Sharing sensor and machine data will become a normal part of business operations to improve daily operations and to leverage the big, but often segregated, volumes of data being generated by machines and sensors for commercial purposes, says office systems company Nashua CIO Yunus Scheepers.

He highlights Nashua’s own operations – it operates a partnership service model – in which it shares machine data from office devices with its partners to empower them with information, including repair, maintenance and operational data, to better serve end clients.

While ownership of and responsibility for the data must reside with the correct stakeholder, data sharing should be the de facto practice between all stakeholders to provide detailed information that can be leveraged for many different commercial purposes.

“We are using, and must expand, Internet of Things systems to manage hardware, services and billing in clients’ environments. Detailed information enables our teams to know what the problem is before they are dispatched – sometimes as far as 200 km – which reduces the costs for us and clients,” he explains.

Further, the use of machine data enables Nashua to predict failures by correlating operational devices and parameters with known failures and causes. The information derived from detailed machine and sensor data is of significant value to Nashua, and effective sharing in real time empowers channel partners to provide clients with real-time service.

“Generic” data – basic sensor and machine data that is not associated with any particular intellectual property or personal or commercial identities – is the type of information that should be shared readily and freely, he says.

Interpreting and using the data to improve business processes, whether for in-house office and building management or for commercial purposes, will be the differentiator, not the sharing of the data. Data that might be of no value to one company might be of significant value to another company.

“We should be encouraging the sharing of generic sensor and machine data, especially in light of the growing use of cloud services and data analytics systems. The free movement and availability of data are central to these modern business uses of data without prejudicing their commercial applications and competition between companies.”

Scheepers notes that current concepts include companies subscribing to data feeds in commercial ecosystems, with data relevant to their processes or uses made available to them. Typically, data sharing would be free or very low-cost, as high costs would stifle the practice.

Nashua is investigating the deployment of wireless connectivity on its existing and new machines to enable the company to reduce or eliminate reliance on clients’ networks for connectivity, and will look at how to leverage the stream of data and improve the use of the data by various stakeholders.

“Leveraging data in Big Data systems presupposes large volumes of data, but the problem currently is that data is segregated and siloed and, therefore, often unused or underused.