I am currently working at a company where we are automating a water treatment plant. we are using Schneider Electric’s PLCs combined with some field instruments for various parameters to be monitored/measured. We are also currently using Schneider’s software called Vijeo Citect v7.2.
Vijeo Citect is good, but its lacks in generating good reports/trends/graphs. I am not talking about complex reports, but simple yet informative ones. Vijeo Citect according to me is not helping at all in this regard.
So I spoke to the concerned person at Schneider and they recommend me to go with their own Vijeo Historian software with a MS SQL back-end for this purpose. Our company accessed this proposal but found it rather expensive.
We would probably go for Vijeo Historian once our knowledge with software is adequate and if it Vijeo Historian is appropriate for any project that we execute.
My understanding is that, it’s possible to write a small app using Visual Basic that uses the data from Vijeo Citect combined with MS SQL back-end to generate reports.
Our company at present isn’t very good at software at the moment. So for the current project that we are executing, we would like to buy a software that isn’t too expensive(open source application is preferred) that can generate these additional reports. And over the coming months, build a small application that can generate reports, trends,etc.
I am very new to automation, so it is possible that some of my assumptions above might be wrong, please don’t hesitate to correct me. I would like some advice on this issue.Any sort of help is much appreciated.