A powerful use case for Flow is the collection of information from multiple production sites into one Headquarters (or Regional Office) Flow System for comparison, benchmarking and production planning purposes. Flow handles this requirement through the Flow Tiered Deployment Architecture, providing information at all levels within an organization (i.e. an Enterprise Information Platform).
The “Site” level Flow Systems will push information up to the “Head Quarters” Flow System as and when that information is available. Similarly, Flow will also push any user commentary up to the “Head Quarters” Flow System. This ensures decision support context for all information is available at all levels.
Where template configuration is used within an organization’s Flow Systems, the tiering architecture allows for templates to be developed and maintained at the Head Quarter level systems, and then be pulled down to the “Site” level systems. This allows for rapid rollout of KPI systems, as well as standardization across an organization’s sites.
In this architecture, Flow becomes the standard information layer across an organization’s production sites, even if they have disparate control systems or data sources.
Note that there is practically no limit to the number of tiers a tiered architecture could have. For example, a third tier could be added to the above architecture. A Global Head Quarters Flow System could collect information from multiple Regional Flow Systems, that each in turn collect information from multiple Site Flow Systems.
For more information on configuring a tiered architecture, see Data Consumer - Flow Consumer (used when "Tiering" Flow systems)