Turning Plant Data Into Margin: PDA Partners with Canary Labs
A production line can run below its potential for an entire shift without anyone knowing until the numbers come in the next day. By then, the material is used, the labor is spent, and the chance to correct it is gone. PDA President Jeremy Anderson points to co-packers, who can “live and die by pennies.” Seeing the conditions behind a line’s performance while there is still time to respond is where the money is, and it shows up in throughput, scrap, downtime, and labor.
Closing that gap is not a matter of collecting more data. Industrial companies rarely suffer from a lack of data. The bigger challenge is determining what information matters, where it should live, and how to get it to the people and systems that can act on it in time.
Process and Data Automation (PDA) has been expanding its capabilities in that space for years, building on its controls and automation foundation to help customers move plant-floor data upward into Manufacturing Execution System (MES), reporting, analytics, and enterprise applications. Its new partnership with Canary Labs strengthens that work.
PDA uses the word partner deliberately. PDA has long taken a technology-agnostic approach, selecting solutions based on the needs of an application rather than steering customers toward a predetermined technology stack. That does not change. But when PDA sees a platform with broad applicability, invests in training its people, and develops the knowledge to deploy it well, that technology can earn a place as a go-to solution. PDA expects Canary to fill that role for industrial data historians.
Canary provides a time-series data historian that collects and stores industrial data locally or in the cloud. Its Axiom application provides visualization, trending, and reporting, while connectivity to third-party systems moves that information into MES, analytics, enterprise business systems, and cloud platforms.
The attraction is less about adding another software product and more about what that platform allows PDA’s Digitalization Services Group to do for customers.
Like many system integrators, PDA’s roots are in controls and automation. PDA President Jeremy Anderson describes the traditional model as “controls first, data second.” Its controls expertise provides access to information at the controls and SCADA layers, while its MES and digitalization capabilities provide a path for putting that information to work farther up the organization.
A stronger historian capability helps connect those worlds. Traditional historian architecture collects, preserves, and presents process data to the engineers, operators, and technical personnel who depend on it. PDA has encountered projects where that architecture became a ceiling when an organization wanted to carry the information farther, combining it with other data or making it available to business systems.
A scalable historian platform lets PDA design the customer’s entire data architecture: what information should be collected, where it should reside, how it should move, and how it serves applications and decision-makers from the plant floor through enterprise systems. That can mean trending and reporting close to the process, while creating a foundation for MES, ERP integration, analytics, cloud applications and AI uses later.
Digitalization projects do not all begin in the same place. In an existing facility, the challenge may be extracting useful information from legacy automation and disparate systems. A greenfield facility has a different opportunity: build a leaner data architecture from the beginning and avoid information silos that have to be addressed later.
Information that begins with a machine, process, or production line can continue serving the engineers and operators closest to it while also becoming available to applications and decision-makers elsewhere in the organization. Enterprise-level objectives, in turn, help determine which plant-floor information needs to be collected in the first place.
PDA has used a similar approach elsewhere, most notably through the investment required to become an Ignition Premier Integrator. Familiarity with a product is one thing. Developing people who understand how to apply, implement, and support it across multiple customer environments is another.
That commitment aligns with changes underway at Canary as it refines its partner program around integrators that actively invest in training, certification and application expertise.
The initial roadmap includes training, certifications, project work and practical application knowledge throughout PDA’s Digitalization Services Group. The companies also plan to collaborate on customer education, application stories, webinars and regional events.
Neither PDA nor its customers benefit because more process data has been collected. The value comes from putting that data into context.
The Canary partnership is therefore less about PDA adding a historian than about strengthening a direction already underway. For Anderson, success will be measured less by licenses or historian installations than by the results customers achieve: better access to information and the flexibility to adapt as their needs change. The objective is not to give customers more data. It is to get real information to the people and systems that make decisions that improve performance.
