The machine, the measurement setup or the device at your customer's site knows something. Your ERP, your planning or your accounting knows something else. In between, there's usually a person with a spreadsheet.
That gap stays because two kinds of people look at it. The software vendor knows your back office and stays away from the device. The installer knows the device and never touches your software. Both are right about their own half.
At Veton, he walks that whole chain himself, every day, from the enclosure to the ERP. For the electronics he works on existing platforms like ESP32 and Arduino: he writes the firmware, connects them, and keeps them updated remotely. He doesn't design printed circuit boards from scratch. The same approach works just as well when there's no device involved at all.