By Steve Taylor, Principal Systems Engineer at ITI Group
“Controversial opinion: products which are developed purely on customer feedback and value statements, risk running into significant quality issues.”
In 2022, our digital engineering team had a problem. We had been building custom extensions for PI Vision for many years, and in the short term had excellent feedback – but over time the technical debt began to accrue.
What did this look like?
Cluttering of the PI Vision tool pane, symbols with limited to no configurability, repeated building and deployment of near-identical symbols for different customers, with different features. We had some of the best developers and experience behind us, but as long as we were building-to-requirements, nothing would ever go far beyond the Minimum Viable Product unless somebody could write a value statement for every last feature.
You see, it’s really hard to write a value statement for incremental software features in an engineering business – what’s the business value of adding a regression curve? How do you articulate the value of finding displays or data more effectively, or inserting data directly from PI Vision? When good features aren’t polished, they never become great.
This is why PI VisionEx exists – we took the best and brightest of what our customers ask us to do year after year, and built a package around it to ensure that it continues to grow in quality and value, for an affordable annual price. Customers who subscribe are then able to influence what new features and refinements appear, in the order that produces the greatest value to their own users and businesses.
The costs of these updates are shared between PI VisionEx customers, and our team of product experts steer the overall roadmap to ensure that every feature gets the TLC it requires to become the best it can be.
New features get added all the time – so let’s take a look at what’s been added to the pack in 2025:
These are now bundled together with all the features from 2024 and earlier, for the same handy subscription price:
- The Playback Tool is one of the most popular features lost from PI ProcessBook – you can now play back any display in real-time, gradually stepping forward by any time interval to see how your plants and equipment have changed over time.
- The Navigation Tool creates dynamic navigation hierarchies which can be accessed from any display. Get where you need to go faster.
- Manual Data Entry exactly where you need it to happen – securely update PI Point and PI AF values directly from any display, allowing you to enter manual data, leave comments, and adjust the behaviour of complex PI AF Analytics.
- Webpage Embed creates new integration routes with other web-based tools.
- The Status Indicator is a versatile real-time status indicator which turns a simple dashboard indicator into a tool for capturing updates, updating availability status and logging notes for other operators, all within PI Vision.
- Power users of PI AF often store important data in AFTable objects, or connect these to live SQL data sources such as maintenance work order systems. The AF Table symbol allows you to bring all this data directly into PI Vision, so you can see the live set of work orders for the piece of equipment you’re visualising.
- The Help Pane allows you to set up a custom help pane, directing your users to the correct links for help requests, getting started guides and anything else they need.
Many of these features leverage the advanced capabilities of the PI Web API to go beyond the standard capabilities of PI Vision.
We would love to give you a live demo of PI VisionEx and understand how it can enable you and your business to raise your game on dashboarding and plant monitoring. Why not leverage the latest tech to get more value out of your existing investments, help users get where they need to go, catch issues faster and communicate more effectively? Get in touch using the Contact form below.