Five reasons to maximize the value of your InTouch HMI with Historian

Posted: October 15, 2019

If you’re among the 35% of all industrial facilities using InTouch HMI, you will have already seen how it helps optimize production, shorten project timelines, and reduce risk and total cost of ownership. But, as powerful as InTouch HMI is on its own, it is only one part of the story.

As an organization, your ability to unlock operational improvements is correlated to your ability to capture, store and analyze high-fidelity industrial big data. This kind of industrial data management is critical to making truly informed choices. That’s why implementing a historian on top of your InTouch HMI investment can help you detect the root cause of problems, avoid equipment failures, and gain significant operational returns.

Many companies have found this. For example, adopting AVEVA Historian on top of InTouch HMI has helped:

• A Global S&P 500 food company reduced energy consumption by 5-10%.
• A mining organization proved an insurance claim for millions of dollars.
• One organization avoid multiple gearbox failures within a week of installing.
• Many organizations increase production by up to 30%.

If you’re looking to make sense of your industrial data, then adopting Historian on top of your HMI solution makes sense for many reasons. Today I wanted to share five of my favorite reasons – which I have seen transform businesses time and again:

1. Superior collaboration, better decisions, higher productivity

Historian provides quick access to accurate historical data from distributed InTouch HMI nodes, arming your operators with actionable insights so they can make better decisions and drive productivity.

With Historian, all historical data is readily available to each InTouch HMI node, and it can also be displayed using the trend built into InTouch HMI. For more demanding needs, Historian Client provides ad hoc trends, scatter plots, and robust scripting control.

2. Centralize and aggregate your data

Historian collects and aggregates data from the multiple sources you have in your facility, not just those from AVEVA, delivering a single source of the truth for operational data.

To get a deeper understanding of your operation, you can analyze data using advanced statistical calculations in Historian and drive continuous improvement.

You can also configure Historian servers in a cascading architecture or “tiering” so that data from many smaller Historians can be aggregated into a top-level ‘master’ historian.  With that, data from remote locations can be easily combined into a central command and reporting center.

3. Never miss a detail

Conventional relational databases may be satisfactory for business data storage, but industrial automation systems require fast, high resolution, reliable data acquisition that relational databases are simply not designed to handle.

Missing a key data point during a critical change or in the event of catastrophic failure can mean the difference between finding the root cause and losing it altogether.

Historian is designed for the industrial enterprise, and is capable of acquiring and retrieving data thousands of times faster than Microsoft SQL Server. Historian is a high-performance real-time database capable of storing up to two million tags in a single historian database.

4. Flexible and straightforward reporting

Historian Client provides amazingly simple access to operational data, excellent trending tools and multiple reporting tools including Query, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word plug-ins. These greatly expand your flexibility to create different reports for different needs easily.

5. Better root-cause analysis

Historian, combined with Historian Client, provides powerful reporting and analysis features with an integrated view of process, alarm and production history. It features trends, overlays, “drill-throughs,” and even direct access to source data at high fidelity and low latency. These features enable you to easily navigate through data and break down the problem into its components.

Don’t just take our word for it

We consistently find that companies who add Historian to their software arsenal get more from their HMI investment:

• Two-thirds of Historian users surveyed reported improving product quality more than 5%.
• Over half of users surveyed improved production by at least 10%.
• Over 70% of users surveyed increased production uptime by 5% or more.

Want to learn more about historians?

Download our, “Myths about Historians” Whitepaper to learn the real facts about historians, relational databases, and the common misunderstandings that pervade the industrial automation world.

Already using InTouch HMI?

Register for our webinar and learn from Elliott Middleton, Product Manager for AVEVA Historian, how you can get more from your InTouch HMI with Historian.