Five Recurring Benefits of the Data Historian

What will your industrial business gain when you start using a data historian? And what makes it so much better than your current SCADA and DCS systems? Discover the five biggest recurring benefits of the data historian, starting from day one.

In a previous article, How SMEs can Leverage Industrial Historians — Without Spending a Fortune, we talked about how data historians were previously only affordable for large companies in capital-intensive sectors. Not anymore, thanks to open technology and the Automation Revolution amongst SMEs.

The obvious question is: what will your business gain using a data historian? When evaluating its value, you should consider that the implementation of a data historian happens in two distinct phases. First, the data historian is introduced as a solution. In this phase, data acquisition, instrumentation, and trending are the focus.

Second, the historian becomes a technology, a data management platform if you will, in which the acquired data itself becomes a source for advanced data analytics, data science and sometimes an updated business model.

Both phases bring merit to any industrial company, and have their distinct added values. In this long read, we will focus on the virtues of a data historian by introducing it as a solution.

But first, let us take a step back, and have a look at what you already have: SCADA and DCS systems.

Why data Historians beat SCADA and DCS systems

Most companies in process and discrete manufacturing have invested in either SCADA or DCS systems, according to their specific needs. These systems operate on level 0-2 of the automation pyramid. They provide adequate, real-time monitoring of the production process, and guide operators in making decisions in case of alarms or fault-states. Both SCADA and DCS systems even provide a, though limited, ability for trending historical data.

However, both control systems come with severe limitations in regard to data analysis. They only provide a limited amount of historical data, if any, and they are limited to their particular data silo. This means that it is only possible to examine the data for which these systems are responsible, say a single production line, without providing an aggregated overview of the entire plant.

Furthermore, these systems are inescapably locked in their proprietary software model. This makes it very hard, if not impossible, to perform data analysis on the restricted data, in both scope and accessibility, that is contained within them.

Where they end and we begin

Most companies in process and discrete manufacturing have already invested in either SCADA or DCS systems, according to their specific needs.  These level 0 - 2 systems provide adequate real-time monitoring of the production process, and guide the operator in making the correct decisions in case of alarms or fault-states during the production process.  Both SCADA and DCS systems even provide an, albeit limited, ability for trending of historical data.

The data historian, on the other hand, operates on level 3 of the Industry Automation pyramid. It aggregates the data of the entire plant — over all production lines — and it keeps the data available for as long as needed, if not forever. This opens a new world in terms of data analysis, troubleshooting and process improvement.

Factry Historian frees the collected data. It puts no limitations on integrations with other software and creates the perfect link between Operation Technology and Information Technology. Production savvy people are now able to use the technological infrastructure to analyse production processes in real-time.

Five Recurring Benefits of data historians

SCADA or DCS systems are not built to answer the questions people actually ask after the shift ends.

"Why did we run four minutes slower on line 2 today?" "Was that a real leak or a sensor glitch?" "Can I see this against last month?" SCADA gives you real-time control over the process as it happens. But it wasn't designed to hold years of history, connect cleanly to other systems, or let more than a handful of trained users actually query it. A data historian isn't a replacement for SCADA or DCS; it sits alongside them and does the job they were never meant to do: turning raw signals into something a person can actually use, long after the moment they were captured.

It helps to think about what a historian gives you in two phases. In the first phase, right from day one, it's about acquisition, instrumentation, and trending: getting every sensor's data flowing into one place, in real time, visualized in a way that makes sense to whoever's looking at it. That's the phase most people evaluate a historian on, and it's the one this article focuses on. But a second phase follows naturally once the first is in place: as more data accumulates and more people start using it, the historian becomes a foundation for things nobody originally asked for, deeper root-cause work, cross-site benchmarking, planning integrations. The five benefits below all start in that first phase, but several of them are really the seeds of the second.

1. Root-cause analysis stops being a scavenger hunt.

‍Acquired sensor data, temperature, pressure, flow, whatever's being monitored, can be linked to contextual data: the start and end time of a specific order, a batch, a shift. That link is what makes the difference. Instead of cross-referencing three spreadsheets and trying to remember what time the deviation happened, an operations or quality manager clicks into the exact window where something went wrong and sees everything relevant to that moment at once, with a couple of clicks instead of an afternoon. That's not just a time saver. It also keeps the person doing the investigation focused on the actual issue, instead of the logistics of finding the data about the issue.

2. Anomalies get caught while they're still cheap to fix.

‍With sensor data centralized instead of scattered, deviations that used to hide in the noise become visible, sometimes because someone spots a trend on a dashboard, sometimes through an automatic alert configured against a threshold. The value here compounds with time: a leak or an efficiency drop caught in week two of monitoring costs a fraction of what the same problem costs after a month of quietly running undetected. The earlier a historian is in place, the earlier this benefit starts accruing, which is part of why "we'll get to it eventually" is a more expensive choice than it looks.

The same underlying data also enables predictive maintenance: instead of servicing equipment on a fixed calendar or waiting for it to fail, you can schedule maintenance based on actual run-hours and condition trends. A World Economic Forum and Accenture study on industrial predictive maintenance found it cut scheduled maintenance costs by 12% and total maintenance costs by 30%, while eliminating 70% of unplanned downtime. That's not a Factry-specific number, it's what happens industry-wide once maintenance stops being reactive.

3. Nobody has to file a request just to see their own data.

‍Classic SCADA and DCS systems are typically locked to a handful of trained operators or engineers, often for good reason: they weren't built with broad, safe access in mind. An open historian architecture changes that calculus. The same production data can be put in front of an operator on the floor, an engineer at a desk, and a director looking at group-level trends, without three separate licenses, three different tools, or an IT ticket every time someone new needs a login. Access stops being the bottleneck it used to be.

4. Data outlives the person who collected it.

‍When institutional knowledge lives in one experienced operator's head, or in a spreadsheet only they know how to read, it walks out the door the day they leave, retire, or move teams. A historian keeps every batch, every event, every recorded anomaly on the record indefinitely. Onboarding a new hire becomes a matter of showing them the dashboard and how to read it, not shadowing someone else's institutional memory for six months and hoping enough of it transfers.

5. It scales without becoming its own project.

‍Add a new production line, a new site, a new type of sensor: an open historian absorbs it as configuration, not as a fresh integration effort. Compare that to systems priced and licensed per tag or per point, where every bit of growth comes with a renegotiation. This matters more every year, since the systems sitting downstream of a historian, MES platforms, ERP systems, BI tools, increasingly expect to plug in directly rather than needing a specialist to rebuild a custom pipeline each time something changes.

None of this requires ripping out what you already have. A historian is additive: it sits next to SCADA and DCS, pulling from the same sensors, and gives everyone downstream, from the floor to the boardroom, a usable, lasting record of what actually happened.

If you're evaluating historians right now, the real test isn't the feature list on a spec sheet. It's how quickly someone outside IT can answer their own question without filing a ticket. See how Factry Historian handles that in practice, or talk to us directly about your current setup — we're happy to walk through exactly what this would look like for your plant.

‍