Start making sense of the factory
Plant historians are evolving to the next level of analytics, and to broader markets
By April Terreri, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 10/1/2002 6:00:00 AM
When a printing facility complained about problems with the paper produced by the mill that Coleman Easterly worked for, it was Easterly's responsibility, as a technical sales representative, to research product data and determine the scope of the problem. "In those days, all of the data was trapped on paper, so it was a huge task to assemble it into information for making decisions," says Easterly, now director of sales support for Mountain Systems, a Green Bay, Wis.-based vendor of manufacturing execution software. "A few years later, with a process historian, there was a lot of process data and test data available, but the data still wasn't as useful as it needed to be, because it was not in the context of the business problem."
Manually sifting through data like this is no longer necessary, say proponents of today's plant historian software packages. These systems are becoming more affordable and scalable, vendors contend. Their ability to store vast amounts of data for a whole plant even has led to the term "plant-wide" historian, as opposed to process or data historian.
Today's historians—combined with off-the-shelf analytical applications for spotting problems such as machine downtime—are shaping up as useful tools for fixing that most vexing of issues: connecting what's happening on the plant floor with business issues such as order throughput, and return-on-assets. "If you are getting an erroneous view of what's actually happening in your plant in terms of what's being produced and what's being consumed, for example, then you don't really have a good handle on how well you are doing in your operations until it's too late," says Leif Eriksen, research director of manufacturing strategies at AMR Research, a Boston-based information technology (IT) analyst firm.
Additionally, say Eriksen and others, historians are expanding beyond continuous process manufacturing verticals like chemicals into discrete and hybrid (e.g., food & beverage) manufacturing plants. Historians also are becoming more affordable—another salient trend given today's tight budgets.
Expanded market
"Over the last 10 years, historians have almost always been installed in heavy process plants such as refining and petrol-chemical facilities, and these historian systems might have cost around $300,000," says Elliot Middleton, product manager for Wonderware Corp., a Lake Forest, Calif.-based industrial automation software vendor. "Our low-cost historian satisfies the needs of manufacturing plants in other industries that just couldn't justify this kind of investment." These industries—food, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals—might only justify an investment of between $5,000 and $20,000 for a historian, Middleton says.
One dollar per process variable is a reasonable cost yardstick, according to one user. That's just about what it's costing Ballard Power Systems, a Vancouver-based manufacturer of fuel cells, to deploy Wonderware's IndustrialSQL Server historian. "We think the cost is extremely reasonable," says William Blakeman, controls engineer. "Historically, if you had to put in a data farm or data warehouse capable of carrying that volume, you'd have been looking at a range of about $20 to $30 per variable. So it's a very affordable product for huge volumes of data storage."
Blakeman notes Ballard's research, maintenance, and production personnel are using the data for their own purposes. "One of the reasons it's been so widely accepted in our organization is the ability to get at the data easily," Blakeman says.
This decision-support aspect to the solution is thanks to a suite of client-side applications called ActiveFactory that layer over IndustrialSQL Server to provide analytics on a number of different plant metrics. By using ActiveFactory to trend a number of data points over time, says Blakeman, "it gives good information through overlaying values to see if there's been degradation, or what's happened to a particular process variable you are monitoring that you couldn't do historically."
Plant historian software is offered by vendors that include large industrial automation software vendors such as Wonderware, as well as vendors well known for their historian solutions, such as OSIsoft, San Leandro, Calif. Another major vendor of historians is Cambridge, Mass.-based Aspen Technology (AspenTech), which offers a broad range of plant, engineering, and supply chain management applications for process manufacturers. While vendors such as OSIsoft and AspenTech have strong presence in continuous process verticals, vendor competition is heating up for manufacturing intelligence solutions that cut across numerous verticals, with historians being a key product in this trend.
Manufacturing intelligence is catching on, say vendors, because companies now are looking for further gains after having deployed enterprise resources planning (ERP) and other systems at the enterprise level. Easterly acknowledges that ERP has "modernized the business of doing business," but says that for the most part, ERP deployments didn't adequately address manufacturing data. As a result, manufacturers "turned toward the plant, asking for resource consumption and manufacturing costs to get a better handle on profitability."
Mountain Systems' manufacturing execution software suite—called Proficy for Manufacturing—is not a plant historian per se, but does integrate with historians, and provides a link between plant-floor process control systems and enterprise-level systems. "You have to get the business objectives down to the plant floor and get 'reality' from the plant floor back up to the business side," says Easterly.
So, while plant historians support manufacturing intelligence, they aren't the same thing as a manufacturing execution solution, or a Web-based plant portal. "Companies like ours deliver off-the-shelf, shrink-wrapped software with a whole set of applications that are designed, out-of-the box, to leverage historians," says Mike Weas, a Mountain Systems vice president.
Nevertheless, the latest breed of historians promises to reach out to a new set of users. Tom Muth, a Wonderware product marketing manager, notes this distinct change. "Now you have people using this information beyond what you had in the past with your typical process control engineer," Muth says. These new users might include the vice president of operations searching for ways to control costs, and improve production efficiencies and capital optimizations, he adds.
"So the growth in historian usage is moving beyond the day-to-day operational aspect into broader organizational goals and initiatives," Muth says. "The plant historian is the key enabler or catalyst in allowing that to occur."
Easterly notes that accounting departments are interested in product-specific manufacturing costs. "A big problem we often solve for our customers is enabling them to know exactly how much each product costs to make by tracking the consumption of all kinds of resources in the context of each item made, and as it is made," he says. "This provides a much more accurate distribution of cost-per-product than typical methods of 'calculated consumption' based on monthly purchasing totals, and inventory changes arbitrarily distributed among each product at the end of the month."
