License To Thrive: Bypass Project Roadblocks With Unlimited Licensing

Speakers

Don Pearson

Chief Strategy Officer

Inductive Automation

Chris Monchinski

Chief Technology Officer

InflexionPoint

Sean McFarlane

Team Leader

DSI Innovations

Nathan Kramer

Technical Resources Manager

NorthWind Technical Services

For integrators and end users alike, the costly and limited nature of conventional SCADA software licensing often stands in the way of improving the value, functionality, and scalability of industrial systems.

But imagine working with SCADA software that is licensed to make it easier to create the system that you need. That’s the whole idea behind Ignition’s unlimited licensing model, which empowers you with unlimited tags, clients, screens, devices, and more, for one crazy-affordable price. Combined with Ignition’s unmatched feature set, its unlimited licensing will empower your success like never before.

Watch this webinar to see what a huge difference Ignition’s unlimited licensing model can make in your future projects!

• Complete more innovative projects for less money
• Heal the pain points of old SCADA
• Spend less of your project budget on licensing
• Take systems from stuck-in-the-past to future-proof

Industries Discussed: Energy (renewable natural gas), Manufacturing (metals), Food & Beverage (pet food)

Transcript:

00:01
Don Pearson: Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, "License To Thrive: Bypass Project Roadblocks With Unlimited Licensing." Glad everyone could join us here this morning. My name is Don Pearson, Chief Strategy Officer with Inductive Automation. And as always, we have some great speakers on board this morning. There's Chris Monchinski, Chief Technology Officer at InflexionPoint, and then Sean McFarlane, the team leader at DSI Innovations. And there's Nathan Kramer, Technical Resources Manager at NorthWind Technical Services. So thanks for being here to all of you, Chris, Sean, and Nathan, but I didn't do a very good introduction of you, so let's see if we can take a minute and let each of you tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you do at your company, and a little bit about your company, too. So, Chris, let's go ahead and start with you.

00:50
Chris Monchinski: Sure. Thanks so much, Don, and thanks for Inductive to invite us and let us contribute to this webinar today. I am Chris Monchinski, Chief Technology Officer at InflexionPoint, a systems integration company that specializes in verticals across life sciences, food and beverage, and critical infrastructure. InflexionPoint's been around for quite a long time, over 40 years, and I've actually worked with the organization 30 of those 40 years. Looking forward to presenting this topic. It's a very interesting topic. This market needed a little shakeup, and Inductive has done some really great things with the licensing model. So absolutely.

01:25
Don Pearson: Thanks, Chris. And yeah, you've got a little bit of experience. I guess it's safe to say this is not your first rodeo, as they say.

01:31
Chris Monchinski: I've seen a lot of different products out there, and we've worked through a lot of different licensing schemes over the years with various vendors. So, yes, absolutely.

01:39
Don Pearson: Yeah. Well, pleased to have you here, for sure. All right. Sean. Sean McFarlane.

01:44
Sean McFarlane: Yes. Hi, everyone. My name is Sean McFarlane. I'm a team leader in our MES and SCADA team here at DSI Innovations. DSI is what we call a full-service system integrator. We're based out of the Southeast United States in North Carolina. I've been with DSI for about eight and a half years now. Started out working in our process controls group, doing a lot of specialty chemical manufacturing, extrusion, all sorts of work. I started working with Ignition in 2018, and a few years ago, I started my own team within DSI, and now we've got a team about five strong doing Ignition projects full time.

02:23
Don Pearson: That's great, Sean. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

02:25
Sean McFarlane: Thank you.

02:28
Don Pearson: Nathan. Introduce yourself.

02:29
Nathan Kramer: Hi, Don. Thank you. My name is Nathan Kramer. I'm the technical resources manager here at NorthWind. We are a systems integrator headquartered in Sabetha, Kansas, which is up in the northeast northeast corner of Kansas. I've been with NorthWind for about 12 years now. I started in 2012 as a controls engineer and more recently switched to the technical resources manager. I lead our digital solutions department, which is software development and MES solutions.

