Manufacturers Leverage a Self-defined Data Fabric to Implement Industry 4.0 and Satisfy the Regulators

Manufacturers Use Orion’s EIIG to Implement Industry 4.0

In order to gain a competitive edge and become more innovative, manufacturers are racing to implement Industry 4.0. At the same time, they need to mitigate risks and avoid penalties by complying with regulations. In both cases, a self-defined data fabric like Orion Governance’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) can play a critical role.

Orion’s EIIG ingests metadata from more than 70+ technologies, intelligently stitches it into the most comprehensive knowledge graph in the industry, and provides the visualizations necessary to catalog, trace, trust and analyze while promoting confidence, transparency, and governance of the enterprise landscape.

Accelerate the Implementation of Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0—also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution or 4IR—is a new paradigm that enables manufacturers to connect all their computer systems to create and share information in such a way that factories become smarter and more productive. Data is a key driver in this digitization effort. As a result, a strong data governance regime is imperative for the successful implementation of Industry 4.0.

As the next generation data governance and metadata management platform, EIIG can accelerate the deployment of Industry 4.0 in several principal ways.

Automated connectivity of all types of metadata

In Industry 4.0 data is generated at an unprecedented scale and velocity. Data flows across various systems, devices, and machines throughout the production process. More than often, data is siloed and there is a serious lack of connectivity within and between disparate systems. How to manage all this data in such a complex environment is a daunting challenge for manufacturers. EIIG automatically scans metadata from more than 70 technologies, from the Mainframe (COBOL, JCL, PL1, IMS),RDBMS,BI, ETL tools, to modern programming languages such as Python, Java and Scala. The technology assets are then intelligently weaved into a knowledge graph, providing an in depth catalog with assets interconnected out of the box.

With this federated view of data assets across a multitude of technologies, manufacturers are able to understand what data they have, how it is transformed and orchestrated, and easily discover and access the data they need to gain insights and trust. What is more, thanks to AI/ML-powered automation, EIIG can be deployed in weeks rather than months or even years. This rapid and automated connectivity of all types of metadata ensures that any Industry 4.0 initiative can be deployed in an accelerated and governed manner.

One thing worth noting is EIIG’s support for the SAP environment since the manufacturing sector is the top industry using SAP. Manufacturers leverage SAP’s integrated applications to connect all parts of their business operations from enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, quality control, production planning and scheduling, asset management, to analytics.

EIIG offers the industry’s most comprehensive solution to parse complex scripts of SAP applications including stored procedures, SAP S4/HANA, SAP BW, SAP ERP, SAP R2/R3, so that manufacturing companies can understand how various systems are connected within the SAP environment and how it is connected with the rest of the enterprise landscape.

Active monitoring of data quality and propagation of data trust

One of the characteristics of Industry 4.0 is fast and accurate decision making with minimum human intervention. A prerequisite to this outcome is reliable data. EIIG’s active metadata capability enables manufacturers to dynamically monitor data quality as data travels through the data pipeline by showing a quality score at each of the stages. Users can visualize whether data changes before and after a transformation to make sure that the data they are using to make decisions is up to the required quality standard.

In the same vein, EIIG verifies the trustworthiness of data assets. It shows the trust score (based on qualifiers such as certification and ownership) in the knowledge graph and overlays such information with popular BI reporting tools such as Tableau, PowerBI, or Qlik.

Data citizens can view such trust scores at every stage of the data flow from source to destination. They can also see such scores right in a BI report and dive into EIIG platform to get more detailed information such as data lineage and location of all PII assets, for example. In this way, trust in data is propagated and self-service enhanced since the data users have better understanding of and confidence in the data they are using.

Enhanced data security and privacy

Increased connectivity and data sharing in Industry 4.0 requires a more robust data security and privacy regime. EIIG provides highly automated capability of mapping rules and policies, exerting access controls, and data masking. In EIIG’s knowledge graph, one can easily tag all PII data, no matter where it resides. All these data security and privacy measures help manufacturers comply with regulations and safeguard intellectual property and customer information.

Metadata analytics to help harness insights and reduce operational cost

EIIG offers powerful metadata analytics to enable Industry 4.0 customers to harness insights more efficiently from the collected data and optimize cost. One such example is EIIG’s Similarity Analysis. With this metadata analytical capability, customers can easily identify duplicated tables, reports, and ETL jobs. By minimizing these duplicated data assets, manufacturers can improve their data retention, reduce operational cost, and simplify the data environment to access the right data and thus gain insights more quickly.

In short, EIIG enables manufacturers to harness the power of Industry 4.0 technologies by ensuring data quality, trust, security, privacy, observability, and usability. As a result, manufacturers can optimize their operations, improve productivity, and drive innovation in the era of Industry 4.0.

Facilitate Compliance with Regulations

The manufacturing sector is subject to some strict regulations with regard to data. To comply with these regulations has become increasingly challenging because of the exponential growth of data and manufacturers’ complex data environments.

Orion Governance’s EIIG, a self-defined data fabric, starts with a bottom-up approach by automatically collecting all forms of metadata, be it technical, business, operational, or social, and building a catalog and providing traceability automatically on the basis of these facts of the data assets. These capabilities provide manufacturers with a trusted data foundation for regulatory compliance. Here are some key use cases.

