PI ProcessBook is going, what are your options?

After 25 years, AVEVA is retiring the PI ProcessBook solutions. So, where does that leave you and what are the alternatives?

Here’s how to make the most of the move from PI ProcessBook to PI Vision.

The PI Process Book has been a key solution for visualizing and understanding data within the PI System for over 25 years. It provides a lot of capabilities and is used by many businesses to provide insight into their PI data. However, after over 25 years in service, the system has become outdated, and in late 2021, it was announced that AVEVA would be officially using PI Vision.

What’s the alternative?

PI Vision offers secure, scalable, and modern architecture to support today’s mobile way of working. To help users migrate to this new product, AVEVA has a utility to convert those displays to the web-based PI Vision. This is very effective and even highlights which Process Books have VBA, allowing you to categorize the ones that will need more work.

I now have new PI Vision displays that have converted and work as ProcessBook did – but what do I do with the displays that didn’t convert?

Once you have the new PI Vision displays that have converted and work as ProcessBook did, you may be wondering which steps to take with the displays that did not convert. In many cases, the answer is to put the analysis into Asset Framework and surface the data in PI Vision. Once you have determined what displays are relevant, those containing VB can mostly be replicated by using calculations and analytics in the Asset Framework. In general, Asset Framework is the right place to do calculations as any other downstream applications will receive the same calculated value, minimizing errors and providing faster response times.

So, what are my options?

To help you with this, here are a list of questions to consider

Are old ProcessBook displays still relevant?
Where should the analysis take place?
How do you navigate to the right display?
What’s your budget?

Governance and Access Management:

What governance is needed?
How can you manage access to approved displays, as well as provide your team of engineers with the capabilities of PI Vision in ad-hoc mode?
If the engineers build some useful new displays, how do I manage the governance to make these available to everyone or to manage the information appropriate to a role?

Data Considerations:

Do you need to display more than PI data?
Do you have manual data entry requirements?

Infrastructure and Resources:

How many users are involved?
Is there an existing Asset Framework structure?
What engineering resources are available for migration?

What are the alternatives?

PI Asset Framework (AF) is a fantastic solution for asset hierarchies and other aspects such as Event Frames, analytics calculations, and rollups. We highly recommend adopting AF even if just for the Element structure and key tags for Event Frame analytics.

Compared to ProcessBook’s tag-based screens, PI Vision is AF-based and provides many advantages, including the management and structure of screens. However simply putting displays into folders (or worse, dumping them into a single folder) will lead to frustration. PI Vision is web-based so it makes sense to bring the visualization of PI data into a governed, structured platform with appropriate security, providing navigation to a wide range of operational data.

The transition from PI Process Book to PI Vision marks a pivotal shift in data visualization, addressing the outdated nature of the former. Asset Intellect provides a flexible, quick, and cost-effective way to migrate from ProcessBook to a web-based solution for both PI and non-PI data sources. Many sites will use a combination of PI Vision, Seeq, Power BI, Power Apps, ESRI, SharePoint lists & documents, manual data entry, read/write SQL data, native charting, heatmaps, and much more.

Get in touch for further information on how we can easily migrate your PI ProcessBook solution to a modern, future-looking platform that enables a multitude of capabilities.