03:03
Don Pearson: Thanks, Nathan. Thanks to all you, everyone, for being here this morning. Just a little bit about today's agenda. We're going to start by discussing roadblocks that are created by conventional SCADA licensing and why Inductive Automation introduced unlimited licensing to help you avoid some of those problems. Then we'll discuss with our guests, of course, here that they'll share little projects where unlimited licensing made a big difference. At the end of that, we'll wrap up with a short group discussion, and then we'll use the remaining time to answer any questions you have. So as we go through this, if you want to ask a question, just type it into that questions area on your GoTo Webinar control panel. At the end, we'll get to as many as we possibly can. If we don't get to your question, please do reach out, though, to one of our account representatives, and they'll be happy to answer.

03:51
Don Pearson: Also, in case you're wondering, as some people do, the recording and the slides from this webinar will be available on our website starting tomorrow. If you don't happen to be familiar with Inductive Automation, just a few facts about us. Our software Ignition is used by 65% of Fortune 100, which means that it's pretty much used every day in some of the biggest companies around the world. We have over 4,000 integrators. I think it's pushing 4,500 now worldwide on our Integrator program. Highly diversified customer base across many industries. Actually, tens of thousands of installations in over 100, and I think it's up to 140 countries now. We've been in the industry for 22 years, have over 350 employees based in the US, and offices in Australia. As far as Ignition goes, if you're wondering what Ignition is, we like to say that it's the unlimited platform for SCADA and a whole lot more.

04:50
Don Pearson: In fact, Ignition enables you to connect, design, deploy basically any industrial application that you need, including SCADA, HMI, MES, and IIoT. It acts like a central hub for everything on the plant floor and beyond. web-based, web-managed, and web-deployed unlimited licensing, which we'll talk about today, cross-platform, and it also offers industrial strength, security, and stability. As far as data licensing, that's one of the topic we're going to focus on our webinar today. In a pretty competitive world that we're in right now, being able to improve the value and the functionality and scalability of industrial systems actually is very, very crucial. But the unfortunate reality is, is that conventional SCADA licensing creates a lot of roadblocks on you and your quest, if you will, for making your automation projects as effective as possible.

05:49
Don Pearson: So we're going to talk about some of those roadblocks, and then we'll look at how Ignition removes them from your path when you're building out your projects. First pain point we'll discuss is the high cost of conventional licensing. SCADA software licenses have incremental charges for everything. For example, if you want to do 100 to 500 tags, it'll cost you one amount. If you want to go 500 to 1000 tags, there's another amount. So you're always thinking about money when you're also thinking about projects because there's a cost when you add something. These arbitrary charges at a very, very fast, and they could actually end up eating the lion's share of the average project's budget in some cases.

06:32
Don Pearson: Second roadblock is that conventional licensing is time-consuming and takes a lot of effort when you have to deal with it on a daily basis and update it. As I said, each client is sold and installed separately, and each client takes several hours to install. Certainly can, and you can have to activate license for each client, which is a hassle. Often you have to spend time trying to figure out how to add something to your project without licensing cost for that license being added in, which isn't the most effective way to spend your time or to think about how to approach projects.

07:11
Don Pearson: Scalability, it's really important because what you need today is not the same as what you'll need tomorrow. In today's world, it takes really a lot of sense to have a SCADA system that can be foundation, if you will, for Digital Transformation or IoT in your future. Those types of projects usually involve adding a lot of edge devices, sensors, and controllers. But with conventional SCADA licensing, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to add more additional sensors or devices after you've completed a project. So your Digital Transformation goal will just end up being a pipe dream because it's not economically feasible to actually pull it off. Another, I would say, pretty big problem is that conventional licensing hinders innovation. The cost and labor intensiveness that I just talked about makes you have to settle for solutions that are less than ideal, or they're just not good, or just basically good enough just barely to fit your requirements.

