"At the Motiva Enterprises Delaware City Refinery plant, we were looking for a solution to migrate our existing process control tools to communicate with the Honeywell PHD (Process Historian Database) required by our sister refineries located throughout the United States. It was understood early on in the project that best practices would dictate using open standards where possible.
"One application that was critical to our success was the process data trending application. We had already selected the Canary Labs embedded TrendLink Control as part of our WEB environment solution for other similar projects and decided to pursue using it again with the Honeywell PHD. The last hurdle left was selecting the interface method for the two products.
"After evaluating our options, we landed on the open standard "OPC-HDA" (OLE for Process Control, Historical Data Access). By reputation, we heard of Matrikon Inc. and their wide spectrum of OPC products and support. After contacting Matrikon sales department, we learned that they had just completed development on their Honeywell PHD OPC server product and were looking for opportunities to work with beta customers. Because we were an early adopter, Matrikon was eager to have someone on-site within a week for installation and testing.
"We were completely impressed with the Matrikon staff and their knowledge of the OPC specifications. Matrikon was not only concerned with making it work to the specifications, but also sensitive to our needs for fast query response required from a industrial trending control. Throughout the implementation and testing phase, Matrikon continued to work out small details until we were satisfied.
"I would highly recommend Matrikon software to anyone that requires Honeywell PHD data using the open OPC-HDA standard."
Kevin Moran
Sr. Staff Specialist
Motiva Enterprises