So today, facility personnel such as plant managers, product managers, equipment operators, and even customer service representatives are using the data from historians, says AMR's Eriksen. "They are becoming increasingly dependent upon that data, though many times the historian presents data in too fine a resolution to be of much use, for example, to a customer service representative," he says. "An integration layer aggregates the data and validates it, delivering the information in a context that's useful to the person seeking the data."
Historian lessons
J. Patrick Kennedy, Ph.D., president of OSIsoft, notes four key components of an historian. These include the interfaces, the historical storage facility, the graphical user interface (GUI), and the infrastructure. The latter is "really a key part to the historian," he says. "Widespread access to long-term trend data in an enterprise requires a highly scalable and robust infrastructure—including server-side storage, presentation, and packaging—to simultaneously manage and display this data to hundreds of people." Joining real-time data with other types of information, such as batch specifications, further increases the requirements on the server infrastructure.
OSIsoft's PI System performs calculations at the server level so users can access what they want to see, whether that is volume of material, or a batch total, for example. "High-performance access requires sophisticated tools for real-time calculation, in addition to a series of mapping models to present data in a GUI format that makes sense to managers," Kennedy continues. "We've developed our software infrastructure to allow multiyear storage and high-speed access to all of the real-time factory-floor data in its original fidelity."
A scalable, effective historian helps spot and manage trends that impact productivity. "To do that, you need better information about what you are doing plant-wide," says Wonderware's Middleton, adding that scalability has to be viewed on two fronts: tag counts, and a wider range of users in the plant. Muth notes that by leveraging Invensys' ArchestrA, a plant integration framework, IndustrialSQL Server can more easily become part of a framework for manufacturing information.
"ArchestrA uses the notion of a template," explains Middleton. "Say you have 50 valves on 10 different reactors for which you need data; all you have to do is check a box in the template to historize data, and the framework automatically configures IndustrialSQL to historize 50 separate tags."
Some note that despite the trend toward pre-built analytics that layer over historians, the core historian still needs to have powerful, easy-to-use tools. Says OSIsoft's Kennedy, "These systems need to include a development environment because historians maintain the plant operational history that is required for many analyses. Users can add simple real-time calculations and programs that achieve very valuable results."
About scalability
Foxborough, Mass.-based Intellution, part of Emerson Process Management, also says its iHistorian package is affordable to a broad range of manufacturers. The historian package, says Kevin Bernier, Intellution's director of plant intelligence, is a real-time, plant-wide historian. "It's a proprietary database that integrates with the enterprise," says Bernier. He adds that traditionally, a proprietary database has not been shrink-wrapped and scalable to smaller systems, which in turn has forced smaller manufacturers to use a SQL-based database, or refrain from buying a historian.
"Our iHistorian is the first proprietary database that is high-performance, does not require integration, and is cost-effective at the low end," says Bernier. "The only way you can extract enough real-time data in the time intervals required in a plant is to have them at 20,000 values per second, and you just can't do that with a relational database."
The structure of iHistorian offers ways of reducing the storage space required. "This is important not only in terms of managing archives, but in the speed of retrieving data, and highlights why you need a plant-wide historian over a relational database," says Stephen Friedenthal, product marketing manager for iHistorian and iDowntime, a downtime analysis application that works with the historian.
Bernier and Friedenthal cite an example of a power plant that suddenly experiences a breakdown. "There is a whole chain of events that occurred within that plant contributing to that breakdown, and thousands of things are happening in a split second," says Bernier. "The ability to reconstruct the events that took place is a critical role for a plant historian, so that root-cause analysis can be performed and the cause identified. The iHistorian's 1-millisecond time resolution and 20,000 values per second continuous performance meet the industry requirement for collecting data with a precise time resolution at a very high rate of speed."
The company's infoAgent is a Web-based analysis package for accessing, analyzing, and reporting critical data. "The analysis needs to be Web-based to have an entire enterprise access it in real time," Bernier says.
Big gains possible
The Calvert City, Ky., facility of Atofina Chemicals has been saving $360,000 every year for the last four years using OSIsoft's PI software to monitor the operation of the company's pumps. "We were getting a lot of valuable information from our distributed control systems," says Dwight Stoffel, principal plant electrical and instrumentation engineer. But not being able to store that information for the long term meant the company was essentially throwing it away. "We weren't taking advantage of something that would allow us to improve our process operation, productivity, and yields," says Stoffel.
PI stores historical information for each pump, and examines the current status of each pump. When a pump shows signs of problems, the software alerts an engineer by pager. A screen link connects to a troubleshooting sheet for that pump with all the information from the PI system regarding what the operating conditions are at the moment, and what needs to be done to get the pump out of trouble. "In addition to the savings, we were able to eliminate a lot of design problems inherent in the system," Stoffel says.
Historians also have brought other enterprise-level benefits. "To properly calculate how much money you've made off your shipments, half of the information you need is in the financial system and the other half is in the plant," says OSIsoft's Kennedy. "Some of our customers are using sophisticated links into their ERP systems to show their people, in real time, margins on the orders as they are shipped."
For reasons such as Kennedy cites, plant-wide data historians are generating interest. AMR's Eriksen notes he's receiving an increasing number of calls regarding what's available, who's using plant-wide historians, and how. Says Eriksen, "The next level for data historians is to get an enterprisewide view of the performance of your operations, and to be able to compare one plant to another plant so as to be able to respond quickly to customer requests, or requests from salespeople with what is a potential market opportunity."
| Who's inside | ||
| Aspen Technology: www.aspentech.com | Intellution: www.intellution.com | Mountain Systems: www.mountainsystems.com |
| OSIsoft: www.osisoft.com | Wonderware Corp.: www.wonderware.com | |
