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Start making sense of the factory: plant historians are evolving to the next level of analytics, and to broader markets. (make).

Article Excerpt
When a printing facility complained about problems with the paper produced by the mill that Coleman Easterly worked for, it was Easterly's responsibility, as a technical sales representative, to research product data and determine the scope of the problem. "In those days, all of the data was trapped on paper, so it was a huge task to assemble it into information for making decisions," says Easterly, now director of sales support for Mountain Systems, a Green Bay, Wis.-based vendor of manufacturing execution software. "A few years later, with a process historian, there was a lot of process data and test data available, but the data still wasn't as useful as it needed to be, because it was not in the context of the business problem."

Manually sifting through data like this is no longer necessary, say proponents of today's plant historian software packages. These systems are becoming more affordable and scalable, vendors contend. Their ability to store vast amounts of data for a whole plant even has led to the term "plant-wide" historian, as opposed to process or data historian.

Today's historians--combined with off-the-shelf analytical applications for spotting problems such as machine downtime--are shaping up as useful tools for fixing that most vexing of issues: connecting what's happening on the plant floor with business issues such as order throughput, and return-on-assets. "If you are getting an erroneous view of what's actually happening in your plant in terms of what's being produced and what's being consumed, for example, then you don't really have a good handle on how well you are doing in your operations until it's too late," says Leif Eriksen, research director of manufacturing strategies at AMR Research, a Boston-based information technology (IT) analyst firm.

Additionally, say Eriksen and others, historians are expanding beyond continuous process manufacturing verticals like chemicals into discrete and hybrid (e.g., food & beverage) manufacturing plants. Historians also are becoming more affordable--another salient trend given today's tight budgets.

Expanded market

"Over the last 10 years, historians...

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