SME Development · Industrial software
SME Development builds software for process plants and industrial sites. Our DCS converter, SMEConvert, converts displays from most DCS platforms into live graphics in whatever trending tool your site uses. Every graphic matches the original one to one and stays current as the DCS changes.
Custom industrial code One-to-one graphics Most DCS platforms Your site's trending tool Handles thousands of graphics
SMEConvert · What it means for your plant
Once the displays are in your trending tool, this is what changes — for the people who run the unit and the people who answer for it. Playback, bookmarks and operator records come from the trending tool itself, and we confirm up front what yours supports.
An upset costs money by the minute. The first minutes used to go on getting the right people into the control room. Now they go on fixing the problem.
Every converted display is live in your trending tool with data from your historian, accurate and exactly as fresh as the historian is, so the graphic the operator is looking at is the same one the engineer on call opens from home, from the office, or from a laptop in the field. Nobody has to come to the control room to find out what is happening, and the people who can help start helping in minutes rather than after a drive.
A field operator used to walk back to a workstation or the control room to check the situation, then back out to the equipment, and back again. Now the converted graphic opens on a phone or tablet at the equipment itself. They see what the board sees while standing next to the valve, and the back-and-forth stops.
When engineers, supervisors and specialists can see the live graphic from their own desks, they stop coming into the control room to look over the operator's shoulder. The operators keep the room and their attention during the minutes that decide how long the upset lasts. Meanwhile the people outside the room can actually look at the data: trend the points that matter, use bookmarks and playback to track what is happening, and work out the best decision to resolve the situation before anyone walks through the door.
Every engineer, supervisor and field operator who can see the graphics on an ordinary PC, tablet or phone is one who does not need a dedicated DCS workstation. Those stations are expensive to buy, license and maintain, and most of them sit idle for most of the day. With the whole library in your trending tool, a site keeps the consoles for the people who actually operate the process and stops buying them for everyone who only needs to look.
Put those together and the upset is shorter. The right people see the problem in the first minutes, work it from their own screens with the trends and the record in front of them, and the operator is left alone to run the unit. Every minute that comes off an upset is production that was not lost.
A turnaround puts more people on site than at any other time, and the startup at the end of it is when things most often go wrong.
During a turnaround the site fills with contractors, vendors, project engineers and extra staff, and all of them want to know the state of the unit. With the graphics in your trending tool they see it from the turnaround office, the trailer, or a tablet in the field. The control room stays the operators' room.
Startup after a turnaround is when upsets are most likely. The people who worked on each piece of equipment watch their part come up live, on the same graphic the board is looking at, from wherever they are. When something does not look right, they step in with the right information instead of a guess, and without crowding the console.
Turnaround projects change displays: new equipment, retagged points, revised alarm limits, whole new pages. The weekly pass sweeps the DCS export tree, reconverts what changed and adds anything new, so the graphics in your trending tool match the DCS when the unit comes back, without anyone redrawing them.
Bookmark the startup and play it back with the alarms and the operator actions as they happened. The lessons for the next turnaround come from what actually occurred on the graphics, not from what people remember of a long week.
During an upset, the safest place for most people is not the control room.
Engineers, supervisors and specialists see the live graphic without standing behind the operator. During a shutdown or an event, when everyone wants to know what is going on, they find out from their own screens. The room stays quiet and the operator keeps the board.
The graphics we build are view-only. Nothing on them can change a setpoint or move a valve. They show the process and cannot act on it, so they can be opened widely across the plant without adding a single new path into the control system. The converter is the same: it reads the HMI display exports, never the live system, and nothing it produces can reach the controller. Visibility goes up; the attack surface does not.
Alarm coloring and trip points are converted from your own DCS configuration, so a converted graphic shows the same alarm state the console does. Nothing is suppressed; the graphic shows what the DCS reports.
When an event happens and an engineer gets the call, whether in the middle of the night or anywhere off site, they open the live graphics from wherever they are. They see the same displays as the board, trend the points involved and start assessing the situation before they have left the house. Decisions on the phone are accurate and informed rather than guessed, and by the time they reach the plant, if they need to at all, they already know what they are walking into.
When something happens, the questions are what happened, in what order, and why. The answers are on the graphics.
Bookmark the moment an event started and play the graphics forward from it, as far back as your historian's data goes. The alarms come in on the display as they came in on the day, the values move as they moved, and the colors change when they changed. You watch the event as the operator lived it instead of reading it off a list of timestamps. Several displays can play from the same moment, so an event that crossed units is followed across all of them in step.
Anyone reviewing an event can add a comment to a bookmark: what they saw, what they think it means, what was decided. When the next person plays the graphic back, those comments appear at the moments they belong to. The recording explains itself. A new engineer opens the bookmark and gets the whole story with the picture, told by the people who were there.
The record of operator actions on the unit sits beside the graphics: the tag, the value and the time of every move. Filter it on screen or export it to Excel, so the sequence of moves during an upset is a record rather than a recollection.
Bookmarks can be shared with the unit or kept private. A review one engineer builds is there for everyone the next morning, and a private one stays private until you decide otherwise.
Reliability engineering runs on records. The graphic is where the record becomes legible.
Play the graphics back from a bookmark and watch the event unfold on the display itself, across several screens if the event crossed units. The investigation works from what the operator saw, with the trend a click away from any point on the graphic.
Click a point on the graphic to see its history, its states and values, and its tag, without leaving the display or opening another program.
The weekly round reconverts any display whose source changed and checks that every output loads, so the graphic you investigate with is the one the operator had. When the DCS changes, the graphic in your trending tool follows it.
A display program that keeps working, year after year, without heroics and without depending on the one person who set it up.
