In a typical manufacturing operation, data lives in at least 5 disconnected systems: the ERP handles finance and procurement, SCADA monitors production lines, a separate quality system tracks NCRs, HR has its own platform, and maintenance logs live in spreadsheets. None of them talk to each other natively. When the CEO asks “what was our OEE last week across all lines?” — that question touches four systems and takes someone a day to answer manually. That’s not a technology problem. It’s an architecture problem.
The ROI of data integration isn’t a new report. It’s the decisions that become possible when you can see across departments in real time. It’s catching a quality trend before it becomes a customer complaint. It’s knowing your true production cost per unit, not the estimate from last quarter’s spreadsheet.
Learn SQL. Seriously. Every system you’ll ever integrate speaks SQL at some level. Understand how to read a database schema, write a JOIN across tables, and build a simple ETL pipeline. Then learn an ORM like Prisma that lets you move fast without writing raw queries for everything. The person who can pull data from three systems and present it in one dashboard will always have a job in manufacturing IT.