08:12
Don Pearson: It's disappointing to have a great idea for improving your control system but not being able to make it happen because, well, of the constraints of licensing. One more issue that I just want to point out here real quickly is that more and more SCADA solutions on the market are moving to subscription models. This means that instead of paying once, you have ongoing payments, but you don't have full ownership of the software. It adds to the cost. And in many different ways, and you're always thinking about that, but it keeps you locked into having to pay over and over to keep your solution up and running. Even if the price of the subscription goes up, you're going to have to stay with that. That's my overview of the big roadblocks. But now I take a minute here and like to hear from what our guests have to say because they're the ones that have to deal with it on a regular and daily basis. So my overall question that I'm posing to the group here is before you started using Ignition, did you run into any of these or other roadblocks in the projects you worked on, and how did that make it harder to meet your customers needs? So I'm going to just ask each of you to comment on that. Might as well just start with you, Chris.

09:24
Chris Monchinski: Oh, terrific. And you made some great points here in these particular five points. Some of the things that you need to think about is of course, time- and labor-intensive. That's interesting. It's one thing to have to figure out how to scope system and count the tags correctly. That's another that I have to go back to the customer again and again and again and ask for more tags because of this, that or another situation that has arisen as the system's scope was expanded; the system capabilities were expanded. Quite frankly, another interesting thing is that over the years, many of these systems that have these more restrictive licensing, how many times have we sat there as developers, let's say, and said, "How can I get around this? How can I use an analog register instead of an analog input? How can I do more in the PLC, maybe, and bring less to the HMI?"

10:12
Chris Monchinski: That kind of engineering workaround is time intensive and takes away from the value added by any project and hinders innovation, quite frankly. So it is restrictive in many ways and sometimes in ways that we just normalize the behavior and don't even think about what we're doing to cut off our nose despite our face.

10:34
Don Pearson: Thanks, Chris, for your comments earlier. How about you, Sean?

10:38
Sean McFarlane: Yeah, there's a couple things that immediately jump out when I think about these five bullet points. We work with a lot of customers that have thin client setups, and when you consider adding to a thin client environment, you need to consider a couple of things. You need to know how many HMI clients you have available, client licenses, how many thin client licenses you have, and if you have the right amount of RDS CALs for your server. So right there, when you think about expanding a system like that, you have three different licenses that you need to consider before being able to implement. We also run into a lot of situations where our customers have limited display counts in their SCADA application, and they're asking us to make modifications, changes, additions, and we get hindered by those display counts because we simply can't add anything else onto the application. And another thing that just jumped to the forefront of my mind because I dealt with it recently is the software I'm thinking about right now has you license by tag count, but if you want to expand that system, it doesn't always count the previous tags that you have already licensed.

0:11:45.3
Sean McFarlane: And so if you have a 500 tag license and you use up all 500 tags, in order to add on to that, you need to purchase the next tier up. You can't just add 100 more tags. So all three of those are situations that I've run into in the last 12 months that really get in our way as integrators to deliver good solutions for our customers.

12:07
Don Pearson: Thanks, Sean. Nathan, your thoughts on that?

12:11
Nathan Kramer: Yeah, I'll just expand on that a little bit. Back in developing another software, one of the common themes was how much you could get in the fewest number of screens. So there was a fair amount of trying to figure out how to stack pop-ups inside of Windows or inside of a screen so that you reduce your number of screen counts. And that became not only a pain to develop in the first place, but it was not fun to sort through after the fact. So those limitations definitely hindered the best solution from being available.

12:46
Don Pearson: Thanks to all of you for your comments. Actually, I think the things that you're talking about there are really the things that, when I first met Steve, I've known our founder for going on 40 years now, but when we first started working together and he had the project to getting started with Ignition, he was an integrator for a couple decades, and he experienced some of this pain. And that was really, when you think about it, to solve all of these roadblocks that we're talking about here; that was the reason for introducing unlimited licensing. You didn't want the integrator to think about those things. You want 'em to think about doing a good project for the customer. It goes back really to our founder and his thinking at that time. Because he was a systems integrator and he'd done it for many years, he had just gotten frustrated by licensing models of conventional SCADA software. He knew there had to be a better way, so he introduced unlimited licensing as part of Ignition. And it's one of the core pillars of Inductive Automation. One of the basic things we're founded on is unlimited means that Ignition is sold by the server and there are no limits to number of tags, clients, devices, designers, reports, and so on.

