TechCrunch
As factories and manufacturing facilities have gotten "smarter" through sensors, robotics and other connected technologies, this has created a potential treasure trove of data that can be mined for insights on bottlenecks and other areas for improvement. While big data analytics has for years been a mainstay of industries such as finance and logistics, it hasn't fully made its way into the manufacturing realm. This has created an untapped gold mine of insights, and more recently a nascent market for technologies designed both to capture and make sense of a vast array of manufacturing data.