You can hear a lot when you listen

Creating a great product requires careful listening. When we started the journey to create Seeq, the leadership team had decades of context and user input. Companies told us that they needed to get more value out of their data. "We know the answer is in the data, it's just too hard to find," for example. “We’re data rich and information poor,” was a common complaint. So, our intent was to address this market need by creating the best visual analytics application for process manufacturing data.

Our first release of Seeq took place nearly 2 years ago and we continue to deliver on the users' needs we’ve heard about for so long. Much of our progress is a credit to our users. The product has evolved substantially based on customer feedback and user adoption. As a result, Seeq now enables sophisticated analytics on historian and contextual data sources. It’s an application for engineers and scientists who know what they are looking for and want a better solution to help them get insights.

As more customers began using Seeq, we received requests to get analytics results from the engineers and scientists to other employees throughout the company. Seeq has some mechanisms for this today such as export to Excel but customer requirements were often in the context of spreadsheets and reports they manually created for each batch, shift, week, month, etc.  We heard things like "This is a great analysis result, but can you help me to get it to look like this?" To better understand customer needs, we had over 40 companies share their summaries and reports with us. What we realized is that Seeq needed additional functionality to enable users to assemble analyses and visualization for collaboration, agendas, presentations, and other uses. These requests led us to create a new tool in our latest release of Seeq (R18) called Organizer.

Now, from the Seeq home screen you have two options.  You can create an Analysis in Workbench or create a “Topic” in the new Seeq Organizer tool.

Topics are analogous to Analyses and are comprised of one or more "Documents.” You can easily add content to each Topic with features to find the content stored in Analyses that insert visually clean analytics (from individual worksheets) to the Document. For example, you can convey an analysis that embodies the results of a complex investigation completed in a Seeq Workbench Analysis through a higher-perspective, comprehensive and documented story in the Seeq Organizer Topic. Documents support content from just about any system, including images and hyperlinks. Of course, you can add text to documents as well.

Two other important aspects of Organizer Topics are the date range and publishing features. Date ranges include conditions and capsules as well as built-in periodic conditions (day, week, month…). Each Document within an Organizer Topic has a primary date range which can come from either of these sources and can be associated with any time frame of interest.

For publishing, Organizer Topics can be published to a PDF and shared with other employees in the organization. Seeq’s PDF publishing model is unique in that it maintains hyperlinks from the PDF back to the source data in Seeq Workbench. This allows for quick drill downs from the PDF file back to the source investigation in Workbench.

In addition to the introduction of Organizer in R18, there are several important new features in Seeq Workbench. One simple but very helpful improvement is a tool panel for periodic conditions such as hours, days, and weeks. Prior to R18, if you wanted to do daily aggregations you would first need to create a formula for days; now it's a simple pre-built tool. We also have a new tool to create Scorecards which are a list of metrics with color coding based on user-defined thresholds. 

There's a comprehensive overview of R18 in the release webinar.

We hope you will enjoy all the new features of R18. Organizer enables you to get your analysis results out to more of your team members and is an important step in making Seeq more accessible to more users.  We encourage you to upgrade as soon as possible. If you need assistance, just let us know. We can always be reached at [email protected]

And most importantly, keep telling us about your challenges and needs – we are listening!