Attendees to the OSIsoft Regional Seminar are also welcome to join an optional pre-event OSIsoft Introductory session. This session will cover the fundamentals of the Modern PI System and is tailored for those that are either new to the PI System and would like an introduction to the technology or wishing to update and refresh their knowledge.

Oman Oil Refineries & Petroleum Industries Company will share their journey  in the operating window for four operating plants, and describe the process from the start of the project until the implementation of the PI System.

To take advantage of operational data across the enterprise, you need to enable more people to consume the data: maintenance engineers, general managers, data scientists, and executives. From real-time access and exploration to operational reporting and analytics, users have different data, technology, and application needs. Managers need to know if targets are being achieved. Analysts need operational data integrated with business data. Data scientists need a cleaned operational data set to train machine learning algorithms for predictive capabilities. But raw operational data can be hard to understand, difficult to access in real time, and hard to consume without extensive processing, which leads to trust and quality issues. In this session, we’ll demonstrate how the capabilities of the PI System can be used to gather, structure, process and deliver the analytics needs of different audiences throughout the enterprise, ensuring that any person can access, understand, and trust the data.

Bill's talk will focus on the changing landscape of the energy industry, how utilities are strategically using data to adapt with these changes and industry trends globally. The talk will highlight that the utilities sector is well into a period of transformation and profound change driven by technological and competitive forces, as well as changing customer expectations.  As these forces accelerate, electric power companies are tapping new technologies to serve increasingly sophisticated customers conditioned by other industries to expect a high-tech digital experience.  New technologies are also expanding opportunities to improve operational efficiencies and prompting experiments with new business models.  However, regulatory structures are taking time to catch up.  Change has begun, but it will need to spread faster for regulated utilities to meet evolving customer expectations.  If they are not positioned to capture value from the shift toward distributed energy resources such as rooftop solar, battery storage, electric vehicles, and smart thermostats and appliances, they risk losing revenue.  As we move into 2019, Bill will take stock of how far and fast the industry is changing and what we should be looking out for in the New Year.

Many of today’s visual analytics tools have been created for business and financial applications and users. Operations managers and engineers need analytics tools specifically designed for industrial operations, which can deliver real-time insights into process and equipment performance. In this session, we'll explore visualization approaches and discover the options best suited for your operations and business needs. We’ll demonstrate how industrial engineers can easily build operational views with PI Vision, use tools like PI DataLink for ad hoc data exploration in Excel, and leverage Power BI from Microsoft for reporting business and operations data together – all with minimal technical skills.