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!"
