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Simplify how you collect, transform, and use manufacturing data, enabling real-time visibility and AI-powered intelligence.
Download White PaperSimplify how you collect, transform, and use manufacturing data, enabling real-time visibility and AI-powered intelligence.
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Manufacturers are experts at producing goods, but using data to continuously improve how those products are made is still a challenge.
Modern manufacturing generates data from MES, equipment, IoT devices, and applications. The Critical Manufacturing Data Platform brings everything together into a unified, MES-native environment designed specifically for manufacturing use cases.
The Critical Manufacturing Enterprise Data Platform takes this concept further. It unifies data across plants, systems, and business functions into a governed, organization-wide architecture. By extending the capabilities of the Data Platform to an enterprise level, it ensures that every source of manufacturing, operational, and business data becomes part of a cohesive ecosystem that supports real-time visibility, cross-system integration, benchmark analysis, continuous improvement, and advanced AI initiatives.
MES guides and controls shop-floor operations ensuring quality, efficiency, traceability, and flexibility across production processes.
Connect IoT enables bidirectional integration with machines, IoT devices, protocols, and data sources — including edge transformation for cleaner, enriched data before it reaches the platform.
The Data Platform turns structured, contextualized data into actionable insights. Support everything from real-time monitoring to advanced analytics and predictive models.
The Data Platform provides the core services that transform raw manufacturing data into a reliable, governed, and ready-to-use asset. It handles data ingestion, standardization, transformation, storage, and consumption, removing complexity so teams can focus on insights rather than data engineering.
At its core, the Data Platform provides four essential capabilities:
Collect and process manufacturing data close to where it is generated, reducing bandwidth usage and latency while keeping sensitive information on site. Edge processing can filter, enrich, and secure data before it is sent to the Data Platform.
Ingest data from sensors, equipment, MES, ERP, PLM, and other systems into a consistent, unified stream. A scalable event-brokering layer then routes this data to multiple consumers in real time or batch, so analytics tools, apps, and services can subscribe and react as events occur.
Apply a shared, manufacturing-ready data model that standardizes structures and terminology across sites and systems. This Canonical Data Model keeps information aligned, streamlines data processing, simplifies reporting and integration, and prepares data for multisite analysis and enterprise-wide use.
Make high-quality data available to dashboards, industrial apps, business intelligence tools, and AI/ML workflows. Teams can visualize performance, build and deploy models, and even close the loop with automated actions—turning the Data Platform into a foundation for continuous optimization.
The Data Platform establishes the foundation. The Enterprise Data Platform (EDP) builds on it by adding enterprise-wide standardization, multi-site harmonization, and AI-ready data models to support global operations.
The Enterprise Data Platform is a centralized, secure, and scalable system that brings together data from MES, IoT devices, and other sources across the organization. It uses Critical Manufacturing’s own Canonical Data Model (CDM) to standardize manufacturing events from any site, regardless of MES version. Third-party MES systems require configuration to output CDM-compliant events.
This creates a reliable foundation of high-quality data that supports reporting, analytics, and more advanced capabilities such as machine learning and AI. Delivering three key advantages:
Get answers in seconds.
The EDP structures MES data around standardized event types, making queries fast, predictable, and easy to run.
Expand without rework.
A CDM layer can be added to any existing MES system or version, enabling a consistent data model across all factories without re-architecting each site.
Improve performance globally.
Comparable, centralized data makes cross-site bottlenecks and inefficiencies easy to detect and address, enabling faster, data-driven improvement.
With standardized data and clear relationships, technical teams no longer need to create custom queries or maintain site-specific data structures. They can focus on higher-value work such as building automated alerts, developing predictive maintenance models, or integrating MES data with enterprise systems.
Plant managers, quality engineers, and maintenance supervisors can instantly access accurate insights—such as current WIP levels, quality trends, equipment status, or downtime causes—without navigating complex screens or waiting for a specialist to prepare a report.
Comparable, contextualized enterprise data gives leadership the visibility needed to make confident decisions—such as identifying underperforming sites, reallocating resources, or scaling best practices—quickly and consistently across the entire network.
The EDP is built on the ISA-95 standard, providing a clear, structured foundation for organizing manufacturing data. Using this standard as the backbone, the CDM developed by Critical Manufacturing converts data from different factories, MES versions, and systems into one consistent format.
It replaces disconnected systems with a single, consistent data foundation, eliminating the core obstacles that hold global operations back:
Unifying data after an acquisition can take months.
The EDP standardizes structures across all sites, making integration faster and far less disruptive.
When reporting depends on technical teams, decisions slow down.
With consistent data, business users can access answers directly, without waiting for specialists.
When sites categorize data differently, improvements remain local.
The EDP enables comparable, cross-site insights that make it easy to identify and scale what works.
Mixed MES versions and legacy systems complicate modernization.
The EDP adds a CDM layer on top of any architecture, enabling gradual upgrades without downtime.
What if accessing manufacturing data was as simple as asking a question? With the EDP, it can be.
Manufacturing data is traditionally difficult for AI models to interpret because each site structure is different. The EDP solves this by applying a well-defined CDM that gives your MES data a clear, structured, documented format enabling true AI readiness across the entire network.
This foundation enables seamless AI integration, allowing LLMs to understand and query MES data using natural language.
explore ai use cases
The EDP includes a set of ready-to-use Critical Manufacturing apps that help teams start creating value from their data from day one. Built on standardized, enterprise-wide data, these apps provide instant visibility and improvement opportunities without the need for custom development.
Explore Apps
This is the first article of a series on how Critical Manufacturing is democratizing manufacturing data analytics. We start with insights on the Canonical Data Model and how we built it to give data the value manufacturers need.
