Data historian based plant reporting system
August 2003
Data Acquisition & Telemetry
Infrastructure
Data logging has long been a subject of interest to most departments in industries of all nature and has been achieved with varying degrees of success in numerous ways. The data logging industry has also provided various reporting systems to view the logged data. These are often cumbersome and require some degree of programming skills to generate. The reporting systems have improved over time but many still do not provide a single package (albeit of various technologies) to provide the system interface, data logging, data storage and easy presentation of the data when and how required.
eTX Data Services believes that the correct approach is:
1. Install a data historian that interfaces to one or many control systems, is configurable to log the data (or points) at the rate and scaling required and stores this data in a standard database.
2. Install the easy-to-use tools on the users' PCs to extract the required data as required to produce the reports using standard tools such as Excel.
3. Ensure that you are not limiting your reporting flexibility by expensive user licence requirements.
4. Ensure that these are proven and standard components.
This system is relatively low cost, flexible enough for the users and/or administrators to configure the data historian and the reports - and is expandable to accommodate more plant. The choice of databases, being standard and widely used products, also allows various other report generation tools to access the stored data as well.
Areas in industry that could benefit from eTX Data Services' offering include: materials handling industry, reason based downtime reporting for manufacturing machinery and the logging and reporting of process industry variables. Environmental, production, financial, quality, sales and maintenance divisions all benefit from access to accurate information in the correct format when required. The system allows the generation of standard reports and/or ad-hoc reports when required. The company also supplies OPC Server interface software for most control systems.
For more information contact Neil Upfold, eTX Data Services, 031 765 5320, [email protected]
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