Welcome to this video on "See the light: Easy wins to improve your asset framework experience". In
the previous video we went through the solution to the first problem we found which was that when
selecting through multiple form fill and seal machines FFS 0-5 was not available. Having fixed
that we can now navigate to the form fill and seal display and FFS 0-5 is now available. The
next issue that was pointed out by the engineer is that on the overview display there was an
issue with the sugar FFS units. You can't really see it at the 8 hour time scale, however if we
switch down to one hour it is possible to see that FFS 3 4 & 6 all have the exact same trend,
they've got the same average value, the same minimum maximum and standard deviation.
So what this tells us is that there's a problem in that units 3 4 & 6 all referencing the same tag,
the same PI tag feeding that data and we need to find out why that is and try and
apply some best practices to resolve that issue. Now the reason we are particularly
concerned about the sugar units is that quality standards mean that we need to
monitor the grain size of the sugar and it has to stay within bounds. So one thing
that you could consider doing if this is your environment is monitoring the sugar
grain size and if it goes above certain limits, either trigger a notification or log an event
and just collect that data so that you know when you are in and out of bounds.
To see how these tags are configured again we can't really see all of that information in PI
Vision we're going to have to switch across to PI System Explorer and we've already got FFS
0-3 which is one of the the problem children. Sugar grain sizes up here we can see it's in
the none category. The configuration it's using is a PowerPoint which is FFS 0-3 dot
sugar grain size that looks fine. If we switch across to four okay this now we can see that
there's a problem because FFS Unit four is also using if FFS 0-3 dot sugar grain size as its PI
tag and lucky guess assume number six is doing the same thing, yeah it is.
Now another problem that we can see here is that if going back to our previous example with
form fill and seal machine number five, the main issue there was that the device wasn't based off
of a template. Having a look at the column on the left hand side where all those green Ts are we can
see that the sugar grain size for units three, four and six are not based off of a template.
Now this was probably done in an effort to make sure that all of these salt packaging machines
didn't have a an empty attribute called sugar grain size and traditionally what you'll find
is when you build a PI System asset off of a template you are unable to edit the specific
elements. So normally you won't be allowed to add a individual attribute to an asset.
However what the IT department on our side found out is that in the library,
when you are looking at the element templates in our case we're looking at the sandbox FFS,
there is a tick box that says allow extensions. Now allow extensions is very useful when you're
in the testing phase but for production what it means is that you run into errors like we're
having now where copy and paste becomes a problem and that's what I assume the issue is here because
we allowed extensions on the template, added the sugar grain size attribute to FFS 0-3 and
then copied and pasted it on 2, 4 & 6. Now the problem with that is that someone forgot to go
and change FFS0-3 the tag name on units four and six. That is something that is very easy to do.
So what we want to do is disallow extensions, we don't want extensions to be used throughout the
plant because it leads to a maintenance issue in future. The way we get around that is it is
possible to use derived templates in PI AF and in our asset framework in our library. The same way
we create a hierarchy of elements we can create a hierarchy of templates and what we've done is we
have created a template for sandbox underscore sugar underscore FFS. The only attribute this
template has if we have a look at our attribute templates is the sugar grain size attribute.
Now you wouldn't be wrong for thinking that if I had to go ahead and create an element based off of
the sandbox sugar FFS template it would only have one attribute because there's only one attribute
template in the the layout here however if you group by template, if you show all of
the attributes by templates what this will do is it'll show you all of the attributes for the base
templates as well; so in our case sandbox sugar FFS has a base template of sandbox underscore
FFS so when we create an element off of sandbox sugar FFS we're going to have all the attributes
from the sugar FFS template as well as the base FFS templates. In order to apply this fix what
we're going to do is we're going to go to our elements and to apply the sugar template we're
going to right click on FFS 0-3, we're going to convert it and we're going to change the template.
At the moment it's based on sandbox FFS, we want it to be based on sandbox underscore sugar FFS.
When we hit okay you'll see that the sugar grain size is moved out of the category for
none and it is put into the processed data category. Doing that for units four and six
gets us about halfway there because the attribute name is the same the PI System doesn't want to
automatically go and just overwrite all of your configuration so sugar grain size will still be
referencing the PI tag FFS 0-3 dot sugar grain size. What we need to do in order to reset it to
template is the same as we did with FFS 0-5 I could select everything right click reset
the templates I could just do that over here on FFS 0-6 I can right click on the attributes say
reset the template and you'll see it applies the correct settings in our settings field.
However if you are doing multiple assets, doing this one by one can take a bit of time,
so another way to do this is we'll check in our changes and then we can do a search for
our attributes. So if I go search, do an attribute search, I want every attribute that starts with
the name sugar because we're working with sugar grain size and I'm not working in production,
I'm working in the sandbox environment and I'll go ahead and say search and what you can
see here is that all of our sugar grain size attributes are here, go ahead say okay. It adds
it to the search and I can reset them to template by right-clicking and saying reset to template.
Going back to our elements now we can see that the sugar grain size is currently based
on the template it's got the green T and to confirm everything's working I'll go ahead
check in my change; open up PI Vision and let me just refresh the display.
You'll see the change's taken place for FFS 0-6 because we did that beforehand, on the next update
cycle when the web crawler checks for changes we should see a change between FFS 0-3 and FFS 0-4.
Right now you can see FFS 0-3, FFS 0-4, FFS 0-5 and FFS 0-6 are all based on the
correct PI tag and we have moved away from the extensions. Our last step is
to go into our PI System Explorer, go to our library and under general for
sandbox FFS we want to take the tick off allow extensions. I'll go ahead check in.
We can consider this one solved and in our next
video we are going to go about solving solution number three,
problem number three, and that is where we had the issue with the sealer temperatures.