One of the most frequent things we hear from prospective customers is “We have all this process data in our historian, but no one is really using it”. When you peel back the onion a few layers you often see that the data is actually being used but it isn’t as heavily used as it should be. There was tremendous value created after the historian technology was first installed, but that value has plateaued over time as all the low hanging optimization fruit was consumed.
Before you give up on your historian, we would suggest that things are just starting to get interesting. Now that you have captured all that history, AI and machine learning have finally matured enough to extract significantly more value out of all that data you invested so much to collect.
Here are a few key ways that old data can be used to generate new value with very high ROI:
Automate Learning
Let’s face it, in order to learn something new to optimize your processes you have to be both curious and have the time to dig deep into the data. There is usually no shortage of curiosity but never enough time - and this is the basic reason why the value of your historian has plateaued - no one has enough time to look at the data deeply enough.
What if you could use AI to automate deep investigation and learning - so what used to take days or weeks of data analysis could be collapsed into an hour? Think about how much more curious you would be and how many more ideas would be feasible to evaluate if the “learning cycle” were just one hour.
With TwinThread you can connect to your historian(s) in minutes and within an hour have predictive models that automatically reveal many dimensions of learning, not only to help you understand what is driving performance but also identify and prioritize improvement actions.
Understand Performance Drivers
Your historian contains clues about performance for virtually every metric that matters to your operation. Whether it’s uptime, or quality, or throughput - where there’s a huge amount of data, there’s also an opportunity to generate significant return on that data. You just need a way to systematically and automatically surface those insights.
TwinThread’s prebuilt predictive applications - focused on optimizing specific performance metrics - allow you to understand drivers at a deeper level than you ever have before - faster than ever before. As an expert in your process you probably understand several of the top drivers already, but inevitably there are surprise learnings that surface after applying TwinThread’s predictive applications, and those insights are what lead to new value potential.
Automate Proactive Action
Insights are valuable, but consistently driving action based on insights is where you make the real money. Your historian allowed you to understand the past and diagnose problems in the past - but by definition it is all “after the fact”.
What if you could use that same historical data to anticipate and prevent problems before they happen? The primary role of TwinThread’s Predictive Operations platform is to do just that.
Predictive applications not only learn from the past, they allow you to monitor your processes in real-time to provide advanced warning alerts and recommended actions to improve your performance in real-time. Every operator can become your best operator.
If you are interested to learn more about extracting new value out of our old data, please reach out to us today.