The weekly round registers itself as a scheduled task and runs as the signed-in user. There is no server to stand up, no database to administer and no service to restart on a Monday morning. If one step fails, the steps that do not depend on it still run, and the round says in writing what failed and why, so a problem is a line in a report rather than a quiet gap in the graphics. Nothing needs doing each week. The only time somebody acts by hand is when they want a new graphic sooner than the next pass.
After every run the converter reads back what it wrote. Displays that did not convert, points that came out as dashes because the historian has no tag for them, files that did not land where they should: each is listed by name. Nothing is assumed to be right because the program finished. It is right because it was checked.
Every week the round walks your DCS export tree. A display that is new gets a row and a folder and is converted. A display whose file changed since last time is reconverted, so the graphic follows the DCS edit. A display that has not changed is left alone. Nothing is redrawn by hand, and the library does not drift out of step with the console the week after the project ends.
The first thing the round does is refresh the tag list from your historian, before anything else runs. Every conversion after that is checked against what the historian actually has today, not what it had when the project started. A tag that has been added shows live data; a tag that no longer exists shows as dashes and is listed by name so somebody can build the point or fix the reference.
Many trending tools load each display from its file every time it opens, so a bloated file is a slow screen. We slim the graphics you already run as well as the ones we convert, removing redundant styling and structure. Nothing that is drawn, bound or read changes. The file gets smaller, the display opens faster, and the run lists exactly what it removed.
Bookmarks, playback and the operator action record capture what happened in a form the next engineer can replay on the graphics themselves, not a story that leaves when someone retires or moves on.
SMEConvert
The graphics live on the console, and the console lives in the control room. So when something goes wrong, everyone who needs to see the process goes there. Engineers, supervisors and specialists fill the room behind the operators, asking questions and reading over shoulders, at exactly the moment the operators need to concentrate. The people running the unit are overwhelmed and distracted, decisions slow down, and the upset lasts longer than it had to. And when the call comes at two in the morning, the only way to look at a screen is to drive to site and look at it.
Pricing
Every DCS display you have is converted, and every one of them stays current and accurate. When someone changes a display on the DCS, the converter updates the graphic in your trending tool to match. No two sites are the same, so we look at yours first and send a written quote before anything is signed.
Tell us your DCS platform, your trending tool and roughly how many displays you have. We review a sample of your displays and send a written quote.
Request a quoteAbout
SME Development LLC is an industrial software company. We build custom software for industrial needs, and our DCS converter, SMEConvert, converts displays from most DCS platforms into live graphics in whatever trending tool your site uses and keeps them up to date. SME stands for subject matter expert.
The graphics that show what the plant is doing live on the operator consoles, and the consoles live in the control room. An engineer who needs that information to adjust the process has to be physically in the room to get it. When there is a shutdown or an event, everyone comes in at once. The operators are crowded and distracted at the moment they most need to concentrate, downtime runs longer, and things get missed.
Every DCS graphic is converted into your trending tool, live, where anyone on the plant network can see it from their own desk or from home. Engineers get what they need without walking into the control room, and the operators keep the room. The converter also keeps the graphics matching the DCS afterwards, so the work does not go out of date.
The program runs on your machines against your files. Your display exports, tag lists, point requests and converted graphics are yours. They stay on your network, and there is no service of ours for them to be uploaded to. If you send us something for support, you send it deliberately.
No site's paths, servers, unit names or conventions are built into the product. Every site answers the same questions for itself, which is also why one customer's configuration can never show up at another's.
A converter that silently produces something wrong is worse than one that refuses. Ours lists what it could not decide, checks its own output, and reports the displays worth a second look — because the failure mode that matters is the one with no visible symptom.
Questions
Every HMI display converts one to one, including the color scripting and other behavior built into it over the years. That is usually around 95% of a site's library. The rest are graphics that are not HMI files, such as overlays from other programs, and those do not convert. They are listed by name, so you know exactly which ones they are. One more thing to know: any tag that does not exist in your historian shows up as ---- on the converted graphic, so a missing point is visible rather than silently wrong.
It gets picked up automatically. The weekly pass sweeps the DCS export tree, and any display that does not have a row yet is added to the list, given a folder from its own DCS path, and converted with everything else. A display that turns up between passes converts too, filed by the same rules, and every addition is written to a report so you can see what was added and where it went. The only displays that stay out are the ones you have deliberately marked to skip.
Most. The graphics are built in your trending tool's own format and bound to the points in your historian. Playback, bookmarks, trends and operator records are features of the trending tool itself, so what you get on top of the graphics depends on the tool your site runs, and we tell you up front. A trending tool or historian we have not built for before is vetted first, the same as a new DCS.
No. It reads the HMI display exports, never the live system, and it never writes to the DCS or the controllers. The graphics it produces are view-only: nothing on them can change a setpoint or move a valve. The sensitive parts of your system are never on its path.
As far back as your historian's data goes. Playback, trends and the operator action record all come from the historian, so if it holds ten years, you can replay ten years. Live values on the graphics are exactly as fresh as the historian is: what it has, the graphic shows, accurately.
Nothing. The round runs itself on a schedule, refreshes the tag list, picks up new and changed displays, reconverts what needs it and reports what it did. The only time somebody does anything by hand is when they want a new graphic to appear sooner than the next weekly pass.
The hypercare month after go-live is included. After that, support and maintenance are quoted up front like any other site-specific work. Most sites need very little of it, because the round maintains itself.
Nobody but you, unless you send them to us for support. The program runs entirely on your machines, against your files. We do not host your data and there is no service for it to be uploaded to.
Every site is quoted. The quote depends on your DCS platform, your trending tool, how many displays you have and how much custom scripting they carry. Send us those details through the form or call (360) 770-9287, and we will review a sample of your displays and send a written quote before anything is signed. What a quote covers.
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