Historians now boosting performance in real time
By Hope Neal, contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Data historians traditionally had one purpose: monitoring equipment performance by collecting specific pieces of information, such as measuring the temperature of an engine every five seconds.
Today, a new generation of data historians is bridging the gap between plant-floor and ERP systems by delivering correlated information that aids business decision-making. One analyst refers to these new offerings as enterprise historians.
"They're intended to be repositories of information—equivalent to a real-time data warehouse—that not only collect data you need to understand what's going on within the four walls of a plant, but also a place where you might roll data up for enterprisewide analysis, says Alison Smith, senior analyst with Boston-based AMR Research.
But making plant-floor data truly useful for enterprisewide analysis requires more than simply dumping the contents of a data historian into higher-level systems.
"We need to figure out the best way to connect to the enterprise environment so that we don't choke the ERP suite and flood the business processes with too much detailed data," says Gregg Le Blanc, director of product marketing for performance management software provider OSIsoft.
That's why many data historian vendors are adding application development platforms to their product suites, giving users the ability to create their own strategies for analyzing data.
"We're seeing more needs for customers beyond the historian," says Steve Garbrecht, marketing program manager for infrastructure and platform products with Wonderware. "They really need an application environment, of which one of the services is historical archiving."
OSIsoft also is pushing functionality of data historians forward. "Raw data is meaningless without some sort of context around it," says Le Blanc. "We're allowing people to construct different ways of finding and accessing data."
Eastman Kodak leveraged OSIsoft's new-generation historian platform to give context to raw operational data. The Rochester, N.Y.-based company used OSIsoft's data historian product, PI System, at the heart of a solution that is reducing utility costs by integrating data generated by several distributed control systems. The correlated information is fed into a Web-based portal that can be accessed by company employees.
"They're looking at saving a lot of money through energy management," says LeBlanc. "That comes from knowing simple things like how much energy should be used while making product versus when there are changeovers or downtime. The key to that is visibility."
