The Data Accessibility Backbone

Does Data Accessibility get you excited?

Probably not, but while it might not be very interesting to you it is hugely important. It’s also the piece of the WATS platform that gives you complete peace of mind.

If you don’t have access to the data from every corner of your business you can’t make the most of it. If you’re reworking things because the data is incomplete or late, you’re losing time and money. That’s why data accessibility is absolutely key to successful testing in a manufacturing environment.

Why Does Accessibility Matter?

So you’ve got test machines across a number of sites, in multiple countries, all testing different things. The sheer effort needed to manually consolidate all that data is massive. But, what if it all synced to one place without any human intervention? Well, you’d certainly save a lot of time. But it’s more than just saving hours of manual work.

There are also quality and traceability aspects; which should be considered when assessing data accessibility. Rather than send a batch of thousands of test files over email and hope they all make it – only for the receiver to have to check them all manually – instead, everything can happen automatically and have a clear log of data movements.

This Dropbox-style technology can support hundreds of facilities and all of their on-site machines no matter where in the world they are. If your manufacturing is based in the Far East but your headquarters are in Europe, the transfer time is still just seconds: so you’ll never be waiting for data to arrive or worrying about crossed wires between time zone changes.

Some companies have developed direct database connections for this type of test data movement; but that doesn’t always work – for example, when the database connection can’t be made (for whatever reason) the transfer fails and isn’t restarted.

However, with WATS, even if your network connection is down, the moment it’s back up and running the files transfer immediately. You never have to track back to where you were or what data you were transferring. This is because the WATS client takes care of all background activities, checking if transfers were completed correctly, and making sure all data is transmitted.

The WATS client requires very little overhead since it uses the HTTPS protocol. So, simply put: if you can run a browser on your test computer, then it will be able to transfer the data to your cloud account.

What Else?

The importance of real-time data cannot be understated. Access to it supports live quality control and therefore gives you the chance to see problems before they snowball into bigger ones – saving you time and money.

Rather than bring all the data from your sites and machines together over the course of a week through manual transfers over email or FTP (for instance) a solution such as WATS pools data in real-time. If you’re running calculations on batches of test info, but it’s taking days rather than minutes to collate it all, your calculations could be out of date by the time you’ve finished them. This means you’d have to go back and amend all your work. For that reason alone, great data accessibility helps to support a Right First Time approach.

If you’re expanding to a new region or site it makes sense to start as you mean to go on and have good data accessibility in place for all of the data you generate – especially from testing. A platform that supports your requirements, is easy to install, and scales seamlessly ticks all the boxes doesn’t it?