Are You Taking Advantage of Your Historical Process Data?

Many companies do not realize the advantage that historical process data can have in saving companies time and money. Do they really know the value of the data? Ed Stern, Vice President of Canary Labs, discusses his experience in the matter:

"Over the past 29 years at Canary, I have been observing how many companies are obtaining great value from their historical data. There are many ways to utilize this data depending on what is important to monitor for the customers’ needs and areas of responsibility. Usually it is unique for each client and in some cases, the client keeps these KPI's (key performance indicators) secret as they can be game changers for their companies.

The first decision to be made is the commitment to collect historical data. Collecting reliable and continuous data requires an investment in a true historian. Often companies try solutions that are not very effective. Utilizing the historical data collection mechanism of any HMI will not give you the results you need. With these systems, a user would be lucky to get 1 to 3 months of data online before the need to dump data due to the typical reading and writing performance problems that appear. Also typical problems that would appear, would be “holes” in the data stream due to the starting and stopping of the HMI for routine system changes and updates. Canary has also evaluated different DCS systems (distributed control system) and have found their historical data collection solutions to be very weak. Many times the user cannot get access to the data needed without monumental and days of work to round up some data that should take minutes in a true historian. Other factors are the availability of easy to use tools for your data analysis of trends over time and easy access to put the data into Microsoft Excel quickly.  Other tools to assist the user would be data management tools for data files, file verification, reporting tools and possibly alarm notification of certain variables.

The value from their historical data that companies can achieve will quickly equate to great returns on their historian investment. By giving employees access to this data, people will start to understand what is going on in their manufacturing process instead of 'gut guesses'. The data doesn’t lie. Was the incident an equipment failure or operator error? Could it have been prevented? Did the equipment show signs of failure over time and could proactive action been taken to prevent an unscheduled shutdown? Can your trend tools provide ad hoc building of charts to show the root cause of problems? How do variables react to one another, or are their relationships between these variables that were never realized before? Can you provide real historical data for studies instead of months of research time for studies and reports that are best guesses?  

These are some typical questions that get answered. It is usually a process that leads to asking other questions and finding the data and answers. This promotes ideas to ask other questions to increase further efficiencies and pro-active ways to increase profit margins.  Learning and software are never done. The question is what is the next step?

Take the next step and talk to a solution provider at Canary Labs. Start making your data sing like a Canary!"

Before Things Go Out of Control

Solutions Consultant, Don Mast, talks about providing more safety in oil refineries across the country. One way to do this is through the tools Canary Labs provides:

"With increased focus on the booming oil and gas industry by the media, the government, groups against anything gas, and health & safety industrial organizations, more needs to be done to prevent accidents upstream, midstream and downstream. 

Refineries convert raw materials into usable product.

Fact: Workers at American oil refineries die on the job about three times as often as their counterparts in other countries.  One example of this is Tesoro, a Washington state refinery that exploded in 2010, killing seven people. Recently the U.S. Chemical Safety board who investigates our nation’s worst industrial accidents says, that on average, across the nation there’s a significant accident at an oil refinery once every three days.  Companies’ report all the time that they are missing data or chunks of time and when that data is gone, bad things can happen including injuries, downtime and massive fines.  With all the technology available, this can be reduced and prevented. The answer is data.

Canary Labs, a leader in information solutions for the oil and gas industry, is working with global oil and gas companies, pipelines, drillers, and refining companies to protect workers and equipment, reduce production and exploration costs, improve process and production metrics while providing the data needed to drive crucial decisions before things at the job site go out of control.

Utilizing the latest technology, Canary Labs open, flexible and high performance enterprise software runs around the clock to monitor equipment and process metrics by collecting data via the Canary Historian and presenting both real-time and historical data trends, allowing operators to have a good understanding of the current plant / job site conditions. Similarly, Canary Labs software tools provide operators access to invisible variables that are not easily detected; providing early warning alerts to problems that can be resolved before they become a disaster. Solutions are deployed as a simple single site solution or as a complex distributed enterprise resource. 

