Jolan De Cock on , updated
Factry Historian v7.1 is here, bringing significant performance updates that will make your data processing smoother, faster, and more efficient. This update focuses on speeding up calculations, simplifying asset management, and adding new functionality like steam functions, ensuring your Historian experience is more powerful than ever.
Ready to see what’s new?
At the heart of the v7.1 release is a series of performance enhancements designed to supercharge your production data handling. Calculation speed has effectively doubled — meaning you can now process twice the number of data points in the same amount of time. This substantial improvement translates directly into faster results, less waiting, and more real-time insights.
Moreover, we improved the integration with the time-series database. In many cases, Factry Historian now processes live calculations internally, reducing the need to query the database every time. This improvement drastically lowers the load on the time-series database, enabling smoother operations and reducing latency.
Event querying performance - Faster querying means less time waiting for event data to be processed.
Collector buffer improvements - If your data collectors go offline, the buffer now processes data twice as quickly when reconnecting, ensuring that you’re back up to speed in no time.
The new update also includes UI enhancements that simplify asset and prototype management.
Assets and prototypes are now grouped on one page, reducing the number of clicks and making navigation more intuitive. You can switch seamlessly between assets and properties, focusing only on the details you need. In addition, assets now have a clearer standalone presence, reflecting their importance independent of events.
Prototyping has also been enhanced: calculations can now leverage metadata from corresponding assets, asset properties and measurements, allowing for greater consistency without repetitive configuration.
Imagine having multiple pumps in your setup, each with unique specifications. Now, by using metadata, you can apply the same calculation logic across different pumps while adjusting for specific variables.
This makes setting up calculations quicker and ensures a standard approach across assets.
One of the notable new features in this release is the addition of steam functions, designed to meet the specific needs of industries dealing with steam networks, from chemical plants to paper, energy or food production.
Based on the IAPWS-IF97 standard, this functionality now makes it possible to calculate thermodynamic properties such as enthalpy, entropy, and energy exchange, ensuring accurate and reliable performance in critical processes.
While this is just a glimpse of what steam functions can do, we’ll dive deeper into their capabilities in an upcoming blog post dedicated entirely to this powerful feature. For now, know that if your process requires accurate steam analysis, Factry Historian has you covered.
What’s in the pipeline for our next update? Expect more performance and functionality improvements, including new features for the Grafana Data Source plugin and expanded data export options.
Five years ago, food producer Roger & Roger implemented Factry Historian and FactryOS in its Belgian production site, followed by a company-wide rollout. Koen Van Ceulebroeck and Jan-Laurens Vandermeersch reflect on their digital transformation journey.
Grafana dashboards are extremely performant, but they can slow down when multiple panels make separate requests at the same time. Using shared queries allows panels to reuse the same data, improving both performance and ease of maintenance. Additionally, features like “repeat by variable” help create dynamic dashboards, reducing manual effort needed and ensuring consistency.
Ever found yourself making the same changes in Factry Historian to multiple machines, line by line? Imagine the time saved if you could do it all at once. With the introduction of asset prototypes in Factry Historian v7.0, we've made that a reality.
