Patent ID: 7650198

Claim:
A system that facilitates monitoring and/or control of a manufacturing process, comprising: a data retrieval component employed in a human machine interface (HMI) that retrieves historical data and real-time data associated with a manufacturing process in an industrial automation environment from disparate data sources, the data retrieval component retrieves the historical data from a database or a data file by employing a first protocol, the data retrieval component retrieves the real-time process data from the manufacturing process in real-time employing a second protocol; a unified data access component that abstracts differences between the retrieved historical data and the retrieved real-time data to provide unified process data; and a process overview display that utilizes the unified process data to provide the real-time data and historical data at the HMI in the same format, and playback of historical process overviews at the HMI, wherein the playback includes playback over a user selected time period.