From raw tags to everyone’s desk.

In our earlier post on why factories need an open, scalable historian, we listed what process engineers ask for: long-term, vendor-agnostic data; access without code; meaningful alerts; trends over time or by batch; and the ability to slice and compare data against batches, phases, events and alarms.

The Factorian Edge Historian was built for exactly that. Now the same context shows up in Microsoft Excel and Grafana. They are two views onto the same governed data, so an engineer building a batch report and a manager watching a live dashboard see the same tags, phases, events and alarms, defined the same way.

Getting contextualized process data out of a historian has meant a compromise. Engineers export raw tag data to a spreadsheet and rebuild batch and event logic by hand every time. Operations teams build dashboards with live trends but without the batch and phase context engineers reason in.

Neither approach scales. The Add-In and the Plugin expose the historian’s contextual hierarchy and aggregation functions natively in each tool, so nobody has to choose between the spreadsheet and the dashboard.

The figure below is the contextual hierarchy from our earlier post: raw stream, phases and events, and batches. Alongside it is the aggregation complexity a historian handles at each level, from F(x) functions like moving average and interpolation, through raw, aggregated and derived alerting, to batch and event statistics and overlays.

The add-in turns the spreadsheet into a live client of the historian instead of a place where exported CSVs go stale. Queries run live from the add-in wizard, so a workbook refreshes on demand instead of being rebuilt.

Because the add-in speaks the historian’s hierarchy, an engineer can ask for E2 across the last three batches and get a correctly scoped table instead of a raw tag dump to filter and align by hand.

The plugin brings the hierarchy into dashboards built for monitoring. Panels are context-aware: a batch overlay panel knows where each batch starts and ends, and an event timeline knows which phase and alarms belong to each window.

Both tools read from the same Factorian Edge Historian, so a batch duration in a Grafana panel matches the one in an Excel report. Hierarchy and aggregation logic are defined once, in the historian, and every downstream view inherits the same definitions.

For pharmaceutical, chemical and other process manufacturers, quality reports, regulatory documentation and shift dashboards can all point to one governed source, with the on-premise control and long-term retention the historian already provides.