Easier asset management

Following on from last month when we introduced the new Asset List, we have now made management of your assets easier and more streamlined. From the Asset List, you can now also add new assets or delete assets you no longer need.

While deleting an asset is final, there are a couple of safeguards to prevent accidental deletion! For example, a parent asset can only be deleted if all its children are deleted first. Plus, you always have to confirm removal before the deletion is completed.

NEW historical Alarms Page

This month we also introduce the new historical Alarms Page which provides a summary of your alarm history from your HMI and/or SCADA systems.

The Alarms page is integrated with the asset hierarchy, meaning you can browse the hierarchy directly from an Asset page to view the alarms related to that asset. Or you can navigate directly to it from the navigation menu. The Alarms page provides not only shows the list of alarms, but provides additional context with sparklines showing the history of the tag over the selected time interval, the duration of the alarm and the limits that were transgressed in order for the alarm to be triggered. Any alarm record that is still active, will be shown as an active alarm in the Asset page, providing more information to the user to help them understand the state of the asset.

The Alarm Page is available to anyone with access to your Insight system. You can drill down by different time periods such as last 7-days, today, or even last hour. This increased visibility can help to identify and resolve alarms. This improved collaboration ultimately helps to minimize nuisance alarms and improve overall system performance.

Asset information is also integrated with the main Insight Search capabilities. From the Home Page, if you select one asset, you’ll navigate straight to the relevant Asset Page, however if you have multiple assets in your search results, then you’ll be taken to the Asset List page where you can review and determine which asset you are interested in. The search at the top of the Asset List allows you to filter asset properties to refine your results for easy information discovery.

The Asset List also allows an Administrator to configure the asset metadata. By clicking on the edit option, you’ll display the asset info sidesheet, containing the configuration associated with this asset and allowing to add keywords, timezones, descriptions and so on to provide the important context that your assets need.

Enhanced alerts configuration

Building on from the custom actions for alerts introduced in March, we have also updated the alerts configuration dialog screen. The small dialog of previous versions has been replaced with a full screen overlay to provide more space and a cleaner interface that should make it simpler to use. While it looks a little different to what you will be used to, the functionality is identical, so simply add an alert and walk through the wizard.

Using this process you will quickly and easily have condition-based alerts configured across the AVEVA Insight system; providing immediate, automatic notification should your system change behavior.

Changes to supported web browsers

Finally, if you’re a customer using Internet Explorer 11 or an earlier version of Edge browser, you will have noticed a new banner that appears on the Insight header. We have made the decision to cease support for IE11 and non-Chromium versions of Edge browser from July 31, 2020.

We do not plan to block access to Insight using these browsers, however will cease testing and development on them meaning you may experience a degradation in performance or functionality with those browsers in the future if you choose to continue using them.

From the warning banner, you can click through to our online help and that will provide you all the details around which browser versions are supported.

Clutter-free search

Search is a super-simple way to find data of interest, but sometimes you end up with extra results that can clutter your content. You told us that you’d like a way to remove those extra tags from your result set so now, you can remove tags just as easily as you can add them. Simply open the tag dictionary and select the tags you want removed, and hit remove. That’s it, clutter-free content is all yours.

Managing production shift

To make it even easier to manage your production shifts we have introduced new capabilities around asset time zones, and shift patterns.

Each asset now has an associated time zone. Like other metadata on the Asset Page, the time zone can be configured by clicking on the Asset Info card and selecting the time zone from list of options available in the sidesheet. This can be configured by any user with Admin privileges.

The time zone supports the ability to define shift patterns for production. A shift pattern is simply a collection of shifts, and you can create multiple shift patterns to suit your organization’s needs. For example you might have a different shift pattern for different times of the year, or days of the week.

Each shift pattern has a name, an effective date for when it becomes active in the system, and a list of locations to which it will apply. This means that different locations may be setup with different shift patterns to match local operating procedures. Within the shift pattern, you can define multiple shifts. Each shift has a start time (which is based on the local time of the asset) and a day of the week to which it applies. Each shift continues until it is replaced by the next defined shift, so if you have periods where this is no shift, then you would define those time periods as well. Here we can see how shift patterns would be configured within the Administration tool.

Once you have defined the shift patterns and applied them to the right assets, you can then access this information in various places throughout Insight. On the Utilization and production events tabs for an asset, you can now filter the visible information by Current Shift (in addition to the time or production run options previously available). KPIs and asset information will now refer to the current shift. On the production events tab, some information still relates to the active run, such as total quantities produced and target values, as this is the most important information in that view.

The OEE analysis view also now supports grouping events by shift, providing summary data such as average availability, OEE, performance and quality by shift.

Enhancements to OEE and production capabilities

On the OEE pages, you can now easily see which utilization events have had comments added to them, making it easier to capture information at a glance. You can also retrieve those comments directly from the Pareto charts. In this example, you can see that the top downtime reason is an infeed jam, and users have added 3 comments to help the user understand what has happened during these events. Understanding this information helps users better understand issues and collaborate to improve performance of the system overall.

