Honestly, I'm not sure which group to stick this question in. Any recommendations are helpful, as I imagine I may need to cross-post/delete this a few times to find the correct group.
Over the previous decade, we've made quite the little system of creating instances/databases, accessing vendor databases, export/import routines, connect this to talk to that, creating some really powerful reports in Excel... all the usual.
However, I have the beginning of a mandate to start centralizing all of this, standardizing/normalizing it all, etc. so that all data from all of our various machines (no matter the type or age) can dump their data for later analysis and retrievel. So for example, one machine may report on dozens of X produced and another machine at another facility may report on the same metric but as cases of dozens of X produced....