Power BI Industrial Connector

£POA

What Does the Power BI Industrial Connector do?

 

 

The Industrial App Store Power BI Industrial Connector is certified by Microsoft and was distributed with Power BI update (03/2019)

 

"Intelligent Plant’s Industrial App Store Connector enables Microsoft’s powerful analytics and visualizations to be applied to real-time and historical process data. Seamlessly integrate plant and corporate data and share with any colleague on any device, enabling faster, better, real-time decision making. The Industrial App Store Power BI Connector connects to Intelligent Plant’s Industrial App Store, while all data remains securely and safely on-premises...". - Microsoft

Additional Resources

Microsoft's official release notes on the Power BI Connector

Connecting Industrial Historians to Microsoft Power BI

Power BI an Alarm & Event Bad Actors

Industrial Historian data retrieval using Power BI

Alarm Analysis dashboard design insights

Connecting Industrial Historians to Microsoft Power Automate

Power Virtual Agents demo video

Power Virtual Agents blog post

How do I connect my data?

1. Start Power BI application.
2. Click the Online Services category and find Industrial App Store connector.
3. Sign in using either service provided.
4. Select the data source you would like to query.
5. Use Tag Search function to perform tag searches or Get Data function - to get data from selected data source.
6. Enter your tag name(s), start date, end date, function and interval/point count.
7. Click Load to load the dataset into the dashboard.

What's New?

View our release notes to find out about recent updates to this app.

Release Notes

Case Study: Greater Accessibility to Process Data in Power BI

Client: Manufacturing

Return on Investment

For a typical factory, Intelligent Plant’s Power BI - Industrial Connector enables organisations to start gaining insights much sooner, often completing deployment up to four years earlier than with traditional methods, unlocking value faster and saving over $800,000 within a five-year period.

Overview

Organisations need to bring together data from corporate systems and operational sources like SCADA, PLCs, and process historians to unlock real value. Microsoft Power BI is a popular choice for visualisation, but it’s built for structured, tabular data. This makes it difficult to work directly with time-series data from industrial systems.

Intelligent Plant’s Power BI - Industrial Connector solves this challenge. Microsoft-certified and available by default in Power BI Desktop, it effortlessly transforms complex SCADA, PLC, and historian data into a Power BI-friendly format, empowering users to create rich, meaningful dashboards with ease and accelerate data-driven decisions. 

Challenge

Power BI is an incredibly popular software used globally by organisations to visualise key business data, aiding decision making, tracking performance, and internal communication.

Traditionally, it has been common for organisations to only use Power BI for corporate data such as sales and administration, and less so for process data, such as monitoring equipment on the factory floor or tracking emissions.

To maximise the benefit of Power BI, it is advantageous for these organisations to combine process data and corporate data together, offer a holistic view of business performance, helping to identify new opportunities for improved business efficiency and cost savings. 

For example, one oil and gas client had been continuing production from a well in a mature offshore field. When they put their process data and corporate data together with our connector, they quickly found that the operational costs of the well were exceeding the revenue being generated.

Had these data sets remained separate, production may have continued unnecessarily, leading to further losses. 

Another client operates in the manufacturing sector and has multiple factories globally. They were looking for a simple, cost-effective way to get their process data into Power BI. They had considered developing a connector internally but had deemed this to be complex and time consuming, and other existing connectors that were capable of performing the necessary data transformation were costly and rigid – limited functionality beyond the bare essentials.

Solution

The Power BI - Industrial Connector does not require SQL knowledge or complex queries. Users simply configure a few fields where they input information such as tag selection, time range, and required data granularity.

And it’s not just process data that can be brought into Power BI with our connector. It can also handle alarm & event data, allowing organisations to identify nuisance alarms and inefficiencies in their facilities.

The Power BI - Industrial Connector has been successfully deployed across various sectors, including energy and manufacturing.

The strength of the Industrial App Store (IAS) is also to be considered. Organisations can connect to on-premise data without needing to store data in the cloud. Additionally, IAS also enables secure data sharing with partner organisations through a simple permissions interface. Administrators can grant or revoke at any time with just a few clicks.

Results and Impact

A manufacturing client used the connector to great effect, with the benefits including avoiding:

• The need to build a connector internally which can be time and labour intensive, delaying desired output and reducing resource availability for other projects.
  
  
• Alternative connectors that were less intuitive, requiring someone with a technical background to make effective use of the connector.
  
  
• Solutions that require data to be stored in a secondary location, which would decrease control of their own data, and increase security vulnerabilities.

We estimate for a particular asset, the savings of utilising the Power BI - Industrial Connector is $800,000 over a 5-year period. We have determined this by the following:

• Labour/resources for approximately 3 years to design and build an internal solution: $500,000
  
  
• Ongoing support team member to handle the building of queries through SQL: $150,000
  
  
• Azure SQL database at ~$2,500/month: $60,000
  
  
• Losses accrued during the 3 years where critical business intelligence was not available: $500,000

Total Estimated Savings: $800,000

The Power BI - Industrial Connector is a simple yet effective solution that enables organisations to effortlessly integrate between real time process data and corporate data in Power BI, helping them to maximise business intelligence. 

Conclusion

Intelligent Plant’s Power BI - Industrial Connector is a game changer for industrial sectors. Having easy access to process data and alarm/event data from your equipment in Power BI makes it more accessible for using to:

• Identify inefficiencies 
  
  
• Perform cost benefit analyses 
  
  
• Monitor KPIs.