User Adoption Matters: Three Top Tips to keep Users Engaged

This article is part of our AVEVA PI System Newsletter series, but equally, much of the advice contained within will be applicable to other Industrial Data projects.

Marija Markovic, Lead Systems Engineer at ITI Group, shares how and why you should keep your users engaged: essentially to improve efficiency, reduce mistakes and get the most from your investment.

Imagine spending weeks building the perfect PI Vision display to solve a complex business problem, only to discover that a similar solution was already in place… but no one knew it existed! Resources were wasted, the team was frustrated, and the opportunity to leverage existing work was missed.

Situations like this happen more often than you’d think: without awareness and engagement, your best solutions will go unused or duplicated. Businesses lose out when their users don’t know what’s available – this leads to repeating work, inconsistent results, and wasted time.

Keeping users engaged and educated about what exists and how to use it helps improve efficiency, reduce mistakes, and maximize the value of the PI System.

So, how do you do it?

Tip #1: Build an engaged user base

Training is the foundation for strong PI adoption. Users who don’t understand what’s available can’t make the most of it or share it with others, so keep knowledge bases up to date and have a strategy for training and support.

Internal sessions like Lunch and Learns can be really helpful internally, but industry or tech events (such as ITI Group’s upcoming Industrial Data User Forum) can help your best and brightest to stay current, learn best practices, and connect with other users with similar problems.

Sharing existing PI assets and knowledge helps teams work efficiently and avoids duplicating effort.

• Provide training: Offer sessions for all users on PI from basics to more advanced roles. There are many YouTube AVEVA trainings available, as well as our PI AF Developer training. Some organizations can access training tokens from AVEVA or others to access formal courses, so it’s worth checking what training resources are available.
• Super Users: Identify key users and champions to guide teams and promote best practices. If you support your best users well, they will be catalysts for the teams around them to use your data and solutions effectively.
• Encourage knowledge sharing: Help teams communicate what they’ve built or updated – solutions from one group may help another. Why not set up a dedicated Teams channel for your expert PI users to share knowledge? If you already have one, what can you do to bring it to life?
• Maintain a catalogue: Create searchable lists of PI AF templates and PI Vision displays so users can easily see what already exists. Don’t forget to include pictures and video!
• Hold Lunch and Learn sessions and Forums in your organisation: Lunch and Learn and User Forum sessions are effective way to keep users engaged and educated. They provide an informal setting for team members to share knowledge, demonstrate best practices, and explore new or lesser-known features in PI.
• Check and communicate new software releases: new versions often bring new features, performance improvements, and tools that can make development and daily work easier, more efficient, and more reliable. Help your team find and use new features!

Tip #2: Beware Failed Adoption

What if your next digital solution was technically perfect and fully functional, but still failed? Maybe no one uses it, or within a few years somebody forgets about it and builds their own version. This can happen when not enough attention is given to how real users adopt and use solutions – a quiet but surprisingly common reason many digital projects fail.

Don’t just build solutions correctly: ensure they are adopted, maintained, and enhanced. Here’s how to keep your solutions delivering real value:

• Focus on real roles and processes: Building a P&ID display (for example) is great and all, but what real business needs and processes are you trying to support? What’s the purpose of the solution? Does the user just need to know what’s running, or are they trying to optimise the process? What actions will they need to take next – what’s the next system or display they will need?
• Review & Encourage Feedback: Get real users to check and discuss what you’re building. Ask them what works and what could be improved. Do it side-by-side if you can, and you’ll get better feedback and build trust along the way.
• Engage different teams: Involve multiple sides of the business so solutions are widely useful, not just for one group. Avoid every team diverging into having their own unique solution and dataset for their own purposes, unless the needs of teams conflict with one another.

We recently discussed this challenge in more detail in a recent Tech Talk for the Institute of Measurement and Control.

Tip #3: Searchability is king – names, descriptions, and keywords

Something has gone wrong with pump P-21101A, and the team is urgently trying to understand what has happened. The operator is looking at the display for this pump, but knows there’s another tag, somewhere, which indicates a critical valve position. But the tag has a generic, useless description, and a non-standard name, and crucial time is wasted trying to find it.

In the digital age, searchability is king: PI tags, AF templates, analyses and PI Vision displays need to have clear and consistent names. This will make it easier for everyone to search, and reuse what is already available.

Introducing a standard naming convention for PI tags and applying accurate, meaningful descriptions prevents confusion and reduces lost time searching for tags. A tag called PUMP1.PV without description or other context could measure anything. But tag XXX-PUMP1-FLOW with the description “Volume flow rate for XXX Pump 1” and clear engineering units tells the user what the tag represents and how to use it.

Some tips for Good PI Tag Naming:

• Use prefixes for different assets: For example, if you have pumps in different plants, use a prefix like PL1-PUMP101-FLOW and PL2-PUMP101-FLOW instead of just PUMP101-FLOW
• Include the equipment ID: name or number of the asset
• Include measurement units: what is being recorded (Flow, Temperature, Pressure)
• Use standard abbreviations: agree as a team and stick to them (TEMP not TMP).
• Keep tag descriptions meaningful: avoid vague text and be explicit, for example instead of Flow sensor specify Flow rate for Pump 1 and include the Pump name or instrument number

Just like PI tags, PI AF templates and PI Vision displays need clear names and useful descriptions. This makes it easy for everyone to find them, understand what they do, and reuse them instead of creating duplicates.

A good template pays dividends. In PI Vision, displays built for assets from the same AF template can be reused easily. An engineer could instantly have a display for brand new equipment, for example a boiler and fan, simply by changing the asset paths – no need to rebuild the display from scratch. Design solutions that are easy to adopt and reuse to maximize both immediate value and long-term efficiency.

Summary

All the guidance, training, and best practices we’ve discussed ultimately serve one purpose: ensuring your PI System actually delivers value. The most sophisticated PI AF template, the most detailed Vision display, or the best analytic is only useful if people know it exists, understand it, and can use it!

Think of it this way: every duplicate display, every unused template, every feature that gets forgotten is lost time, effort, and insight. But when your team is engaged, trained, and aware of what already exists, your PI solutions become more than just tools; they become catalysts for smarter decisions, faster problem solving, and cross-team collaboration.

Strong adoption elevates every PI system into a crucial business system by reducing wasted effort, driving smarter decisions, and increasing the return on your digital investment.

So build it, share it, adopt it, and maintain it!

And as always, if you need any help with anything AVEVA PI System related, our expert engineers are only a phone call or a message away…