The Nordic energy and process industry is waking up to the era of digitalization and beginning its digitalization journey. With large amounts of data being generated from almost every industrial activity, it can be difficult to decide where to start. The most appealing area for leveraging digitalization is undoubtedly in increased process efficiency and energy efficiency, as well as improved availability. These improvements can be achieved by using the process experience of historical data in the control of both the process and operations through digitalization.

In the process industry, digitalization applications are based on process data, which mainly consists of measurement values. Measurement data inevitably includes measurement errors, measurement uncertainty, and instrument drift. These characteristic properties of measurement data must be kept under control through continuous quality assurance of measurement data in order for digitalization applications to create value.

Process data mainly consists of measurement values from analog measuring instruments, which are always associated with a certain measurement uncertainty. Measuring instruments are always more or less unstable, meaning that the measured values usually exhibit a certain degree of temporal drift.

If measured values are used for billing between two parties, their uncertainty and drift can, in the worst case, undermine the entire billing process. If process data is used to draw conclusions about the process, errors and drift can completely distort the analysis results and lead to misleading conclusions.

Acceptable quality of measurement data means that the measurement values are traceable to international measurement standards, the measurement uncertainty is continuously controlled and sufficiently small for the purpose. Additionally, it must be ensured that all stages of handling and transmission of measurement data are covered by quality control.