At last after 3 decades! What are we waiting for?

Ask any process control engineer: What is the biggest problem in trying to automate on a site wide basis and he will tell you "Islands of Automation" "….it is like a car with the steering wheel in the drivers seat, the brakes in the rear passenger seat and the climate control in the engine compartment. Sure we can control most areas but we are so busy running from place to place, we never get a good overview!"

It is almost as if we have won the battles but not the war!

This phenomena is almost 100% pervasive in just about every industry in the world. The reasons for it being so widespread include:
    Multiple brands of front end devices which means we need a different interface for each,
    Lack of an inexpensive means of collecting the information from all these islands,
    Lack of an automatic way of configuring the system,
    Lack of a standard and inexpensive repository for the data and
    I hate to say this, but, we have lived with this problem so long, we had just plain given up!

But now, at last, there is a quiet revolution taking place (suspense building..)... a raft of new technologies are combining to suddenly and dramatically crack this case.

What would "cracking the case" mean'? Well if everyone on the site could go to their computer and call up any tag from anywhere on the site and see, not only the current value but also the history of that tag, and all this could be achieved in a short time frame of less than a month and at a reasonable cost! Would you say that would crack the case?

Just a dream? Too good to be true? We don't think so...In fact we'll tell you how you do it in three simple steps!

• Make a note of your PLC's, DCS's and SCADA systems on the site and purchase an OPC server (for around $600 to $800 per PLC) for each of them,
• Link in a historian like St James jHistorian (under $10,000 for 70,000 tags) and let it AutoConfig to suck up all the tags into a central database. (You choose whether you want Oracle, SQL Server or Access.)
• Connect all your users via a network to the server and suddenly ALL your users can see ALL the information from ALL the areas in glorious graphical color.
  

But once it is in the database, what tools do we need to actually get this information into a form that can be really useful?

If you want to see trend information in graphical and digital format, then you can use a trend package like jBrowser. It is a user's dream, elegant, practical and any and all tags are available in a group format. It also show all the alarms and events and you can cut and paste the information into a spreadsheet if you want.

If you want to make ad hoc inquiries and store the information in a spreadsheet, use a free package like jWorkBook.

If you want to create reports you can use jWorkBook or any of the standard reporting packages like Crystal Reports to link into the database.

OK so what else still needs to be done? Well in most cases, we recommend the creation of a few (say 4 or 5) custom graphical displays to assist the many users find their way around the information. These custom displays are essentially navigation aids and they enable the user to quickly get to the trend or alarm information that they are interested in. The displays also serve to highlight all the key information usually in a hierarchical form. I.e. the top screen shows the "Plant information, then you can drill down to an Area and from here, you can go straight into the actual real-time and historical information which is organized into logical groups. Give us a call if you need to know the best way to do this.

Is this the ultimate solution? Maybe not. But it a) neatly solves the problem that has plagued us for 30 odd years and b) provides a logical, scalable and maintainable structure for the specific applications you need to automate your site. You have won the battles, now go win the war!

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