13:54
Don Pearson: The only real limits are what your hardware can support and what your imagination can dream up so you can connect your whole facility for one surprisingly affordable price. With Ignition, you get unlimited tags, client screens, etc. As I said, one price, it costs a fraction of what conventional licensing costs, and it only uses up a small portion of a project's budget, so you can spend the money and the time to do the project right. As I said earlier, with traditional licensing, most of the budget can get allocated to software licensing. With unlimited licensing, most of the budget can be allocated to the actual implementation. Another great thing is that instead of being time-consuming and laborious, Ignition's unlimited licensing, it's fast. It's easy. You can simply add new tags, devices, clients without having to add new licenses. It's easy to get started. You download Ignition in only three minutes, has a quick start feature, lets you start designing projects in no time.

15:00
Don Pearson: All of this gives you more time to focus on what's really important, which is, of course, building your innovative solutions. Also, unlimited licensing helps you future-proof your system. You don't know where it's going to go or what you're going to want to do with expanding that project. Ignition grows along with your company, so you can buy one license to connect your entire facility. Later on, the organization grows. You can easily add more sensors or devices, or you can buy multiple licenses to connect to multiple facilities. This affordable scalability is what enables you to expand solutions across the enterprise and to successfully undertake Digital Transformation or your IoT initiatives. It's really ready to start now and ready to grow into the future. Instead of hindering innovation, unlimited licensing empowers it. Problem solvers in the Ignition community, some of whom you're going to hear from today, often tell us that Ignition lets them just say yes.

16:01
Don Pearson: I remember in the early days we had a webinar we did very early on, and Steve was still involved very much in all of the content. And he had a slideshow we put together called Shooting Fish in a Barrel. And Shooting Fish in a Barrel was just like, "Hey, with Ignition it's easy. You can do what you need to do." And one of the slides was when a customer gives you a problem, just say yes. You'll be able to figure it out with Ignition, so just say yes and then figure it out. Nearly anything the customer wants, you can be able to deliver. Because it's so affordable, they have opportunities to try new things without having to justify heavy licensing fees. If I can borrow anecdote from Steve, our founder, when we launched Ignition in 2010, we were entering a mature market with a lot of incumbents. I can remember going to trade shows down in Houston where people were saying, our competitors told us you're doomed to fail.

16:57
Don Pearson: They thought we wouldn't make money with unlimited licensing model; you can't do that. This is a mature market. All these reasons why Ignition and Inductive was going to fail, but that was a shortsighted way to look at it. We discovered that when you remove the old technological and economic barriers and give those people a powerful platform to work with, you open up vast new worlds where people can innovate. And that has led to great success both for our customers and for our company with that mindset. And as I said, more SCADA software is being sold as a subscription these days. Ignition has always been sold under perpetual license model.

17:38
Don Pearson: That means you only pay for each license once, and then you have full access to it from then on. And with Ignition, you can add, as is mentioned, it's just what tags you need, what connects you need, what device you need, etcetera, etcetera. The license allows you to do whatever you want to do, and you just have to handle whatever the hardware is needed in order to actually handle all of that. So that's a pretty good summary. Granted, I'm a bit biased because I work here at Inductive Automation, but let's hear what our guests have to say about what they can achieve with unlimited licensing. We're going to let each of them discuss some real projects they've worked on. So, Chris, why don't we go ahead and turn the presentation over to you, and then we'll go to Sean and Nathan after that.

18:28
Chris Monchinski: Terrific, thank you. And again, thanks for the opportunity. Don, we don't have cameras on etcetera. But I'm smiling ear to ear because of what you said. You said never having to say no or always say yes and then figure it out. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but let me give you an idea of what that really means in the real world and the contrast between the way we used to do business or what we had to do in the past and what we do today. So what does it mean to be able to say yes to a customer? One of the interesting things that also parallels the development of unlimited licensing and the rise of Ignition Inductive Automation in this space. As Don said, in a mature space, SCADA was a mature space, a lot of incumbents, etcetera, doing things the way they'd always been done. What's interesting is, of course, in parallel we have, you know, the buzzwords, Digital Transformation, smart manufacturing, all these new technologies that are being brought to bear in the OT space, that are causing real churn in our industry, but also vast opportunities.

