The Biggest PI Vision Mistake I See

July 07, 2026•1 min read

Your operators ignore PI Vision because it looks like this.

Here's how Shell's team made theirs actually useful:

They stopped building dashboards for engineers.
Started building them for operators.

The difference?

Old PI Vision approach:
📊 50+ tags crammed on one screen
📊 Raw data everywhere
📊 No context, just numbers
📊 Built once, never updated

Shell's operator-first design:
✅ 5-7 critical KPIs only
✅ Visual alerts (red/yellow/green)
✅ Equipment diagrams they recognize
✅ Mobile-friendly for field rounds

One Shell operator told me:
"Before, I'd check the HMI and ignore PI Vision. Now it's the first thing I pull up."

They went from 10% adoption to 85% in 6 months.

The secret wasn't fancy analytics.
It was understanding that operators need answers, not data.

Your PI Vision has everything you need.
You just have to build it for the people who'll actually use it.

Start with one unit.
Ask operators what they check most.
Build that. Nothing else.

Watch what happens.

Continue the conversation on LinkedInhere

Ricky Sun
AVEVA PI System Specialist
Sunlead Technologies Inc.

🌐sunleadtechnologies.com
📧[email protected]
📞 +1 (587) 327-7514

Ricky Sun

Ricky Sun is the founder of SunLead Technologies, an industrial data infrastructure engineering firm based in Calgary, Canada. He specializes in modernizing operational data systems for energy companies, with deep expertise in industrial historian platforms including AVEVA PI System, Canary Historian, and modern time-series architectures. Ricky’s work focuses on PI System migrations, Asset Framework (AF) restructuring, and historian modernization executed inside live production environments. He works closely with system integrators and energy operators to stabilize industrial data infrastructure, improve operational visibility, and prepare operational data for advanced analytics and AI. Through technical content, industry collaboration, and conferences, Ricky actively contributes to the industrial data and Industry 4.0 community, helping organizations build reliable data foundations for digital operations.

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