Plant Historian: Core of your Digital Transformation

The pace of digital transformation is accelerating, delivering benefits from increased profitability, reduced costs, and higher productivity. Exaquantum Plant Historian enables companies to generate growth from plant data and is at the forefront of digital transformation.

Exaquantum is Yokogawa’s digital platform enabling industries to gather and transform process data to support improved business analysis and decision-making and overall digital transformation. With the increasing volume and diversity of data, organizations have the means to transform operational and business data into actionable information. This information should be available across the enterprise because it is breaking down the barriers between Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT).

What is driving Digital Transformation?

For decades, technology has enabled organizations to improve plant efficiencies by automating and improving existing processes. Today, exponential increases in computing power, memory capacity, and data availability, driven by market and technological demands, are radically affecting the business environment. This digital transformation involves making use of both current and rapidly evolving digital technology to accelerate business strategies. Therefore, this ‘disruptive view’ as some might describe it, is changing the business landscape. So it is significantly impacting the way markets, industries, companies, departments, and societies interact and operate. For industrial automation, it is not limited to the application of specific digital technologies; it is about using these technologies to fundamentally change processes, support people in new and innovative ways. These applications help to make business in the process industries more efficient.

How does this impact plant data?

Today’s plant historians are storing ever-increasing amounts of data originating from a much wider variety of sources including, data from control and monitoring, laboratory information management (LIMS), and asset management systems. Plant historians have the potential to translate this into actionable insights. For instance, to implement and improve equipment diagnostics, maintenance, safety, alarms, production, performance, and other process plant activities. However, you need to ensure that your accumulated historical data is available and used as the basis for operational decisions. Historians are the critical point of integration between IT and OT. Therefore, they are acting as an OT data collector to distribute process and asset information throughout the enterprise (IT). They distribute process and asset information in various formats as needed.

How does a plant historian help?

From a technology standpoint, Exaquantum is well-positioned with open connectivity standards that provide performance and scalable solutions. In addition, this plant historian is deployable across single or multiple sites and cloud installations.

Organizations are able to:

• Share plant data

• Break down any information silos that may exist

• Provide information to an expanded audience

Vast volumes of plant data are being consumed in new ways, enabling decisions that are more effective with the power to generate real business growth.

In terms of business processes, Exaquantum allows information to be exchanged and unified with integrated business and management processes, including ERPs or LIMS systems. Exaquantum data is available in the office environment via Microsoft Excel for enhanced analysis and investigation by data analysts and subject matter experts. Alternatively, Exaquantum provides well-structured plant data that is easily exported and available for data analytics and business intelligence tools.

What are the advantages of a plant historian?

One of the unique advantages of Exaquantum is the ability to access and process raw plant data using native applications developed by Yokogawa to target specific process improvements. Exaquantum is a powerful data platform, enabling applications to be built that support customers directly. It is focusing on explicit areas of improvement, including alarm management and safety management. With Exaquantum, organization’s share information across the enterprise by providing the technology, process improvements and access to plant data. Supporting the decision-making process and enabling departments to collaborate more effectively.

Exaquantum and Digital Transformation

Yokogawa provides a digital platform to enable data collection and integration, along with advanced analytics solutions for deriving value from the data. With the help of our plant historian, you solve your problems within and beyond plants and enterprises. Exaquantum is at the forefront of digital transformation because it is allowing companies to take a ‘disruptive view’ of doing business that is aligned to their own business goals. Additionally, Exaquantum provides one trusted communication channel for plant data that is consistent and reliable across the enterprise. In conclusion, it eliminates the barriers between OT and IT, with the power to generate business growth from plant data.

Author

Nick Cross

A marketing professional with over fifteen years of progressive experience within digital, marketing and sales environments, Nick joined Yokogawa in 2015 and brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the marketing team at Yokogawa Marex. Yokogawa Marex develops specialist software solutions that develop, promote and support software and IT solutions for process information management in production facilities such as oil refineries and chemical/petrochemical plants across the globe.

With an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the marketing environment with a key emphasis on effective customer communication, today Nick is responsible for raising the profile of Exaquantum - Yokogawa’s plant historian solution. By acquiring data from all facets of a process and transforming data into easily usable, high-value, widely distributed information, it enables organisations to achieve safe, reliable and optimal plant operations.