Driving innovation in the data industry, Canary Labs technology allows operators to collect data from distributed or remote sites and safeguards that the data are sent to the historian in event of a communication outage. Furthermore Canary’s Axiom trending solution, AxiomTrend, is an intuitive and easy to use data analysis tool. It visually transforms process data into knowledge. It empowers operators, engineers, and managers to stay connected while using a common analytical tool for viewing data anywhere at any time via mobile devices. With increased scrutiny on the industry by governments and anti-gas groups, Canary Labs provides streamlined detailed reporting for regulatory compliance. 

“Canary Trending is an invaluable tool in our refinery. It runs around the clock, 24/7. Over the last 14+ years, Canary has provided quality products that utilize the latest technology.” Kevin Moran, System Engineer, Delaware City Refinery “As a trending tool, we like the flexibility in how it’s configured and the ease of use. Users can drag and drop to add trends to the chart and save charts for later recall. The speed is a big plus, allowing users to quickly scan and find historical data they want to see. Users can access overview charts and then quickly drill down to see detailed data. The user doesn’t have to be a genius to figure things out.”

Randy Walker, Control Systems Engineer says, “Canary is a valuable tool allowing us to graphically review archived data for maintenance issues and performance. Templates can be saved of commonly reviewed trends for quick future access. The export utility is used to generate viewed trends into reports for distribution. This trending software has proven to be a valuable asset in our day to day operations.” 

For nearly 30 years, Canary Labs has been a game-changer in the oil and gas, industrial automation, energy production and distribution sectors delivering world-class, real-time data historian and trending tools with a focus on safety and solutions." 

Finding a Cost Effective Enterprise Historian

In another guest post, our Senior Software Engineer, Ken Wyant, explains the hardships of coming up with your own data solution:  

Finding a solution that works may be easier than you think.

"When companies search and evaluate historians for enterprise wide data, many are hesitant to commit to the cost of a true time-series historian. Many times they respond with the answer: “We are going to try and come up with our own solution”. However, what is overlooked is the technical expertise and experience required to store and retrieve the massive amounts of historical and real-time data required for the facets of the business. They think that they can come up with a more cost efficient solution. The problem is that this solution, in the long run, ends up costing the company more, takes longer to build and implement, and it fails to achieve the results that they intend or lacks the desired performance. Often times companies who try to build their own solution, end up coming back and regretting that decision. The negative outcome most often results in the company going back to the solution they originally had tried to avoid: switching to a true enterprise historian.

Usually the perceived cheaper solution that a company comes up with, entails a relational database, such as SQL server or Oracle. These databases normally don’t have an issue with the storage of large amounts of data. However, when it comes to reading and retrieving the data, you quickly find limitations. Often you’ll find scheduled jobs to trim the tables or archive older data to another table or maintenance plans to rebuild indexes periodically. Why? Because performance starts degrading and they don’t have any options except to manage the amount of data online and readily available. A true time series historian won’t require you to lop off data or rebuild indexes weekly OR require data to be moved offline in case you might need to access it again.

Can a company build their own solution that works? Perhaps for a while. But at the same time, it won’t work the way that they expect or envisioned it to. You want the data, and you want it fast. You don’t want all of the data, you want specific results. If that describes you, than maybe you should skip the attempt at developing a home grown solution and allow Canary Labs to provide you with the long term solution that you need.

There is great value in your data if you can get access to it. We find that the companies that commit to this investment with Canary will many times get their return on investment within a few months. Those that work closely and develop the partnership relationship with Canary benefit even more as ideas and innovative techniques are offered, exchanged and developed for game changing solutions for their companies. The Canary Labs mission is to provide superior value to our customers and develop long-term client relationships that exceed customer expectations. Maybe it is time to see what Canary Labs can do for you!"