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by Lauren Gibbons Paul, Contributing Editor Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 4:18:16 PM   | Abstract: | Historians have been faithfully collecting plant data for years. But today's products are integrated with automation platforms and enterprise applications to flex decision-making power. |
About 10 years ago, Brian Hoyler looked into buying a data historian to use in his glass dishware plant in Corning, NY, then owned by Corning Inc. Hoyler thought a historian could help by automatically collecting furnace temperature data and storing it for later analysis to enable management to make better power-usage decisions. He received a free evaluation copy of a slick historian, but then faced the disappointment of not being able to pay for it. At about $50,000 for the application software alone, the product was beyond his budget. "I couldn't make the case, so I had to live without it," says Hoyler, manufacturing information systems engineer for World Kitchen LLC. (Corning spun out World Kitchen as a separate business in 1998.) But Hoyler wasn't willing to give up completely. He did what few others have tried: He created his own version of a historian, based on an Oracle relational database. The tool polled the control systems for temperature data every 30 seconds, but storing the data quickly became unmanageable. Hoyler learned firsthand that historians differ from relational databases in important ways. With that experiment a failure, Hoyler had to wait until 2003 before he could afford to enjoy all the benefits of a data historian. By 2003, World Kitchen's primary automation vendor, GE Fanuc Automation, was working toward an integrated historian offering, having completed its purchase of Intellution Inc. from Emerson Process Management in 2002. That acquisition netted GE Fanuc Automation not only the iFix SCADA system, but also iHistorian. Today, both go under the umbrella of the Proficy plant management suite. World Kitchen now uses iFix and the Historian, along with the Proficy Plant Applications manufacturing execution system (MES) and the Proficy Real-Time Information Portal. The link between the Proficy MES and the Proficy Historian has enabled World Kitchen's Corning plant to do root cause analysis of downtime. This directly relates to the plant's most critical metric — machine output, or what Hoyler terms "percent of possible." He explains: "If the machine ran for the whole hour, how many pieces could it have made vs. how many pieces did it actually make?" A dashboard shows managers how many more pieces could have been made if they had avoided the downtime. They can then examine the historian data to help develop a better plan for the next time. Hoyler's experience illustrates how far data historians have come in recent years. Where they used to be stand-alone repositories of time-series data, typically used in process plants, now historians are likely to be part of an integrated control system, and their use is expanding outside process industries to hybrid and even discrete manufacturing. "Historian functionality used to be an add-on thing," says Steve Garbrecht, marketing manager for platforms and SCADA at Wonderware, a business unit of Invensys plc. "Now, it's becoming much more of a mainstay of plant automation." Sphere of Influence As such, historians' sphere of influence has broadened. "They used to be limited to a station or a couple of lines," says Jack Wilkins, senior product manager for Proficy software at GE Fanuc Automation. "That was of pretty minimal value to the organization. Now, they have moved up from being a local data historian for a human-machine interface (HMI) node to being part of a much broader manufacturing intelligence system." Page : 1 2 ... NEXT |