Plant Historian and Data Monitoring
Most plants can tell you what a tank holds right now. Very few can tell you what it held at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday four months ago. That is the number that lets a plant reconcile receiving, forecast reorders, and catch problems early.
111 days of hour-by-hour tank inventory from a system we installed at a Texas blending facility. Deliveries step the curve up, daily consumption draws it down. This is real data, not an illustration.
Real record, real installation
CTX Automation builds plant historians into its control systems: continuous, timestamped recording of inventory levels, material additions and draws, alarms and equipment states, captured automatically from the same instruments that run the plant.
The trend above comes from a plant that runs its entire tank farm and blending operation on weight, with more than two dozen weighed vessels logged around the clock. Nobody typed any of it. The control system recorded it as a side effect of doing its job.
The live view on that installed system: every storage tank in the north, south and external farms with its current weight, product and last update.
Any tank opens to a 7, 30 or 90 day trend. Deliveries step the weight up, consumption draws it down.
Usage reporting
Daily, weekly and per-material consumption fall straight out of the record and reconcile against receiving and production.
Reorder forecasting
Real consumption rates project forward to reorder dates, so materials arrive because the trend said so, not because a tank ran empty.
Early warning
A level that sags with no draw, a duty cycle creeping up, a pump that takes longer each week: drift in the recorded data surfaces problems before they become failures.
Built in, not bolted on
Because CTX builds the control system and the historian together, the tags, units and timestamps are coherent from day one, from the panel HMI to plant reporting. Timestamped event logs, lot-number entry and batch records are part of the same system.
Platforms we implement
- Siemens WinCC and WinCC Unified with integrated logging and trending
- Siemens SIMATIC BRAUMAT and SISTAR batch and process control systems for recipe management, batch records and ISA-88 batch control
- Ignition SCADA for plant-wide visualization and historian
- Siemens Insights Hub for cloud-based dashboards where remote visibility is wanted
- Secure remote access hardware for support and off-site monitoring
What did your tank hold at 3 a.m. four months ago?
If your plant cannot answer that, we can build the record that can, automatically, from day one.
Get in Touch (713) 672-8251