How to connect AVEVA Historian with your Siemens supervision system?

As a result, it's hard to get a consolidated view of production, to compare performance between sites, or to respond quickly to a quality inspection. This is exactly where AVEVA Historian comes in , transforming this fragmented landscape into a single source of truth that every department in the company can draw on.

AVEVA Historian is your plant's industrial memory

In every plant, PLCs and supervisory systems generate a colossal amount of data. Temperatures, pressures, speeds, consumption, machine status... everything is measured, often every second. But without the right tools, this data is quickly lost in a saturated SQL database, in Excel files or, worse still, never exploited.

AVEVA Historian changes all that. Designed specifically for industry, it continuously collects, compresses and stores millions of data points, while guaranteeing that no information is lost. Above all, it makes them accessible in just a few clicks, whether you need to find a critical measurement from six months ago, or compare the performance of your lines over three years.

Where a SCADA system like Siemens WinCC provides an instant, local view, Historian acts as a central, long-term memory. It's the difference between "seeing what's going on" and "understanding what happened, why, and how to improve".

Example 1 - The food industry and cold traceability

Imagine a site producing yoghurts. At each stage (fermentation, packaging, storage), the temperature must remain within a strict range. During an audit, the quality manager is asked a simple question: "Can you prove that your vats have never exceeded 6°C in the last six months?"

If he only has WinCC's local history, he only has access to a few weeks' worth of data, which is difficult to extract. With AVEVA Historian, the answer is immediate: he opens a report, selects the requested period, and displays a clear curve with every variation recorded to the second.

Not only does it provide the auditor with irrefutable proof, but it does so in a matter of minutes, instead of spending days gathering scattered files. The result: time savings, enhanced credibility and assured compliance.

Example 2 - Automotive and predictive maintenance

In an automotive plant, an assembly line regularly stops because a screwing robot breaks down without warning. Each stoppage costs thousands of euros in lost production.

By connecting WinCC to Historian, the maintenance teams decide to historize two key pieces of data: motor vibration and temperature. By analyzing the curves over several weeks, they observed a trend: before each breakdown, vibrations slowly increased.

On the strength of this observation, the plant set up an alert based on these drifts. The robot is now serviced before it breaks down. Unplanned stoppages are reduced, line availability is improved, and production becomes more regular. Historian didn't just store data: it transformed raw measurements into a predictive indicator of breakdown.

Example 3 - Chemicals and energy efficiency

In the chemical industry, energy is one of the biggest cost items. A plant found that, despite stable production, its energy bill was rising. WinCC's local data doesn't allow them to look beyond a few weeks, making analysis complex.

With Historian, the team continuously collects the electricity and steam consumption of each line, then compares it with the volumes actually produced. A clear trend emerges: some batches consume much more energy than others. Digging deeper, the engineers discover that certain process parameters are not optimized.

After adjustment, consumption drops by 10% over the year. On the scale of a chemical plant, this represents hundreds of thousands of euros in savings. Historian has enabled us to move from "we're paying the bill" to "we're controlling and reducing costs".

What are the limitations of Siemens WinCC's native historization?

Siemens WinCC is a specialized supervision tool, but its historization is designed for local, time-limited use. In a modern production context, several issues are at stake:

• Data volume: a modern line generates thousands of points per second. A conventional SQL database quickly becomes saturated.
• Openness: WinCC remains centered on the Siemens ecosystem, where plants are rarely 100% Siemens.
• Operation: generating multi-site reports or analyzing 2 years of history becomes cumbersome, if not impossible.

These limitations show how difficult it is to be satisfied with local historical data when you want to manage modern production. To take this a step further, it's time to rely on a tool designed for this purpose: AVEVA Historian, which goes beyond simple recording to become a veritable industrial data hub.

How do I connect Siemens WinCC to AVEVA Historian?

The connection is based on a simple principle: the OPC UA/DA standard, used throughout industry to share data between heterogeneous equipment.

• Step 1: WinCC exposes its data via its OPC server (e.g. SIMATIC NET). Sensor values, machine status, alarms and setpoints become accessible.
• Step 2: Historian connects to this OPC server and retrieves the selected data. You define which tags are to be historized (temperature, speed, power consumption, etc.).
• Step 3: Historian archives and enhances this data, with built-in compression, redundancy and security.

For the user, this remains transparent: WinCC continues to supervise, Historian stores and makes the data usable. Imagine an invisible pipeline: your Siemens data is captured in real time and automatically transferred to Historian, with no disruption to service.

What concrete challenges does this address?

This is where the connection really comes into its own. The benefits are not just technical: they directly address the day-to-day challenges faced by manufacturers:

• Regulatory traceability: in just a few clicks, a pharmaceutical manufacturer can demonstrate the conformity of a batch, thanks to reliable histories going back several years. This saves weeks of manual research in local databases or Excel files.
• Continuous improvement: in the automotive industry, teams were able to reduce downtime by cross-referencing Siemens sensor histories with production orders stored in the MES. Result: rapid identification of root causes and concrete corrective action.
• Energy efficiency: a beverage manufacturer can precisely monitor the power consumption of its Siemens lines, compare it with production volumes, and detect deviations to reduce costs.
• Multi-site vision: an industrial group operating several plants can centralize data in Historian, even if each site has a different Siemens supervision system. This makes it possible to identify best practices and harmonize performance.

Historian, the data hub for performance

By linking your Siemens supervision to AVEVA Historian, you go beyond local control to build a solid, scalable and open industrial data infrastructure. Historian becomes a central hub, capable of supplying quality, maintenance, supply chain and general management with reliable, contextualized data.

At a time when competitiveness depends on mastering your data, connecting WinCC to Historian is not just a technical option, it's a strategic lever: one that transforms your raw data into sustainable added value for the plant.