AURA EOD Reporting: Automating Your End-of-Day Workflows

The data is not missing. Clinker production, kiln feed, specific heat consumption, mill throughput, section-wise power, AFR usage, WHR generation — all of it is measured continuously and stored in the historian. What is missing is the aggregation, the calculation and the presentation, and those are performed manually because nobody built the alternative.

The consequences compound. The report is late because it depends on a person arriving. It is inconsistent between plants because each site evolved its own spreadsheet. It is error-prone because it involves transcription. And it is unauditable, because when a figure is questioned three weeks later, nobody can reconstruct which tag readings produced it.

That last point is the one plant heads raise most often. A number that cannot be defended stops being useful in a management discussion the first time it is challenged.

Four stages, running unattended as a Windows service. It reads tag values from the DCS, PLC, SCADA or historian over a read-only OPC connection. It validates those readings — range checks, staleness checks, expected-null handling — and quarantines anything that fails rather than silently including it. It applies your configured formulae and aggregates by shift, day and month-to-date, flagging deviations from target. And it builds a multi-sheet Excel workbook in your existing template and writes it to your LAN shared drive with a unique dated filename.

The trigger is your EOD cut-off time. Nobody starts it, nobody supervises it, and there is no operator action required for it to complete.

Production volumes, energy consumption per tonne and cost data are among the most commercially sensitive figures a manufacturer holds. In a competitive market they are precisely what a competitor would most like to see. That is the substantive reason plants resist cloud reporting tools, and it is a correct instinct rather than technophobia.

AURA runs on a server inside the firewall and writes only to a local drive. There is no internet path, no cloud service and no external transfer — there is nothing to leak because there is nowhere for data to go. For groups that do want head-office consolidation, a controlled one-way replication of aggregated figures can be added, and that is an explicit decision rather than a default.

The read-only constraint deserves equal emphasis. AURA reads OPC tags and has no capability to write to a control system. This is architectural rather than configurable — the write path does not exist in the software. That is the answer to the first question every plant engineer asks.

This is the decision that determines adoption, and we insist on it for the first release. The output must be the workbook your management already reads — same sheets, same layout, same terminology, same conditional formatting, same embedded charts.

The reason is that it removes the adoption problem entirely. Nobody has to learn anything. From the reader's point of view the only change is that the file appears on the drive at 06:30 and is always correct. Improvements to the report — better structure, additional analysis, removal of columns nobody uses — come in a second phase, after trust is established.

We have reproduced some genuinely awkward templates: merged cells, sheets with hard-coded row offsets, formatting that depends on the day of week. It is unglamorous work and it is what makes the difference between a system people use and a system people are told to use.

Parallel running is not optional. AURA produces the report alongside your existing manual process, every day, and the two are reconciled until they agree consistently — typically three to six weeks. Only then does the manual process stop.

This does two things. It proves the calculations, obviously. Less obviously, it surfaces the places where the manual process was quietly wrong — a formula that referenced the wrong cell after a sheet was edited two years ago, a shift boundary applied inconsistently, a tag that was decommissioned but whose last value kept being copied forward. We find something in most parallel runs, and that discovery is frequently more valuable than the automation.

Alongside the report, an audit sheet traces every figure to its source tags, timestamps and formula. When a number is challenged in a meeting eight months later, the answer takes a minute rather than a day.

The immediate change is that two to four hours of skilled time per plant per day is returned. That is the number that justifies the project and it is the least interesting outcome.

The more significant changes are second-order. The morning meeting starts from a report everybody has already read, rather than waiting for it. Deviations are flagged the day they occur rather than noticed at month end. Plant-to-plant comparison becomes meaningful, because every site computes its KPIs identically for the first time. And a figure that gets questioned has an answer, which changes the character of the discussion.

Several clients have told us the reporting automation was the smallest part of the value. The largest was that arguments about whose number was right simply stopped.