Connect, Store, View Real-Time Data
Connect to any machine,
PLC, or device
Store in a Process Historian or SQL or both
View anywhere, Panel, Mobile, Dashboard
Plant and Enterprise Industrial Solutions
Connect to any machine, PLC, or other devices. Augment what you have store on premise or cloud. Gain visibility from any device, dashboard, scoreboard, mobile. We are getting customers connected and they are seeing business results. Many of our projects are directly related to Industry 4.0 and Manufacturing 4.0 initiatives.
Experienced and Designed to work with your Control (SCADA) Systems
and your data
We work with what you have to get you where you’re going . We call it open and layered to get the most out of your existing systems at any layer of your plant floor systems. And we use an Open approach to prepare you for future connectivity needs. Gain visibility from any device, dashboard, scoreboard, mobile. We work closely with you every step of the way to make sure you get what you want.
Process Historians
Get what you need from a Historian. A secure time-series database, with great trending and reporting a great cost
Dashboards and Scoreboards
We create actionable Dashboards or Scoreboards with real-time information Dashboards can provide metrics and trends, alerts and notifications
Data Collection Now
Get started now and get results fast, add a new or tough system and collect now, or track downtime or OEE, proven & low cost.
Alarms and Notifications
Multiple alarm levels, logging, scripts. Notification by email, SMS. Acknowledge, display and act. Automatically log all actions for audit.
Manufacturing Events
Easily create manufacturing events for downtime, OEE, batch events, waste events to tack, report, and notify based on key events.
Trending Analysis
Flexible trending and data analysis from any historian. Auto discover tags and asset frameworks. Reusable symbols and components.
Open and Universal – Fit Into Your Existing Infrastructure
There are a many applications and systems in your environment. As we work with you, we will be able to better understand the applications you use, and what data is inside of those systems and how we can assist. Most applications have valuable data, and we can combine some of the data with real-time data to achieve the results you need. For example, typically ERP systems utilize standards and not actual real-time data for some decisions and forecasts. If ERP had “real” data from the plant floor, it would make better decisions and forecast in near real-time.
Data is the foundation of making decisions
The value of data collection with process historians is well understood and is the basis for Industry 4.0 on premise and in the cloud.
We have Customers in every industry that get value from their process historians, like:
- Real-time and historical analysis (troubleshooting & analytics)
- Reduce data management costs
- Connect islands of production information and remove barriers to decision-making
- Provide a “single source of the truth” with a common data foundation and consistent reporting
- Safeguard data assets with robust redundancy, high availability, and security
Process Historians and Data Collection
We are experts at getting data in to and getting data out of Process Data Historians.
If you already have a historian installed, we can help you get more out of the data or we can help you evaluate what process historian will fit your needs. We can also help you migrate data from any historian to any historian or cloud-based data store for analytics.
Connect to Anything
We are experts at connecting to any machine or plc or any device. We utilize standards like MQTT, OPC UA, Modbus, and more
Dashboards and Scoreboards
We create actionable Dashboards or Scoreboards with real-time information Dashboards can provide metrics and trends, alerts and notifications
Integrate to ERP and More
We have experts that can unlock your data in real-time and interact with ERP system or others including SAP, Oracle, and MS
Alarms and Notifications
Multiple alarm levels, logging, scripts. Notification by email, SMS. Acknowledge, display and act.
Event Detection
Easily create manufacturing events for downtime, OEE, batch events, waste events to tack, report, and notify based on key events.
Trending Analysis
Flexible trending and data analysis from any historian. Auto discover tags and asset frameworks. Reusable symbols and components.
Data Collection Now
Is what we call a “quick start” to tackle data collection in a targeted area that you identify. This is meant to get a quick result and proof point based on your needs. Get connected to your control system, collect data, and provide some trend reports to visualize the data. We also can do “quick starts” with Downtime and OEE solutions.
Click on the solution to learn more!