When we switch to the production events tab, you can see that for a very long production run, the production window now displays for the last 7 days. This ensures that you continue to get a quick response time on the production events tab, even when there is a lot of data to process. The grey highlighted text shows the production window represented on the page.

The Estimated Completion Date and Production Progress information is not available since production counts before the start of the window 7 days ago are not known and the Actual Production Rate, Pareto Bar charts, and OEE KPIs are all calculated for the 7 days shown on the page. If you do want to see older data associated with this production run, you can still go and see this through the OEE analysis pages.

Custom actions for alerts

As part of our ongoing investment in condition management, we’ve continued to improve the alerts capabilities in Insight. Now we are simplifying and extending custom actions and adding support for consequence of failure configuration as part of the alert definition.

Custom actions allow you to setup Azure logic apps to trigger based on an alert condition being met. A common use case might allow alerts to trigger a work order in an external asset management solution such as AVEVA Enterprise Asset Management or SAP.

Define the custom action by providing the name, description, Logic App URL and any optional parameters to be passed to the logic app when the alert is triggered. You’ll notice that the parameters in this example have been separated using the pipe symbol. This tells Insight to show them as separate configuration fields in the alert definition, making it simpler for users to understand and configure the action in their alerts. Once you get to the actions page of the alert, select the custom action, update the information and fill in the appropriate parameters needed for the alert to be sent. Now AVEVA Insight will trigger the necessary action whenever the alert parameters are met, and you will be kept up-to-date with system behavior.

We’ve also added consequence of failure information that can be configured for an alert. Simply enable this in the wizard and configure the notifications that you want to send to the user – if this alert has implications related to safety, environmental impacts or production performance. The user will then be notified of this when they receive the alert, giving them additional context with which to respond to the alert that they receive.

Subscription banners

Finally, we heard your feedback for more information to remind you when your subscription was expiring, so we’ve added banners to remind you when your renewal date is close. Within 30 days of expiration, solution administrators will be notified of the number of remaining days so they can action the renewal. If the solution then expires, all users will be notified through the banner that the solution is overdue for renewal.

Similarly, you can select to view the asset page for the overall system by selecting it from the Insight menu and navigating to the asset you are interested in.

Asset context

Adding context to all that valuable asset information is critical if you want to use it as a live feed for effective decision support. Let’s look at this in more detail starting from the top. Here you will see the Breadcrumbs that show the location of the asset in context of the entire system. You can easily view and navigate through the hierarchy to look at parent, sibling or child assets by clicking on any of the entries. While the diamond takes you back to the root of the hierarchy.

Underneath there’s the Asset Info card which summarizes all the relevant metadata i.e. name, namespace, description keywords and geolocation. The namespace allows you to group assets together using easy-to-understand categories e.g. Water Treatment. Keywords allow you to tag assets with relevant information of your choosing e.g. asset manufacturer, pump capacity, or anything else that could provide additional context for a user. The example here has US and WaterPlant. In the not too distant future, you’ll be able to search by these fields to help you find the asset that you need. The description allows you to describe the asset, it’s history, or how to find it if it is in an obscure location. And finally, you can set the geolocation for the asset. When you do, the location tile will appear on the asset page to show you where this asset is located, along with its immediate child assets. By clinking on any of the pins on the map, you can easily navigate to these other assets.

The asset info card doesn’t just allow you to view the context, here Administrators can edit the information directly. Simply click the Asset Info card to access the side sheet and make the necessary changes. No longer do you need to bulk edit every asset all-at-once, now you can keep the information updated as you are working with these assets, making the upkeep of this information a lot more accessible and maintainable. The screenshot below shows the editable content for the Valley Water example.

Asset behavior

To the right of the Asset Info card is a Central Content tile. What shows here will depend on how you have been using the system to date. If you have already created and saved content for an asset, then the most recently used item will be shown here. However if no content is saved yet, as is the case in our example today, then AVEVA Insight will display a status board listing all the associated tags. In either case, clicking on this central card will drill through to more detail so that you have fine-grained control over what you see, and how you interact with it.

For even more insights into asset behavior, we also included a News tile. This tile is automatically populated and filtered to show news about this asset and its children (a quick refresher: newsfeed is the unsupervised machine learning capability within Insight that constantly analyzes your data, and highlights any discrepancies or anomalies that may indicate something needs attention). You’ll notice we’ve also added the thumbs up and thumbs down icons at the bottom of the News tiles, so you can prioritize those notifications that are most relevant to you.

In the lower part of the page there is also an Efficiency tile that will be auto-populated if the asset is configured for OEE. This gives the ability to immediately see OEE and availability calculations for the assets in this part of the hierarchy, and drill-down to the detailed efficiency screens is as simple as clicking on the tile. Allowing even quicker access to more detailed analysis of asset performance.

Journal

The journal tile is linked to the new Journal feature also released in this update. The journal is the operational logbook, allowing users to record events of interest on an asset. This information is then made available to other users in the system. Using the journal couldn’t be easier. Simply click on the journal tile, and the journal entries will appear in the side sheet on the right. Click on any entry to see more detail. To add a new entry, click the + icon at the top and fill in the details. Insight will keep a record of the entry with this asset, capturing organizational knowledge and hopefully helping users better respond to problems, or drive increased efficiency.

