How Prism Connects Laboratory Analysis Results to an Industrial Historian

Laboratory instruments generate valuable information about product quality, composition, and process performance. When those results stay isolated on laboratory computers or have to be transferred manually, they're difficult to fold into plant-wide reporting, trending, and operational decisions.

A chemical manufacturer engaged Prism Systems to build a dependable connection between its Agilent ChemStation laboratory systems and its industrial historian. The resulting software automatically collects completed analysis files, interprets the data, and writes results to configured historian tags, without laboratory personnel having to reenter anything manually..

The Challenge

The customer's ChemStation systems produced analytical results as formatted text files. The information laboratory and operations personnel needed was there, but it wasn't automatically available in the plant's historian.

A manual process would have meant repetitive data entry, delays between finishing an analysis and having it show up in the historian, a real risk of transcription or tag-mapping errors, and little visibility into whether a given result had actually been processed. It also would have created ongoing support work every time analytical methods, compounds, or historian tags changed.

The customer needed an automated integration that could support multiple laboratory computers and analytical methods while staying manageable as lab requirements evolved.

The Prism Solution

Prism built a configurable solution with two components: the Laboratory Data Integration Service and the Laboratory Data Integration Console.

The Service runs continuously in the background on each laboratory computer. It watches a designated output folder for new ChemStation result files, identifies the analytical method in each one, parses the required results, and writes the corresponding values to the industrial historian. After processing, it moves each source file into a Processed or an Error folder, giving a clear record of what succeeded and what needs review.

The companion Console gives authorized users an easy way to view service activity and monitor what's being written to the historian. Users can start, pause, or restart the service from the console, but the background service keeps running independently even when the console is closed.

Configuration Without Custom Code

A key design goal was supporting changing laboratory methods without repeatedly modifying the application. Prism externalized the instrument, method, compound, and historian-tag mappings into configuration files. Each installation can define the instrument identifier, the location of ChemStation output files, one or more analytical methods, method-level and sample-information historian tags, and the compounds and historian tag tied to each method.

That means authorized personnel can add, modify, or remove methods and compound mappings as lab requirements change. As long as the ChemStation output follows the supported report structure, new methods can be added through configuration rather than a new round of software development.

A Dependable Laboratory-to-Historian Workflow

The completed workflow runs like this: ChemStation finishes an analysis and creates a formatted result file. The Integration Service detects the new file, identifies the instrument and method, and parses the configured result values. Each value is written to its historian tag, the activity is logged and shown in the Console, and the source file is moved to the Processed or Error folder. This keeps the laboratory application separate from the historian integration while preserving a traceable record of every file processed.

The Result

The integration makes laboratory information available within the same historian infrastructure used for operational data, reporting, and analysis across the facility. It helps the customer eliminate repetitive manual transfer of results, reduce transcription and tag-mapping errors, make lab results available to historian users more consistently, and keep a traceable record of successful and unsuccessful processing, all while supporting multiple instruments and methods and adapting easily as procedures change.

By connecting laboratory systems to the plant's existing data infrastructure, Prism turned isolated instrument outputs into accessible operational information.

Bridging Laboratory and Plant Systems

This project shows Prism Systems' ability to integrate specialized laboratory equipment with plant-wide operational technology. Successful industrial integration takes more than parsing a file or calling an interface. It requires accounting for instrument behavior, data mapping, configuration management, error handling, historian architecture, long-term support, and the people who'll actually operate it.

Prism builds custom integrations for laboratory instruments, industrial historians, ERP and manufacturing systems, production equipment, quality applications, and other specialized operational platforms.

Have laboratory or production data that needs to reach the rest of your operation? Talk to our Software Engineering team about a practical integration strategy.

Agilent and ChemStation are trademarks of Agilent Technologies, Inc. Prism Systems, Inc. is not affiliated with or endorsed by Agilent Technologies, Inc.