Product Reporting with Wonderware Historian

Can anyone help provide some direction on best practices for creating reports in a batch/production environment? I am using Wonderware Historian server. I have fairly extensive experience in water/wastewater where compliance reports are typically cyclic and go from midnight to midnight. Those are simple because it's based on time.

Now in the manufacturing world, I have a requirement to create reports based on events (production cycle completed). These types of reports require summary and average calculations for analog signals, and time-in-state calculations for discrete signals.

I can create an two event tags (production cycle started & production cycle completed) in historian server with all my production data as snapshot tags within that event. I can use the same event to trigger MS Excel to open which performs the query and prints the report to PDF. I am using the Historian Client Excel add-in to query the data and some macro's to save the file and print it.

So my question is how can I get excel to query the correct production cycle when there are more than one of them in a day? The problem is that the event tag on returns snapshot data based on a time period. If I query the event tag for the last 24 hours I will get more than one production cycle returned and I only want the last one. Seems the historian client tools are really limited.

I know about dream report and other reporting packages that can accomplish this but I need to use historian client and excel.

If you could provide some guidance that would be great. Even if it's that I'm going about this the totally wrong way. What works for water/wastewater time series data certainly isn't the same for batch/production based reporting.

Thanks,

Mike

Interested Also

Mike - I'm wondering if you ever got the information you needed or came up with a solution yourself on your question? I also am interested in the best way to do batch reporting using the Wonderware Historian client tools (query, report, workbook, etc.)

To have historian means you obviously have SQL installed. In my experience it is easy to do these type of reports with SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services). The Word and Excel plugins work ok, but seem to be slower in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, they do have there place. The other reason for using SSRS is that you only need a web browser to view, not every machine always has office installed. Query is good for helping create the syntax needed if you are not that strong with SQL language. To help you create the dynamic batch report you need with your current setup will depend on your excel file and other information...I would suggest engaging and system integrator to help you.

Anyway that is my two cents on it.