You Have No Need for a Historian

There are a good many reasons why you wouldn't use a historian, but we believe them to all be inaccurate reasons. Having a historian is an investment, a long term investment.

Think about this: When you're looking for a place to live, are you planning on renting where you live all of your life? Or are you going to buy something to own it? In the first case, you are putting out money each month and gaining nothing. In the second case, you're also putting out money but gaining something in the end. In the long run, wouldn't it be better to find something that was a bigger payment, but you knew would give you what you needed? It's the same when it comes to your business, especially when the product that you are buying will prove your company to be more efficient, leading you to an increase of profits.

When management is worried about controlling monthly maintenance costs (short term thinking) instead of getting to the root of the problems, they must change their focus to an investment of a historian which will show them what is really happening within their process. Instead of constantly putting out fires, correct the reoccurring problems that are costing money. Long term thinking is not for impatient people, you must be a visionary leader. If you choose to continually play it safe, you will get nowhere, and this thinking will only hinder you from acting on things that have potential to make you a better business. Business is all about taking calculated risks."Get-rich-quick" schemes won't work. Don't be a short term thinker! It will hinder you from seeing better results.

"My own view is that every company requires a long-term view." - Jeff Bezos (Founder, Chairman and CEO of Amazon)

Can you think of the problems that are holding you back from being a better company? If you are not aware of your trouble areas, how will they become fixed? Is your company working at its maximum speed and efficiency? Knowing where your specific problems are will be more helpful than seeing that you have problems without solutions.

Don't be afraid of change. It is more productive to have a historian logging your data rather than the "guess and check" method. New, better inventions would not have been created had it not been for forward-thinkers willing to take a risk.

In the end, our point is to say that a historian is only going to help you. Yes, it is an investment, but an investment that will help increase profits in the long run and overall make your company more efficient! 

Is Customer Support Really Necessary?

You may be thinking: Do I really need Customer Support? Or is this something I can skip to save money? You may believe it to be unnecessary, but in the long run, you are only hurting yourself and costing yourself more money. Protect your investment in our product by renewing your annual Canary Labs Customer Support subscription!

Let's say, for example, that our latest version of product was released and you saw a feature you wished to have, but your company is not under support. The only way to get that new version is to buy the product again. If you had been under support, you would have received the newest features at no additional cost. The cheapest way isn't always the best way, especially when your company is depending on the information provided by our products.

Like a life insurance policy, are you able to buy one after you are dead? Or a health insurance policy after you have become ill? Don't wait until it's too late to be covered by our Customer Support. Do you expect your outdated software to work when it was written years before the operating system was released?

The Canary Support team hard at work

Some customers only buy support from the companies they don’t fully trust or when they believe that their product won’t have a long-lasting life. They feel since Canary Labs is very reliable, they don’t want to waste money on product support for a product that will never need supported. This is the wrong way to look at our customer support, it is more than just product support, it is more like “upgrade insurance”. Without an active Customer Support subscription any help needed will be routed to your account manager rather than our professionals.

There are many benefits to keeping up to date on your support. Outdated software means trouble. With support, you receive all the new version releases, minor updates, fixes and enhancements. Need immediate help? You have access to technical email or live help desk support from our team of highly experienced support professionals.When a problem is too difficult to describe or has not been reproduced, we even use a remote web screen sharing session so that we can solve the issue with you directly on your computer.

If you are NOT a member of our Customer Support program, you will no longer receive updates, upgrades, or technical support. If and when you find that you need these essentials, you will regret not having kept your subscription up to date.

Here's the gamble: not renewing your Customer Support. You would have to hope that our software would last 7 years without needing any support or having become outdated to stretch your money to the furthest point. But in this day and age, technology is moving quickly. Imagine something technological created 7 years ago, it may work, but is it working as well as the things created just within the last year or two. You could make it work, but how efficient is it? 

Here is the real question: Can you risk NOT collecting data?

