Software Toolbox Technical Blog

Welcome to the kickoff post of our Data Storage Deep Dive blog series! In this series, we will explore the crucial role of data storage solutions and Historians in industrial automation. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be looking into how solutions delivered by Software Toolbox can be utilized with Historians, helping you make the most of your industrial data.

Welcome to the kickoff of Software Toolbox’s Summer of IoT blog series! Over the next few blog posts, we’ll discuss how our products can play a role in the exciting world of Internet of Things (IoT), but more importantly, how they can be used to further your success in Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation initiatives. The IoT landscape has grown exponentially over the past decade, transforming industries by connecting devices, systems, and people in unprecedented ways. IoT is reshaping how we interact with technology. At Software Toolbox, we recognize the power of IoT and are committed to providing solutions that facilitate this technological revolution.

There is significant growth in companies offloading their applications, data management, files, and content to cloud hosted systems. While this is great for a multitude of reasons, have you wondered what impact that might have on your business reaching its sustainability goals? That's where we have some good news – the cloud can be, and typically is, green, because of the economies of scale that large data centers provide. In this second post of our Environmental Sustainability blog series, we'll look at what cloud providers and data centers are doing, how using cloud computing can help reduce your company's energy usage and carbon footprint, and how Software Toolbox's solutions empower them all.

In this video blog post, Jeff Knepper from Flow Software and I engage in a discussion about the issues that users and integrators often face. Drawing from our experience, we dive into the challenges we've noticed in assisting manufacturers to reconsider and redesign their strategies in building robust data infrastructures, essential for scaling their analytic solutions. Join us as we explore these topics and more in this 46-minute video blog post.

With industrial processes, it's only possible to manage what is being effectively measured.  Without keeping tabs on key metrics in a process, you'll never be able to determine if the efficiency of the process is getting better or worse.

In this short blog post, we'll discuss the progression from raw process data to information to the actions that can be taken and decisions that can be made using that information.  We'll also discuss how the context (or how you're looking at data) can affect the information you're consuming.

To manage a process well, it's about more than just producing.  It's necessary to measure how efficiently that process is producing.  A process increases in profitability as it runs more efficiently (producing the same amount using the least amount of resources).

In this short blog post, we'll discuss some of the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that should be available for a particular process and how measuring those KPIs can increase the profitability of your operations.  And we'll discuss how you probably already have the raw data sitting there and how you can turn that raw data into actionable information.

The New Year is a time of renewal, new projects, new challenges, and for some of you, new roles, or new people on your teams.

In this blog post, we provide a quick reference to resources from the past year that should be helpful to you and your colleagues.  If you aren't already subscribed to our blog, we encourage you to . We publish new content about once a week, sometimes more often, and you can control when you are notified about new content.

It is well known and accepted that, to manage a process, we need to measure the results of that process.  If we start measuring the production output of a machine, the people responsible for running and maintaining that machine are more likely to pay attention and take the necessary decisions to improve its performance.

Every business with any focus on continuous improvement has some system that works for them and has evolved as they have traveled their journey. Some use paper, some use paper and spreadsheets, others use custom solutions, and others use some form of off-the-shelf software.

For over 20 years we’ve helped users get the digital data they have into these various systems, but in the process of doing that, we’ve heard some things from them and seen some patterns we will share in this blog post.