In a recent AspenTech webinar hosted by Emerson’s Adam Schindewolf, Product Marketing Manager, AspenTech Inmation, Florian Seidl, Business Unit Manager, Industrial Informatics, and Raphael Brachmaier, Senior Data Integration Engineer, both of Inmation partner cts Group, showed how WebStudio grows from a toolbox of widgets into scalable business applications. Their core message for operational technology (OT) teams: treat dashboards as applications, and build a framework around them so they can scale.

Why It Matters

OT and data teams are being asked to deliver more custom applications fed by real-time plant data. One-off dashboards are quick to build but become hard to maintain, share, and secure as use cases multiply. AspenTech Inmation™ OT Data Fabric is designed to unify, contextualize, and govern OT data from edge to enterprise and cloud. WebStudio, its web application environment, turns that data into the dashboards and business applications people use every day.

Key Takeaways

• WebStudio sits on top of AspenTech Inmation, which connects OT systems, contextualizes data in the ISA-95 equipment model, stores history, and makes data available to IT and cloud applications.
• WebStudio skills progress from beginner to intermediate to advanced through training, with expert level built through real project experience.
• A scalable framework needs defined styling, a consistent structure, reusable modules, role-based access management, and reporting.
• Development rests on four pillars: self-service, adaptation, unit tests, and continuous improvement.
• Access is governed through Inmation profiles tied to directory groups, and data sources can be set to read-only to block writes to control systems.
• WebStudio and the cts Group framework work in both classic AspenTech Inmation and AspenTech Inmation OT Data Fabric.
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Think of Dashboards as Applications

Raphael described a skill pyramid. Beginners place widgets and connect them to data, such as a historical chart or a faceplate showing a current value. Intermediate users create interactions between widgets, such as a form whose inputs change what a chart displays. Advanced users build generic, dynamic dashboards bundled into testable libraries.

Building and sharing a single dashboard is simple. You name a compilation, add text, table, and chart widgets, then export it as a JSON file that a colleague can import. But Raphael said that at scale, dashboards are full applications that need to sit inside a framework. That framework provides consistent structure and styling, reusable building blocks, role-based access, and reporting. When a new use case arrives, it becomes another application slotted into the framework using features already built, which shortens time to market.

A Development Cycle Built on Testing

The framework’s development cycle rests on four pillars. Self-service lets engineers add and change applications easily and lets end users do more on their own. Adaptation keeps existing applications easy to adjust. Unit tests cover positive, negative, security penetration, and regression cases, so teams know code still works after a platform, infrastructure, or application change. Continuous improvement ties it together with versioning and automated pipelines.

In practice, Raphael runs tests on his local Inmation system, fixes any failures, and reruns the full suite. He then pushes the code to a code hosting platform, where an automated pipeline builds a fully separate test system, checks code style, and runs the tests again. Once the code passes locally and in the separate test environment, it is ready to ship.

Inside the Application Framework Built on WebStudio

The live demo showed WebStudio styled in company colors, with a dark mode option. Users sign in with their Microsoft Entra ID credentials, and the applications each user sees are governed by Inmation permissions. Every application includes a built-in user manual, and administrators see an admin manual instead.

In a training application, Raphael navigated the equipment model to a mixing tank on a bottling line to view level history, then used a tag search to find temperature tags and copy a tag path to share with a colleague accessing Inmation data from another system such as Power BI. An events application listed alarm and event streams, allowed added columns such as system timestamp, exported data to CSV, and showed the top alarms over a selected time range.

He also built a new dashboard in build mode by dragging the tank level onto a chart widget and temperature onto a faceplate, with no back-end configuration. New compilations stay in draft until released. Once released, anyone with read permission on that area can see them, and later edits remain in draft so operators keep seeing the released version until changes are ready.

From the PLC to a Phone

A second demo connected a programmable logic controller (PLC) operator panel to a WebStudio application on Raphael’s phone over mobile data, using a simple Connect 4 game. The demo showed bidirectional interaction between the PLC and WebStudio, where actions from the phone traveled through the Inmation architecture to the PLC, while changes at the PLC flowed back through the connector, core, and secured web API to WebStudio while both screens stayed in sync. A report summarized the results afterward. Florian noted the same compilations can run in the office, on a phone, or on a shop floor operator panel.

Florian added that because the data sits behind a web service, data analysts and AI agents can query it too. The product page describes an API-first, schema-driven architecture intended to support Industrial AI, along with flexible deployment across cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments.

In the Q&A, Florian explained that permissions use Inmation profiles mapped to Active Directory or Entra ID groups, controlling both what users see and what they can change. Teams can extend out-of-the-box functions with the built-in Lua scripting language. Custom React applications are possible through the web API, but he recommended WebStudio for its ready-made widgets and resilience through platform updates. Adam noted that Inmation OT Data Fabric adds a node-based architecture and can run on ARM-based Linux edge devices.

Learn More

Unify, contextualize, and govern OT data to create trusted, AI-ready intelligence from edge to enterprise and cloud with AspenTech Inmation™ OT Data Fabric.