Cuts Like a Knife

Everyone’s had a Swiss Army knife at some point in their lives (I guess the North American version is the Leatherman Multi-tool - we always have to do things bigger, huh?). A Swiss Army knife with one or two screwdrivers, LED flashlight, a nail file, pliers and a toothpick is commonplace. I’ve seen models that had so many features, you couldn't find the blade.

I’ve known Bob Engel for at least 8 years now. Bob is Vice President of Informetric Systems (http://www.informetric.com/). InfoBatch is Informetric’s batch reporting package, and I’ve been sweet on InfoBatch ever since I first kicked its tires at the Emerson Exchange in Dallas back in 2004.

InfoBatch generates batch reports. And it does it very well. It allows you to connect to a multitude of data sources and aggregate them into a single, unified report. It doesn’t force you to replicate your data into yet another location (the “many versions of the truth” paradox). And if you don’t have another datastore to worry about, you don’t have to worry about all those pliers, toothpicks and nail files to manage it.

InfoBatch inherently understands the S88 model, from phases to recipes. It handles the concept of sub-phase triggers (for example, just show me a plot of a tank's temperature during the relevant portion of a phase). And it has connectors that understand the structure of the views from your data sources. Simple drop-down selections as opposed to flashlights and screwdrivers for managing custom SQL queries from software packages that don’t care if you’re creating batch end reports or your monthly bank statement.

Of course there has to be a shameless plug in one of my posts, so here it is: be sure and attend session 2-3041 at this year’s Emerson Global User Exchange, October 24th to 28th in Nashville. Bob and I will be presenting “Integrating Syncade S95 Orders, DeltaV S88 Batch Recipes and Continuous Data”. Please leave your knives at the door.

Data View Web Part

I came across a web part for our dashboard development that makes access to SQL data a little easier. It’s from a company named Lightning Tools Ltd, and it’s the LT Data Viewer Web Part. Its claim to fame is not requiring SharePoint Designer to drop a table, view, or stored procedure on to a SharePoint site.

In the screenshot below, I’ve used the web part to display data from a stored procedure, showing recent batches run on our demo system. The web part has the ability to highlight values or whole rows based on expressions. In this case, I’ve highlighted batches whose duration has exceeded a predetermined limit. Makes it easy to quickly identify the outliers.


Of course, it would be really neat if I could just click on the Batch ID in the list and get access to a report or launch a tool like History Analysis…

PMBR

With batch event and LOG EVENT information going into the DeltaV version 10.3 Event Chronicle, you can start putting together simple views or what I’ve affectionately termed as Poor Man’s Batch Reporting (PMBR).

Process History View just doesn’t have the horsepower for the types of queries required. And that’s OK, because the Event Chronicle is a SQL database. So what I’ve done is link the alarms and events table into Access. This was easy because the ODBC data source is already setup for you in DeltaV:

Then I created two queries – one to get unique Batch ID’s and one to get the batch events. The Find Unique BatchIDs query looks like this in SQL:


SELECT Right(Events1!Attribute,Len(Events1!Attribute)-InStr(1,Events1!Attribute," ")) AS BatchID
FROM Events1
GROUP BY Right(Events1!Attribute,Len(Events1!Attribute)-InStr(1,Events1!Attribute," ")), Events1.Attribute
HAVING (((First(Events1.Attribute)) Like "@*") AND ((Count(Events1.Attribute))>1));

Executing this gives:

The Batch Events query required a parameter (well it did for me, anyway, but I am no SQL guru – I’m sure someone out there can do a better job), its SQL looks like this:

PARAMETERS BatchID Text ( 255 );
SELECT Events1.Date_Time, Events1.State, Events1.Desc1, Events1.Desc2
FROM Events1
WHERE (((Events1.Attribute) Like "*" & [BatchID])) OR (((Events1.Desc1) Like "*" & [BatchID]))
ORDER BY Events1.Date_Time;

When I run the query, I get prompted for the BatchID:

And the results look like this:

The pressure drop data was captured with the LOG EVENT function in the FERM_PTEST phase.

So here's a way to generate some simple batch reports without dealing with those pesky EVT files. Head over to my website - I'll be consolidating the 3 posts about batch events/reports into a whitepaper.