What is Rhize?

Rhize is a real-time, event-driven manufacturing data hub. It unites data analysis, event monitoring, and process execution in one platform. Its interface and architecture is designed to conform to your processes. We assume nothing about what your manufacturing workflows look like.

Rhize has only one strong opinion: all manufacturing objects and data must be modeled on the ISA-95 standard. This standards-based schema is how Rhize connects every data event across an entire operation. If you aren’t an ISA-95 fan, we’re happy to convert you, but adoption is a requirement to use the platform.

And if you do adopt ISA-95, you open your organization to Rhize’s far-reaching transformations.

A data hub for manufacturing

Rhize is a data hub that collects, stores, integrates, and processes data from your manufacturing system. Rhize accepts the event as the driver of change in manufacturing state. Its architecture is designed to receive and process message events emitted from the operation in real time.

To make each event coherent in the context of all others, it must conform to a standard. Rhize uses the ISA-95 standard as its data model, and the database schema is the most complete digital representation of ISA-95 in the world. The flexibility of ISA-95 scales to an entire enterprise operation, and future changes in processes require no ad-hoc changes of the schema.

The database represents data as a single graph, a structure ideally suited for the association of nodes and edges inherent in ISA-95. The database is exposed through a single GraphQL endpoint. Besides keeping the interface small, the GraphQL query language coheres exactly with the underlying graph model.

The API is totally open, meaning that your operators can use it as a backend to build any MES, MOM, and data-science applications that they want. Rhize also has a built-in low-code BPMN workflow creator, so operators can write logic to handle event data with only API calls and JSON transformation.

Finally, Rhize’s architecture supports distributed deployment, and its components are loosely coupled microservices. This clustered approach is necessary for organizations to scale horizontally and maintain high reliability.

A tool that fits to your processes

The development of Rhize is the culmination of decades of experience from real practitioners. We know that manufacturing is messy, and each process has thousands of particulars. Even within the same company and segment, processes frequently differ from site to site.

Our design philosophy empowers manufacturing operators to shape their tool for their work demands. Some examples of the flexibility include:

• A headless MES. While Rhize has a graphical interface, all data is reachable through a single API endpoint. This means your teams can rapidly build custom frontends―and do it with the most comfortable API for frontend development, GraphQL.
• Low-code interface. Model your schema and execute processes using BPMN, a visual programming language. The visual interface makes Rhize and your manufacturing automation accessible to the widest possible audience.
• Generic data collection. Rhize receives data from all levels of the manufacturing process. The NATS broker publishes and subscribes to low-level data from MQTT and OPC-UA, but the database can also receive ERP inventories and documents sent over HTTP.

Read about use cases.

Modern IT for manufacturing

Rhize’s system design is flexible, practical, and built on modern tools and practices:

• All data is accessible through a single endpoint. While the data collected and processed may span multiple segments, events, units, areas, and even plants, all data is stored in a graph database and exposed through a GraphQL interface.

• Automated and containerized deployment. Rhize brings innovations from DevOps to manufacturing. In practice, this means that Rhize is interoperable with whatever system the manufacturer uses, deployment is version-controlled, and your system can use rolling upgrades with zero downtime.

• Built on open standards. Rhize is based on open standards, like ISA-95, and open protocols, like MQTT. Open industry standards and protocols ensure that the application and your manufacturing processes speak a common language. Rhize heavily uses open-source software, which brings interoperability, reduced vendor lock, and robust tooling ecosystems.