.
While the main focus of Litmus Edge as well Litmus Production Record Database is on production processes, they are not limited to them and can be used to read data and record events from any other processes executed by an organization as long as the data can be read by Litmus Edge and the events can be identified by these recorded date. This can include for example processes for shipping, logistics, maintenance or facility management and energy management.
Litmus Production Record Database can be used by customers to:
- record production events based on a data model -> these data can come either from an internal event monitoring function or are send from sources like Litmus Edge
This functionality is inspired by the ISA-88 standard and legacy traceability systems, but is not limiting the user to only traceability events. But instead the user can record any event which has a clear identifiable trigger.
- record both process data and meta data for individual tags -> these data are send from outside sources such as Litmus Edge
This functionality is inspired by both legacy historian systems as well as data warehousing but designed to be used more focused and especially with process event recording as well as analytics in mind instead of long term mass data storage.
- internally monitor recorded tag process data for trigger events to record specific production events according to its data model
This functionality was inspired by how processes are typically controlled and recorded and how triggers for events are existing as their initiator for for their start as well as end. Making use of the capability to record raw process tags, Litmus Production Record Database can monitor these data for simple trigger conditions for process events of interest and then record them as production events, without the need for an external trigger monitoring.
Additionally, Litmus Production Record Database offers additional secondary functions for administration, configuration and data exploration. This includes:
- the solution does include a retention period style mechanism to only keep a desired number of days as online data. This does allow to control the size if the database as well. Data purged by this mechanism are not just purged, but are backed-up before the purge. this allows to reimport them at a later point again if they are needed for example for a RCI.
- further are a series of functions and procedures included to interact with Litmus Production Record Database as well as use them to create custom solutions such as the solutions available on Central.litmus.io to enable the customer to create the smart manufacturing environment they need to succeed.