Trend Analysis Client- the Most Important Tool

Your historical data is highly valuable. The questions to ask is: how does one get the value from their historical data? The first step is making sure that you are collecting all the data you may possibly need in the future and collecting it at the correct frequency or resolution, depending on the type of data. For instance, temperature change does not typically change very rapidly meaning that a 10 second frequency would be fine. Pressures or values should be collected more often, around 1 time per second or faster depending on the application. Collection rates can be another detail discussion. The goal is to collect data without missing the key transitions within the data stream. This old saying speaks exactly what we are trying to portray: “How do you know where you are going if you don’t know where you have been?”.

The quickest way to make a return on your investment is utilizing a great trending application. The main purpose of the trend client is to empower those who use it, by providing easy access to the data and supplying information to allow good decisions to be made. Ed Stern states that early comments from customers are, “I am starting to understand what is really happening in my process based on what the data is telling me, not how I thought it was working.” Many people make assumptions on how the system may be working, but the data doesn't lie, it provides additional insight and discovery of nuances. A quality trending component displays whether equipment has been installed properly and is running at its fullest efficiency. Additional data is needed during start-ups to verify correct processes and expectations and to enable quick troubleshooting to make corrections.

Data analysis tools answer questions that had been unsolved before. What you thought was an equipment failure may have been an operator error. What measures can be put in place to keep it from happening again? How do we achieve better efficiency without harming the equipment? These should be questions you are asking. If plant personnel is provided with easy to use tools and access to the data, they can be a great asset to a company’s success. If the data is dependent on someone else or not readily available, productivity is lost.

The trend tool needs to be intuitive, easy to use, and have the ability to make ad-hoc changes. Predefined charts don’t cut it, they could be a good starting point but the user needs the ability to add additional tags or trends quickly. You should also have the capability to easily scroll back in time or look at different time intervals from minutes, weeks, or months of data. When these capabilities are present, the user will start asking questions and investigating the process for efficiency, long-term trends, and can come to intelligent conclusions based on data and not hearsay. This will lead to the next level of questions and may require utilizing additional capabilities such as calculated trends and alarm notifications as the user becomes more dependent on the data and its value. Ease of use means these trending tools can be learned within an hour or so via short training videos. The money saved on the purchase is wasted when time is lost at a week or more of training classes at the supplier's facility. 

Everything comes down to empowering the user with the data and tools needed to be productive. The monitoring of valuable assets and processes along with the investment of historian and trending tools will pay for itself many times over because of the operational information provided to the owners. When dealing with government agencies, a better trust relationship will be developed when the authorities know that the data is consistent and provides all the facts. The ability to allow user annotations contained within the data is also very helpful to explain data anomalies such as re-calibration of equipment to explain what happen in the data reports. When your data management is under control, offering you the answers you need, good decisions can be made to increase your business productivity instead of being in firefighting mode to keep the business running. Don't toil in vain, which is meaningless and striving after the wind. Choose tools that will improve your company's processes and productivity!

The 800 Pound Gorilla vs the Canary

This is a story about two companies, each sell similar products and services. Both companies have been around for many years and address a specific market niche. Each company has good products, loyal clients, and a high retention rate for repeat sales. The gorilla has an aggressive marketing department. The canary is singing a song of warning.

The gorilla is pushing company leaders to standardize on their products. The gorilla states they are a very successful company that collects, stores, archives, analyzes, and displays time series data. One person within the gorilla company claims they only make profit by having little to no competition. They also shared that they have a decrepit code base, poor communication, no innovation, and overall the company is flat. This is proof that the gorilla will tell others, even inside their company, inaccurate information to make it seem like they are the only company in the market. 

In the great free enterprise system we are in, sometimes the gorilla wins and sometimes the canary wins, all depending on which company best fits the needs of the client. The canary gets frustrated on projects when existing clients are blindsided with corporate standardization that has chosen the gorilla over the canary. The client is upset because they had not been notified, by their corporate management, of any evaluation or were allowed input, but were told to accept the results after the fact. Now the client needs to move many years of data from the existing canary system to the new mandated gorilla system. Being under support, the process can be done quickly with the canary tools at a minimal charge. When the roles are reversed, the gorilla needs to be fed with a lot of lettuce to use his tools.

