OSIsoft PI shows complex reporting can be automated and provided as live
The objective of the OSIsoftPI was to demonstrate that complex reporting can be automated and provided as live in an online dashboard.
One of the challenges common to all Victorian water authorities is the requirement to provide a standard report to the Essential Services Commission (ESC). This is typically a time-consuming manual process involving capture of data from many sources into a spreadsheet prepared monthly and submitted to the ESC annually.
In addition to the inefficiency of the manual process the use of the data is retrospective, which means the opportunity to take corrective action to meet targets is gone by the time the report is produced.
The PI System can provide the solution to this challenge as it can be used to interface with data from many different sources, perform calculations on the data and use the data in reports and dashboards.
Additionally, the PI System provides a plug in for Excel, which allows the data to be downloaded into report files. The flagship solution demonstrated that it could collect available ESC data and key performance indicator (KPI) targets into a single structure, calculate year to date and monthly performance against targets, and provide the automation of report preparation such as auto-generating annual spreadsheet and a real-time KPI dashboard.
However this was a prototype and users were trained to modify or create their own displays presenting data in ways that are most meaningful to them.
Through automation, the reporting process becomes much more efficient - thus reducing human effort and releasing resources to do more meaningful work. By having access to live data, users can make tactical decisions that result in better compliance with targets such as avoiding what may otherwise have been a non-compliance.
The dashboard updated in real time, showing managers how their activity was tracking for the current month and year to date. Moreover, by analysing longer term data they could review current year vs. past years to measure improvement and look for peaks caused by seasonal or other factors so that steps could be taken to avoid unwanted incidents.
Taking a step further towards the digital utility, the data from each water authority may be published to the cloud and accessed directly by the Department for Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) or the ESC. Rather than ask water authorities for new or modified reports, DELWP may instead simply describe a dataset to be provided from which they could perform their own aggregations, analyses, run reports and view real time dashboards.
Data & Analytics Program Lead David Bergmann said: “a consistent, automated and near realtime way of reporting will give new insights to water utilities and revolutionise the way we report to stakeholders.”
For further information contact the D&A Program Lead - david.bergmann@sew.com.au.
Acknowledgement GTS and OSIsoft PI for above content.