Take Action

Having a clear picture of asset performance is not enough, you also have to be able to act! The Asset Actions button allows you to record pertinent information and insights into the journal directly. Likewise, you may realize that an issue can be avoided with early detection. To help this, we have extended the alerts capability so that you can now add an alert direct from the asset page. If you’ve used our advanced alerting previously you’ll be familiar with the steps but its really very easy: select any combination of tags you need using the search bar, and follow the wizard to set the alert parameters. Done!

As AVEVA Insight continues to evolve into a ‘doing’ platform for operations you will see more capabilities coming to the Asset page, including the ability for users to take more actions in response to their discoveries.

No Configuration Needed

The important thing to note with the Asset page is that it requires no configuration. Once the model is in place, there is nothing more to do. If you are publishing from a data source such as AVEVA System Platform, then the model will be published for you. If your publisher does not publish the model, then you can simply open the tag dictionary, and set the location field for any tag that you wish to be available in the model. This will automatically create the asset model for you and give you access to the capabilities of the asset page with no additional work.

When viewing on the alerts page, you’ll notice that the Asset column shows the asset to which each alert is linked. You can now also filter by column, which makes it much easier to find and modify alerts – particularly as your system becomes larger. The filters can be applied across all the field shown on the alerts page, applied in real time, to help you find what you need more quickly.

Finally, solution administrators can now manage the alerts configured within the solution, irrespective of who created them. Allowing both the administrator, and the original creator, to configure the alerts provides simpler management and a more sustainable solution as organizations evolve. No more late-night notifications because Bob didn’t disable those alerts before he retired!

Additional production context

For the Insight operational user, we’ve made improvements that provide additional context around production data. For instance, the OEE KPIs at the top right-hand side of the Equipment Efficiency page now clearly indicate that the KPIs are for the current production run. We’ve also added the actual production rate for the active production run on the Production events interface. Each of these shows values while the production run is active and is removed once complete – thus helping to avoid any potential confusion.

For utilization events, the length of the comment field has now been extended. This means you can capture all the critical details and information you need for future context and analysis.

For more detailed analysis, we also improved how data is exported from the OEE Analysis page. Now, the CSV download will automatically include the equipment name column so that all the relevant information is captured in one place for faster analysis.

Usability improvements for visualization

AVEVA also updated the visualization capabilities to provide additional context to all users. For example, when plotting tags on maps, you can now add the current state value next to the historic values. This gives you at-a-glance understanding of what is happening, and what has happened, in your operations.

And, to make it easier for operators to quickly assess current states on any chart type, analog graphics now format based on the number size e.g.

• if the Value, Min, or Max is between 0 and 1, four decimal locations are shown.
• if the number is between 1 and 9,999, two decimal places are shown.
• if the value is 10,000 or larger, no decimal places are shown.

Additional calculation options on charts

We’ve also made improvements to the available calculations that you can perform on charts. The “Rolling Sum” chart has calculated a rolling total from a periodic average, which works well for measurements that represent a quantity, such as “cubic meters”. However, in cases where the measurement represents a rate, such as “cubic meters/hour”, the appropriate value to total is the daily total volume – get this by selecting the “Total” statistic that is now available on the chart.

Suspend or activate alerts

Building on from the more advanced alerting released in May 2019, users can now suspend an alert so that notifications are not sent. Simply select Suspend on the drop-down menu of an Alert on the Alerts page. Then when you’re ready to start receiving alerts again it is as simple as selecting Activate.

Enhancements to the Equipment Monitoring capability

Just like Reason Groups we have also added Equipment Groups to the Equipment Efficiency page. This means that related equipment can now be grouped together, for example “Production Line 1” or “Area A Case Packers”. Grouping equipment together can give users a simpler and faster method of managing large numbers of equipment.

In the example below, users can now quickly switch between All Equipment and Houston Line 2 via the drop down menu.

Efficiency model configuration improvements

The efficiency modeling experience has been reorganized into multiple cards to make it easier to understand which options can and need to be configured to support the Utilization and OEE tracking capabilities within Insight. The same bulk import and editing capabilities are still available in the new modeling experience.

We have improved the ability to maintain existing efficiency model data within Insight. Now, an Administrator can perform an export of all efficiency model elements (e.g. equipment definition, equipment states, utilization reasons, etc.) to a CSV file. Allowing them to easily execute bulk edits and updates via Excel.

This new feature is also helpful when moving or transferring efficiency models from one Insight solution to another.

Data source improvements

We’ve added to other data sources the ability to import a CSV of data just like you may have done in the past with a CSV/JSON data source. This can act as a solution for correcting missing or erroneous data, as well as providing basic backfill functionality for history that may be contained in another system. To backfill this missing data, Administrators can simply upload the CSV/JSON file to your existing data source.

In addition to the existing “wide” format CSV we have added support for a new “narrow” CSV format. Narrow CSV can open more options for device compatibility, as well as reducing bandwidth for custom integrations that use CSV as a data solution. Refer to the Help file for more: https://insight.connect.aveva.com/help/#634485.htm