Many companies are taking shortcuts and are not doing the proper evaluation process to determine what is the best long-term solution. The decision determines direction for 10 years. Once it is made, it is hard to reverse or admit it was a mistake. When a company decides to collect and utilize the value of historical data, do a full evaluation and focus on the important needs that are used daily. Don’t be distracted by the minor one-time decisions or listen to misinformation, do your research. For instance, the gorilla claims to have many direct connections that are more efficient than standard protocols. This may or may not be true. Has anyone challenged this? The gorilla claims they have many analysis tools, but in reality, it is their third-party partners that own these tools. These partners are not treated as partners, as pricing information is withheld from them. The partner is forced to only sell their part of the solution and not get anything for the total solution.

Don’t complain about the lettuce to feed the gorilla if you are not willing to make a change. Some companies make the canary fly through hoops and the gorilla may come back with pricing concessions. If you want competition in the market place, it is there. Do the proper evaluation; there are better companies and solutions available. Don’t believe everything the gorilla tells you. Make the long-term decisions that are best for your company, not what is comfortable for you for a short time.

In conclusion, bigger is not always better. The flexibility and personalized support of smaller organizations can provide a lot of value. It comes down to what your preferences really are: the grunting of the gorilla demanding lots of lettuce or the sound of the canary singing a sweet melody of valuable solutions. The choice is up to you: let those who have ears hear.

What Should You Be Looking for in a Historian?

So you see your need for a historian. Where do you go from there? A false assumption is that all historians are the same. The proof is in the results. Here are some things to look for:

Stores Long-term Data
A main essential to having a historian is being able to store years' worth of data. If your maximum storage capacity is 6 months to 1 year worth of data before having to offload or archive data, you may want to reconsider what you believe a true historian to be. If your trend or client tools cannot access years of available data in a quick manner, you will face problems. This may seem to be more of a luxury, but it is an huge part of having a historian.

Easy Access to the Data you Need
The purpose of the historian is having quick and easy access to process data. You should not have to rely on IT to take days to find the data requested. Having chronological data is fundamental to finding automation, control and equipment problems.

The Ability to Quickly Identify Issues
When you already have the qualities mentioned above, you will be using this historical information and easy to use off the shelf tools to learn about the interaction between process and equipment data that had not been apparent in the past. This also helps in identifying other problems, including maintenance issues. This should be an on-going process, as the users learn more, there are more questions to research and may require additional data to be collected. The data doesn't lie.

Reliable
Are you dealing with:

-Holes in your data?
-Unreliable systems?
-Disk or file limitations?
-Limiting your data?
-Slowing your scan rates to accommodate for length of data?

These all point to one thing: trouble. It may be time to rethink your choice of your historian. These problematic issues can be avoidable, but only if you have the right product.

Monitoring Tools
Are you able to find out information like: The CPU and memory usage for different programs? Does your historian inform you of your update rates and throughput? How many clients and data loggers or collectors are attached? Your historian should also be able to compare other products and processes if anyone wants to evaluate performance parameters. Your historian should provide these answers with monitoring tools for the management of the system and health of the PC or server. If you don’t measure it, you don’t have peace of mind.

Ease of Use- without weeks of training

The definition of “ease of use” is not the same between different companies. Your historian is NOT easy to use if you have to go to 1 week or multiple weeks of training. The software should be intuitive for the majority of users and able to learn by use after 2-4 hours of instruction. Why over-complicate the situation for the users?

Up to Date Software

If your supplier is not constantly making product improvements, they will be left behind quickly. Is the maker of your current Historian concerned about staying up to date and fixing current problems? Users should have flexibility in arranging the display layout and formatting. The user interface must follow standard conventions. It must be simple, obvious and easy to learn. Users should not be required to press a refresh button to see accurate data after changing a display setting.

