As SCADA has grown in the past decade along with the other IoT devices, the need for monitoring the internal aspects real-time has come as a need-based requirement. It can be your camera that needs a larger screen to view real-time scene details before you capture the data or the continuous electrical voltage recording passing down an installation at your auditorium which needs to be read from time to time by a watchdog. Exactly, how these are made possible is by attaching readable interfaces and actionable buttons and callable methods that work on a PC touch screen in front of the human attending to the system. Although the data can be read later after it has been stored at the data centers of those huge companies, and accessible to you via the smart phone application, the need to directly see the reading, the temperature level, the capacity of the tank using audio and visual diagrams and colorful visualizations on a monitor is often the boost in efficiency.

Once, the visualization is done and the numbers are read, a necessary call or instruction to slow down the generator can be passed by the simple click of an on-screen button. This reduces the use of hardware switches and relays and makes everything quite neat and accessible.

Improved accessibility

The PC touch screen is often available in various sizes, in various formats whether 4:3 or 16:9 ratio and can be mounted at strategic corners where you can sit and monitor the processes all day without having to roam around in the dingy corridors and among dangerous tanks with boiling water. So, safety is a major advantage. The SCADA applications come with animated objects, graphical interfaces, symbols and icons that are standardized across industries, theory, and practices, and hence offer useful insights right from the screen. It also helps get customized reports in real-time by clicking on a specific device, let's say, or by zooming in the data recorded by the voltmeter and so on. When everything is right there in front of you, the bigger picture helps consume the information in a much more palatable way.

Improved graphics

The graphical interface of any application is the prime concern for the user. It must be easy to navigate, easy to understand, should not be too detailed or too abstract, should allow flexibility at every level as much as possible, should allow actionable insights wherever is necessary. It cannot be restricted to a very few or everything cannot be made user-based, so the automation systems should work on their work offering a provision to intervene. In order to make things legible and, accessible touch panels are used.


Archer Finch writes about modern advancements in monitoring equipment in SCADA and PC loggers, where PC touch screen panels and actionable graphical visualizations laid over an interpretable front-end is very useful for the end user. This helps make inferences faster, understand the underlying processes, and derive reports with just a few clicks.