Choosing the right historian tools will help drive your manufacturing plant’s digital transformation.
A data historian is a software system that records the digital measurement data produced by Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors and similar devices in a single database optimized for time-series data.
Engineers rely on data historians to help them improve the performance of manufacturing plants. Here’s why they’re crucial to digital transformation and how you can get started with these powerful tools.
Where are data historians used?
Most industries implement and operate data historians as part of their digital transformation. Process manufacturing examples include chemicals, mining, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper and oil and gas. Discrete manufacturing examples include aerospace, appliances, automotive, consumer goods, distribution and semiconductor chips.
Data historians are a component of the computing infrastructure and operate where:
- The number of IIoT sensors is significant.
- Data volumes are substantial.
- High write performance or the ability to manage high data rates is required.
- Reliability, availability or uptime are critical to avoid data loss.
- Read or query demands cannot reduce or interfere with write performance.
Data historians complement supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Data historians often operate independently of SCADA systems. There is a trend of some vendors tightly integrating their data historians with their SCADA systems.
How do data historians support engineers?
Example engineering applications based on the digital data managed by data historians include:
- Prepare plant performance reporting and data visualizations.
- Perform root cause analysis of unscheduled outages to diagnose the underlying problems and recommend actions that reduce the likelihood of future outages.
- Improve operational performance to reduce required inputs or extend the facility’s operating life.
- Real-time monitoring of manufacturing processes to generate operational insights for plant optimization.
- Perform predictive monitoring to reduce the risk of unscheduled outages.
- Guide business decision-making, such as scheduling turnarounds, planning maintenance and designing upgrades.
- Respond to fluctuating market conditions by revising product mixes.
- Increase product quality consistency through quality assurance.
A significant benefit of time-series data is that it enables engineers to compare performance based on variables such as day versus night shifts, different work crews, earlier versus later production runs, material lot numbers, ambient temperature and seasons.
What is increasing the interest in data historians?
It’s difficult to say if digital transformation has increased the interest in data historians for manufacturing plants or if the availability of highly functional data historians has enabled digital transformation.
Business pressures have increased engineering interest in data historians. So has management recognition of the value of data, sometimes labelled Big Data, in advancing the business plan. Concurrently, information technology advances have made data historians feasible in more plants.
Business pressures include competitive pressure to:
- Reduce capital required by adopting better production technology and extend the operational life of plants.
- Reduce operational inputs to reduce costs.
- Increase returns on capital by increasing margins.
- Reduce waste and pollution to improve environmental performance.
These business pressures can be partially addressed by analyzing plant performance data more consistently and rigorously. Digital transformation and data historians support this task.
The following information technology advances improve the business case for data historians to advance digital transformation:
- Cheaper computing infrastructure and cloud computing costs.
- Cheaper IIoT sensors.
- More affordable network operating costs.
- More capable extract, transform and load (ETL) and data analytics software.
What are the benefits of a data historian?
Data historians streamline the gathering and managing of IIoT time series data from all monitoring points in a plant. Using analytics tools, engineers query the data historians to gain visibility into every aspect of plant operations. The visibility produces several business benefits by increasing agility, boosting efficiency and improving profitability.
The information management benefits of data historians include:
- Data accuracy and completeness: Data historians provide high-reliability data capture for confident decision-making.
- Accessibility: Data historians give end-users easy access to the collected data to analyze trends and patterns.
- Efficiency: Data historians increase data management efficiency by automating many data collection, storage, aggregation and archiving processes.
- Security: The security features of data historians protect valuable company information from unauthorized access or manipulation.
What are the steps to implement a data historian?
Choose data historian software
Engineers considering data historian software should use the following primary selection criteria:
- Compatibility with existing IIoT devices and OT infrastructure. This requirement often reduces your data historian software choice to the one offered by the supplier of your IIoT devices or SCADA system.
- Automated data acquisition and validation with support for multiple protocols.
- Data acquisition from multiple plants.
- Data aggregation.
- Ability to manage the volume of data your plant produces.
- Integrated data reporting and analytics tools or data delivery to your tools.
- Ease of integration with other systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), inventory management and production planning.
- Ease of deployment and updating.
- Ease of use for engineers and plant operators.
- Data access and security management.
- Ability to archive and restore older data.
- Ease of operation for administrators.
- Support for on-premises or cloud operation.
- Data replication for high availability failover.
- Data forwarding to a data warehouse or data lakehouse.
- Support for browser, iOS and Android access.
A significant software selection risk is picking an excessively complex and feature-rich data historian that leads to high license, deployment and operating costs or choosing simple software that cannot provide the required functionality.
Develop an integrated data system
Data historians gather the data, but that data is only valuable if engineers can extract insights from the data historian and apply them to processes. Engineers need an advanced data analytics and visualization platform with artificial intelligence (AI) functionality to produce actionable insights that guide decision-making.
Building an effective integrated data system implies integrating the data historian database with other databases such as finance, production, inventory and maintenance.
Ensure the right competencies
Alongside the right software tools, organizations need engineers with the right skills to operate the integrated data system to produce actionable insights.
Given the shortage of individuals with the right experience, an alternative strategy is proactively developing internal staff.
Open up access to insights
Ensure your insights are accessible to all your stakeholders. Finance officers, process engineers, maintenance staff, data scientists and senior executives can all benefit from the insights generated with the help of a data historian.
What happens without a data historian?
Without a data historian, the IIoT data is only used to operate the plant, but is not retained for long. Also, the data is located in various controllers scattered around the plant and is not consolidated in one location.
Without consolidation into a database and retention for extended periods, the digital data is not helpful to engineers for analysis and does not contribute to digital transformation. The IIoT data only benefits the organization for moment-to-moment plant operation.
Data historians routinely help engineers improve plant performance and advance digital transformation in their organizations.
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Yogi Schulz has over 40 years of Information Technology experience in various industries. He writes for ITWorldCanada and other trade publications. Yogi works extensively in the petroleum industry to select and implement financial, production revenue accounting, land & contracts, and geotechnical systems. He manages projects that arise from changes in business requirements, from the need to leverage technology opportunities and from mergers. His specialties include IT strategy, web strategy, and systems project management.
