eDatasheet: Manual Entry to a PI Data Historian
Manual data entry into a PI system typically involves cumbersome and complex solutions. Various industries, including the life sciences, power & utilities, aviation, and more all require the ability for manual entry to a data historian. While mature data historization strategies are in place, they often fail to capture data from manual activities. eDatasheet solves these challenges, enabling real–time data entry to a PI system.
Challenges of Existing Solutions
Legacy manual data entry product exist, such as the PI Manual Logger, yet have failed to adequately meet market needs and capture industry attention. Other solutions including PI Datalink involve complicated Excel sheets with un-maintainable macros to read and write values to PI. These avenues have proven not to be sustainable and result in high maintenance costs, cumbersome work arounds, and poor extensibility. These legacy solutions fail to capture user requirements and fail to make end–user lives easier.
How eDatasheet Solves These Problems
eDatasheet enables manual data entry to a PI System, unlike ever before. Capture time series, manual data via mobile device or desktop. This system can be configured in a matter of days to weeks to reduce the time to value and increase ROI. Even in highly automated facilities, critical equipment and monitoring devices still rely on manual data transcription and entry to a PI system. Often times this data is essential for performance monitoring, investigations, and trend analysis.
eDatasheet is industry agnostic and built to plug and play with any industrial vertical including life sciences, power and utility, pulp and paper, wastewater treatment management, and many more. For instance, in the wastewater treatment industry, various process perimeters must be tightly controlled and maintained at steady-state. eDatasheet enables the ability to capture perimeters typically monitored and observed manually. Now data is available for reporting to authorities and analyzing for deviations.
Function
Unlike legacy or spreadsheet-based solutions, eDatasheet’s user-focused interface makes manual data entry simple and intuitive. The interface supports not only text and number entry, but also supports comment dropdowns and boolean inputs to the PI data historian. eDatasheet enables configurable limits to flag exceptions when tolerances are exceeded thus enabling real-time user feedback. This leverages the existing PI Asset Framework (AF) to manage manual equipment data as well as observations required for further analysis. eDatasheet time-series data can significantly reduce the time it takes for data to go digital. In turn, significantly reducing the time for all data to go digital.
Integration
aDatasheet leverages the PI Web API to enable real-time data entry to the PI data historian. This allows users to save data directly to PI Tags or AF attributes. Sometimes data entry is not enough, as visualization and action are what ensure processes remain in-spec. eDatasheet integrates directly with PI Vision to streamline the entry process directly from a PI Vision display. Displays in PI Vision may be configured with eDatasheet and traditional asset charts to visualize entry points. Out of spec limits are instantly identified to enable real time action and remediation activities. Closing this feedback cycle has never been easier thanks to eDatasheet, which significantly reduces the time to monitor and correct process deviations. The integration capabilities of eDatasheet make is a powerful tool for any industrial environment.
How can eDatasheet Help Support Your Historization Strategy?
eDatasheet is a practical and intuitive tool to enable manual data entry to a PI System. The ability to log data from the source allows for streamlined inspections, trend analysis, and process correction in less time. The system is built for plug and play which eliminates the need for long-term ongoing support without sacrificing costs and configuration effort. Suitable for all industrial sectors, eDatasheet provides high value for a variety of use-cases.
Coming to AVEVA World 2022? Come join us at Booth #56 to learn more about our PI Consulting services and see eDatasheet in action! We hope to see you there!