Experts tell us that there is a data revolution ongoing in manufacturing, and that future success will rely on any given business' ability to effectively use massive amounts of data: to gather it, store it, analyze it, train machines to learn with it, predict and avoid failure with it. Data, they say, can be used to automate and fine-tune processes to achieve efficiency levels beyond what we could have imagined only a decade or so ago.

So where do you start? Modern machinery - even old machinery equipped with smart sensors - can generate an unwieldy amount of data, producing up to thousands of data points every second for every sensor. As Murad Kurwa, a VP at Flex, put it: "A single production line can generate more than 70 terabytes of data per day." (Kurwa, 2021). So which data? Where to store it? How to use it? And how much would that cost, anyway? Each of these questions could easily elicit discussions and arguments well beyond the scope of this short article, but, for now, let's focus on a technology concept called "Edge Computing".