Heightened Data Privacy: California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

CCPA is a comprehensive privacy law that governs the collection, use, and protection of personal information of California residents. To comply with this law, companies must tag information that is collected directly as well as data that is linked to the consumer based on activities and business processes. For many organizations, conducting an initial assessment across disparate heterogeneous platforms is a daunting and time-consuming exercise.

EIIG can help with the challenge. Its sophisticated scanners can quickly and automatically examine different databases across disparate technologies, file types and even determine where and how such personal data is linked and moved across the enterprise. In addition, it enables manufacturers to compare the content, format, range of values, and data types in an automated fashion for similarities, differences, and compliance with data management and data security policies.

With EIIG’s Term-to-Asset mapping capability, manufacturers can map their business glossaries, business policies, rules, data quality rules and business terms that describe consumer data using a broad brush into the specific physical data for semantic querying and can thus vastly enable data discovery in a comprehensive data inventory.

CCPA requires enterprises to minimize data collection and process. Manufacturers can leverage EIIG’s metadata abstraction layer to review retention policies and implement best practices. They can also use EIIG to help with data deletion (Right to be forgotten) by easily searching on any data (field, job, task, report, etc.) and identifying data flows (data lineage) end-to-end throughout all systems so that they can confidently delete the record when needed.

Data transparency is essential to CCPA compliance. Manufacturers are required to provide clear and accessible privacy notices to individual consumers. EIIG visualizes data movement from source to destination through complex systems.

With EIIG, companies can automate the process of granting data subject rights, including those regarding the right to know what personal information is being collected, the right to access their personal information, the right to request deletion of their personal information, and the right to opt out of the sale of their personal information.

Thanks to EIIG’s configurable dashboard, enterprises can meet various reporting needs to comply with CCPA.

“Know Your Data”: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Specifically, under Article 30, GDPR places significant importance on the principle of “knowing your data” or having a clear understanding of the personal data being processed within an organization. With tremendous volume of data collected, processed, and stored in many disparate systems, manually discovering, and cataloging personal data is an impossible proposition.

Orion Governance’s EIIG offers end-to-end mapping of information assets to automate the discovery of personal information across manufacturers’ entire portfolio of corporate data assets. Simply define or import the GDPR catalog, then start the automatic process to reveal where the required data is physically stored.

This map of information assets is a visualization of all data in an enterprise, including structured, unstructured, on-premises, and stored in the cloud. It includes all data endpoints (i.e., where data comes from or goes to). All transformations are visible regardless of where those operations occur (e.g. structured databases, in-house Java or python applications, data lakes, lake houses, distributed file system storage, within mainframes or AS400 systems).

With this map of information assets and other EIIG capabilities, manufacturers can more effectively satisfy GDPR requirements by

• Discovering and identifying personal data automatically and accurately
• Cataloging external data sources
• Documenting data flows and lineage
• Implementing a metadata repository and access layer

As a result, manufacturing companies gain complete visibility into their data assets and near real-time traceability and unprecedented accuracy of customer information for GDPR compliance while reducing the resources allocated to fulfilling such regulatory requirements.

Data Trust for Financial Reporting: The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX)

The Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) “contains provisions affecting corporate governance, risk management, auditing, and financial reporting of public companies, including provisions intended to deter and punish corporate accounting fraud and corruption.” Though this law applies to public companies, many private companies, particularly large ones, find it useful as best practices. However, compliance with SOX is no easy task. One of the key roadblocks is to build trust in the data underpinning the financial reports to comply with SOX regulations.

As in the cases of CCPA and GDPR, EIIG thorough coverage of technologies in a manufacturer’s data landscape is the starting point. Whether it is JCL, PL1, IMS or COBOL in the mainframe, RPG in AS400, or Python, Java, Scala and Java scripts, EIIG can provide enterprises with visibility into all of them. Both intra- and inter-system connectivity is established through automated data lineage. EIIG offers active metadata capabilities to augment data quality and propagate trust as described in the first part of this article.

EIIG thus lays the foundation for the accuracy of financial reporting. Stakeholders can dive into EIIG directly from the report to see data lineage and establish the trustworthiness of the data and confidently submit the report.

By establishing data trust, manufacturers can strengthen their internal control for financial reporting with the right policies and rules, access management, and other mechanisms to mitigate the risk of fraud, errors, and irregularities.

With data trust propagated and visualized by EIIG, manufacturers can achieve auditability and transparency for SOX compliance. Trustworthy data allows external auditors to validate financial information and helps manufacturers pass audits much more transparently and confidently.

What is more, EIIG’s data observability capability extends to near real-time monitoring of data quality and data trust, it can detect and disclose any significant events regarding financial information to ensure SOX compliance in a timely fashion.

To sum up, EIIG establishes data trust and helps build stakeholder–investors, regulators, customers, and partners–confidence in terms of SOX compliance. By doing so, it enhances the manufacturer’s reputation and reduces the potential legal and financial risks associated with non-compliance.

About the Author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development at Orion Governance, Inc. Connect with Niu on LinkedIn.