- Data Collection Now
- Historian
- KPI / Manufacturing Events
- Trends
- Alerts
- Reports
- Scoreboards
- Dashboards
- Upgrade Applications
- Replace Legacy Application
- Upgrade OS / Servers
- Virtualization
- Rearchitect
- Mobile
- Thin / Zero Deploy Clients
- OEE , Downtime
- Track & Trace, Serialization
- Quality Management
- Costing / Scheduling
- Manufacturing Metrics (KPI)
- Scoreboards and Dashboards
- Eliminating Paper
- Automating Manual Process
- Interface to ERP, WMS, CMMS
- Data Collection
- Edge Computing
- Data Aggregation in Context
- Data Lakes – Cloud / On Prem
- Digital Twin
- Predictive Analytics
- Data Science
- ML – Machine Learning
Simple Plans to Get There
Data Collection Now – Get started with collecting data to analyze your process. You can be collecting data and seeing trends in real-time via your web browser in 1 to 5 days depending on the complexity of your data analysis needs.
- Initial half day walkthrough with our engineers to get details and prepare for installation
- Load software or use existing software and establish data collection
- Create portal views and reports
Simple OEE – This is a way to get started with OEE and realize some outcomes and results in two weeks or less on one line. (This includes a loss and waste analysis study using your data.) You get:
Simple DT Reporting – Includes above but focuses on Downtime monitoring, reason code capture and reporting. (This includes an analysis on the cost of your downtime using your data.)
Scoreboards, Dashboards, and Mobile
Get the data from your systems and visualize the data on any device. We help with UI design specifically for your application based on the information you need to see to make the right decisions in a timely manner. Our experience comes from designing 100s fo systems from SCADA to Shop Floor Based interfaces to ERP.
- Build Dashboards to connect to your Real-Time Data
- Connect to any SQL, SCADA or Process Historian
- Combine Data types for analysis
- Trigger alert events based on data event
- Mobile, Desktop Dashboard, or Large Scoreboards
How to Get Started
We schedule a walk through to assess your needs and evaluate the appropriate path forward with you. A member of our team will walk your facility and do a brief plant readiness survey, the results of the survey will be a proposed path forward.
*We can do most of this remote if needed
FAQ
The general consensus is to collect everything you think you might need. Both time series and events. Analytics will always be better the more it uses “big data”. Historians give you a great start for time series data, which can also later be used to create events. Storing event digitally in databases give you a big head start. Manually recorded data can be used, but the cost of data entry and accuracy of the data can be a limiting factor.
If it communicates we can likely talk to it. If it supports standards like OPC and MQTT it is plug and play. If it is a published protocol we likely have a driver available today, and if we do not, a driver can quickly be developed. One potential issues can be not knowing what “data” is in the PLC, and how to get to the “tags” if it is an OEM machine. A quick call with one of our engineers can typically answer the question.
The key is to use analytics to resolve a particular issue. Understand the issue, and what “variables” might influence that issue, and make sure the data is collected. They start applying analytics tools, which in many cases can be as simple as trend charts, reports, or dashboards. Use of Data Science or other analytical tools may be required. INS can help design those projects with you.
For decades time based collection has been in Historian’s and SQL databases. In general SQL loggers have limitations at some point in amount of tags and/or total amount of data where the system performance fails, where Historian are designed to scale easier. As computing power and SQL have gotten more efficient the line has moved, but still is an issue. The are modern “NoSQL” databases that handle time series better while not being a traditional Historian.
This can be as simple as understanding how the two sides can communicate, and set it up. But there are many potential pitfalls, such as you do not want to query all of the data consistently because of the amount of data. At the same time, how will you handle when a piece of data changes in the past needs to be accounted for. Universal name spaces are key to combining data from multiple sites. Design is key.
Properly designed systems can combine manual data with automatically collected data. All manual data has a cost and accuracy concern, but in many case can not be avoided. For example you can automate the collection of downtime and reasons on a machine, but that time the operator hits cycle stop or e-stop, it is important to collect the reason why they pressed the button.