Seeq now supports Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and expanded reporting capabilities in latest release, increases headcount to support larger and worldwide customer deployments
Seeq Corporation announces the availability of their latest release, R21, an advanced analytics solution for process manufacturing customers. Seeq enables engineers and scientists in process manufacturing organizations to rapidly analyze, predict, collaborate, and share insights to improve production outcomes. Customers include companies in the oil & gas, pharmaceutical, chemical, energy, mining, food and beverage, and other process industries.
“The rapid pace of Seeq innovation is leading to bigger customer engagements and even faster insights and impact from production data,” says Steve Sliwa, CEO and Co-founder of Seeq Corporation. “We are growing the organization quickly to keep up with customer needs in training, use case development, and core feature development.”
Leading many of the recent hires is Dr. Lisa Graham, a registered professional engineer with more than 20 years of experience in data analytics for pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Dr. Graham will manage the Analytics Engineering team which works with customers on training, use cases, and operationalizing analytics strategies. Seeq’s team of analytics engineers has grown rapidly in 2018 due to the strong growth in Seeq’s customer base and the increased scale of deployments. Other new Seeq employees are in the software development team, testing, development, and user experience, as well as within a rapid response team to address customer issues.
New R21 features reflect both the growing use of Seeq for publishing analytics-based views to other employees, and the increased complexity of the use cases where engineers use Seeq. For publishing insights, Seeq has expanded “scorecards,” a feature for the display of calculated tables in Seeq Workbench and Organizer. Scorecards are used for tabulated metrics, measurements, and other summary data, and may be presented in tables with conditional formatting support and user-defined columns, for example roll-ups by batch or plant.
In addition to new scorecard and other features, R21 also adds frequency analysis capabilities, often referred to as “FFT,” to transform segments of a time-series signal into the frequency domain. Seeq users access the frequency analysis tool via an intuitive panel which guides them through the transformation process and displays results as a power spectrum, or they can access FFT functionality as a formula in Seeq’s scripting environment.
Viewing and analyzing data in a frequency domain is a common requirement in oil & gas, power generation, and other process industries as it helps engineers understand what is causing variability and the best way to deal with it. Examples of how an engineer could use FFT to understand variation of equipment and process include:
- Identify process oscillations due to poorly tuned controllers or sticking control valves
- Identify controllers oscillating with a common frequency
- Identify process variation due to poor operation or incorrect functioning of the process or equipment
- Identify process changes happening at common intervals, and identifying changes in these oscillations which may indicate problems
R21 expands Seeq’s recent focus on enabling larger deployments through scalability features and making the Seeq applications easier to use. R20 features, released earlier this year, include the ability to have live updates to Seeq Topics, which publish insights from Seeq to other users; expanded machine learning functionality for customers doing predictive analytics with Seeq; and an improved query model for customers accessing contextual data from SQL-based data sources to provide faster connections to big data sources.
“Seeq continues to release compelling analytics solutions for customers in process manufacturing and Industry 4.0 engagements,” says Janice Abel, Principal Analyst at ARC Advisory Group. “The need for faster and better insights is a consistent requirement for customers investing in IIoT and Smart Manufacturing.”
Seeq partners with many leading process automation firms including OSIsoft, Emerson Automation Solutions, Inductive Automation, Honeywell, and Schneider Electric.
Seeq also supports all leading data historians, making it the most widely accessible and extensively used advanced analytics solution in process manufacturing companies. Supported historians include the OSIsoft PI System, GE Proficy, AspenTech InfoPlus (IP) 21, Emerson DeltaV Continuous Historian and Ovation DCS Historian, Honeywell Uniformance PHD Historian, Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Historian, Inductive Automation’s Ignition Historian, DataParc Historian, Aveva’s WonderWare Historian, Citec SCADA, and eDNA Historian—with others in development.
