Many of you have seen the movie Avatar. I was a little late, but I did finally see it (and in IMAX 3D). The special effects were, of course, amazing. I was not so thrilled with the theme which was something like “Corporations, bad; primitive people, good.” But that did not stop me from staying through the end of the credits. In the credits, of the dozen or so special effects companies involved, one guy’s title caught my attention – “Data Wrangler.” Since I work in “The West’s Most Western Town,”* I’m well-acquainted with the term “wrangler.” Often used as a synonym for “cowboy” it has the connotation of the guy in charge of the animals, especially the horses. It further connotes the idea of herding the animals. So, I guess the data wrangler keeps track of the data – he’s in charge of the data. I can envision him trying to find all the stray data and herding it into a central “corral.”
Finally, the Industrial Automation connection: Now even if a line or a plant is not new, it probably has newer automation devices. These devices have data locked away in them. Data that could be conveyed to systems that would help a company diagnose and troubleshoot problems… or even avoid them by allowing predictive maintenance instead of reactive maintenance.
So mount up, data wrangler, and herd the data in those stray devices to a corral that can sort them and brand them. Now in this entire scheme, PROFINET just provides a trail for the data to follow. I guess that makes PROFINET the data wrangler’s Old Chisholm Trail.
–Carl Henning
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*Watching countless TV Westerns in my youth helped, too.