PI ProcessBook - Best Biopharm Practices 2

by Oliver Yu

The thing about visualizing process trends is that at some point, you're going to have to make a decision with it.  And when you make a decision with it in the cGMP environment, you're going to need someone to review the decision.  Perhaps this decision is big enough that you're going to need to document it.

Or perhaps, this decision needs a little CYA and you're going to have to present it to the plant management.  Whatever the case, there comes a time when you're going to have to take what you're seeing out of PI ProcessBook and put it in a Microsoft Word document or Powerpoint slide.

This is where the core philosophy of my ex-boss "Jesse B." comes in handy.  Jess is a big believer in one-stop or "few-stop" shopping for data.  You go to one or two places for data and spend the rest of your time analyzing.  OSIsoft PI server is the ideal stop for plant information.

The corollary to "One-Stop Shopping" is "No Additional Editing."  This means having the PI display formatted correctly where "correctly" means no additional work has to be done.

Face it, when you're facing a big decision and you've spent all your bandwidth on analyzing the data, the last thing you want to do is mouse around trying to get the background color right, or putting lipstick on the proverbial PI display pig.

Here are a few things to help you out:

• Use a white or transparent background for your PI ProcessBook displays.
  All Word documents and most Powerpoint slides have white backgrounds
• Use dark colors for primary tags
  The tags that need the most attention should have dark to contrast against the white background
• Use lighter colors for noisier tags
  Noisy tags like jacket temperature or controller output will do well with lighter colors

Have a look at this display and you can tell immediately that this can be copied and pasted directly into a memo with no additional editing:

You're shaving 5 to 10 minutes off every presentation you make.  Over the course of a week, we're easily talking an hour or two of your life you're never going to have to spend on making your memo look pretty.