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."
Customers such as World Kitchen that use the Proficy Plant Applications MES can do drill-down analysis on data from both the Historian and the Plant Applications MES to feed a business intelligence tool for greater insights.
"Now, they can use that data in a much more context-aware fashion. How is line 1 performing compared to line 2? How is plant 1 performing compared to plant 2?" Wilkins says.
Other vendors have joined GE Fanuc and Wonderware by making historian functionality part of their broader plant-wide integrated suite of software. Rockwell Automation has expanded its FactoryTalk line to include MES, control, visualization, and information management. Rockwell officials say FactoryTalk plant-wide information software eases integration between a manufacturer's information network and its control network. FactoryTalk also features a new service-oriented architecture (SOA); a common set of software services, such as diagnostics; a data historian; and security.
Rockwell Automation also has a joint development agreement with OSIsoft Inc. "Rockwell and OSI together will adapt the OSI product as part of the FactoryTalk suite," says Jan Pingel, product manager for Historian at Rockwell Automation. The OSIsoft PI System gathers, archives, and processes operational data from automation and control systems. The joint development and technology licensed through this agreement will serve as the platform for a tiered, distributed historian strategy. According to Pingel, this approach represents a highly scalable and cost-effective alternative for manufacturers that want to improve insight from each level of their manufacturing system to an entire plant or across the enterprise.
Continuous Process Improvement
Hoyler has come a long way from the days of fumbling around trying to create his own historian. Now, he has a fully functional historian integrated with other factory data sources, providing the link between production and business performance.
These days Hoyler feels like the kid who got the pony on Christmas. "It is nice," he says, an understatement from someone who has spent 16 years working in factory data collection, storage, and reporting.