Not all historians are the same, Canary Labs proves that. Canary Labs Enterprise Historian is set apart from the others, all of these problems that you may face with other historians are eliminated. The Canary Labs Enterprise Historian provides you with each of the above mentioned essentials, to better your company's process, enabling you to work more efficiently. 

Canary Labs Integrity

A company’s values start at the top and trickle down through the whole organization. The leadership at Canary Labs has always focused on providing value and quality products to the end-user. Emphasis has always been on long term growth, not short term profits, this is why the terms 'high performance' and 'small footprint' are significant. 

Programming and designing software products is an art. Canary Labs senior programmers were trained in a time when memory and CPU hardware resources were very limited. 30 years ago, programmers had to spend days at a time organizing and optimizing their code. With today’s tools, the philosophy is productivity and there is always more powerful processors and unlimited memory to make your program run faster. Canary Labs engineers focus on effective engineering practices, knowing when to optimize the code versus the productivity of turning out code.

"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do." - Lewis Cass

Efficiency is highly important when dealing with time-series data. The design of the database determines the speed to write data, read data, and the space in which to store the data. Canary Labs has specialized in the management of time-series data since the beginning of the company. Historian and trending tools provide users easy access to the data needed, in order to make informed decisions.
  

Another saying here at Canary Labs is that software is never done. As soon as our engineers think they have added all the necessary features, it is probably time to do a major redesign to the software to take advantage of the latest technologies available. We typically see this occurring every 7-10 years with minor improvements throughout the life of a product. If your supplier is not constantly making product improvements, they will be left behind quickly. Another advantage we practice at Canary Labs is examining how the customer uses the product daily, searching for how to make the product more efficient according to customers. Also, if the same recurring questions come up in customer support, the software should be redesigned to eliminate those questions.

We appreciate positive feedback from our customers and often are told that our product provides value many times over while exceeding their expectations. This also means that our work is never done.

The Canary Labs Enterprise Historian Means No Tunneling Software Needed

Canary Labs Enterprise Historian is an excellent tool for use as a local or centralized historian. The Canary Historian incorporates functions that allow data to be transferred securely and reliably through networks, internet firewalls, or satellite communications. No extra tunneling software is needed which can incur additional costs, licensing and reliability issues.

Third Party Software

The Canary Labs historian provides easy network management and enhanced security.  The advantages of the Canary system eliminates the need for VPN connections and messy DCOM configurations. The Canary historian also provides the options of encryption and data compression if required. Tools are also provided to throttle data throughput to allow other critical applications the necessary bandwidth for real-time operations. The Canary Labs Enterprise historians allow for remote connectivity in two ways. First, at the data collection side with store and forward capabilities built into the Canary logger or collector software, and second, with the Canary Labs Mirroring service to replicate local historian data to centralized locations in either a scheduled mode or in real-time depending on what is preferred. All these features are included at no extra charge. 

When introducing third party tunneling software, the user runs the risks of increased costs, increased configuration connection issues, increased licensing issues and risk of maintainability and reliability. Canary Labs expertise has always been able to provide easy to use software to exceed customer expectations. Customers say “It just works!” and can focus on their job rather than wasting time with data issues.

Remote Connection with Canary Labs Historian

In conclusion, if you are burdened with poor network setups, unreliable network infrastructures such as satellite or wireless networks, or have multiple remote sites to manage, then the Canary Labs Enterprise Historian may be a solution for you. Make your process data easily available to the necessary people and remove guess work from decisions while increasing your company’s efficiency and profitability.

Benefits:

   ·         Allows data to be transferred securely and reliably through firewalls

   ·         Remote connectivity

   ·         Ease of use and maintainability

   ·         No VPN connections

   ·         Eliminate DCOM

   ·         Easy network and throughput data management

   ·         Encryption and data compression if desired

   ·         Enhanced Security

   ·         Increased reliability with no loss of data 

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."