19:28 Chris Monchinski: We can do so much more than we were able to do many years ago. And SCADA in the 1990s could be licensed by tag because your systems were isolated HMIs; islands of automation, had a couple hundred tags. It is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of tags in systems. It's an expectation. And there's many different audiences for those systems. So in an industry that's brand new, and there's quite a few new industries, new innovative ideas like the one we see here, this is an opportunity that we were presented with, a project we've now successfully implemented for our client. And we call it, I like to call it, the customer calls it to cash, to, a cow to cash, rather, excuse me, basically making profitable renewable resources. This is renewable natural gas. Basically taking cow manure as a raw material and turning that into natural gas that I can use to heat my home, that we can use in a factory, that we can use to power a fleet of trucks. This is gas that ultimately is of the high enough quality to go straight into the pipeline and ultimately be used and contribute to the overall energy independence and a circular economy for energy even in the fossil fuel industries.

0:20:33.9
Chris Monchinski: That wouldn't have been possible years ago. It wouldn't have been possible without all the innovations and technologies and capabilities that we can bring to bear today in the SCADA arena, and Inductive's Ignition is a huge part of that. If you think about it, again, what we're doing here is we are, you can see in the diagram here, we're building essentially mini factories on farms in remote locations that typically don't have a tremendous amount of infrastructure, don't even have really good internet connections all the time. And yet we are building these mini factories. So there's automation and safety and control. And since they are new sites and they're remote sites and they're mini factories, they don't have, and there's never been an intention to have them fully staffed. So there's a lot of automation, a lot of need for autonomy, again, safety; there is a need for a lot of remote access in order to have visualization and awareness of what's going on in these locations continuously, as well as safety conditions, alarms, etc.

21:33
Chris Monchinski: And then possibly most importantly is that we're spending a lot of money to implement all these factories and deploy them and bring them up and turn this byproduct, if you will, into a product that we can use renewable natural gas. And in doing so, that requires an awful lot of data. The economy that makes this possible wasn't really even economically viable if it's not for the concept of carbon credits. So I know Don's in California, so thank you, California. Okay. But the fact is the carbon economy and the ability for this company to basically apply for and get a dollar response of value to offset the cost of producing this product makes it economically viable. But in order to qualify those carbon credits, there's a need for a tremendous amount of accurate data. So all these things come together, and you say to yourself, "This is a level 2 and level 1 system that is very, very complex, requires a lot of accuracy, stability, and is going to scale.

22:36
Chris Monchinski: So think about this in the traditional SCADA fashion. It's a new industry. It's never been done before at scale. And I'm the sales guy, and I'm being brought this opportunity, and I want to go and say to my customer, "Yes." Now, as a technology person and knowing the technology, of course I can say yes. I know that the Inductive Ignition tool is the right tool for this. I know that the technologies that are available today, such as MQTT, for example, are going to allow us to scale. Cloud-based storage is going to allow us to scale very quickly in this system. But now I have a constraint. I have a lot of different OEM skids, and vendors that are all over the world are going to bring the equipment to each of these firms, and there's different skids and different collection of OEM equipment that will implement each different location depending upon what's the need.

23:25
Chris Monchinski: So how many connections do I need? How many PLCs do each of these OEM skids have? One more? Some of them are safety systems, so they could have multiple PLCs, etcetera, different types of PLCs, different vendors, different equipment, how many tags, how much data? There's process control requirements, of course, because it is mini factory, like any factory; it's in traditional process control fashion. But then there's an awful lot of other audiences. In fact, this is a new industry. And we're in the era of smart manufacturing. So our customer says to us, I need to buy. It's a brand new vertical for me, a new ERP system, a new CMMS system.

24:02
Chris Monchinski: All of these different pieces of software are going to come to bear in a greenfield environment. So a unique opportunity because we can bring to this customer concepts like Unified Namespace. We don't have to do it in a brownfield where we have to map everything together at a top-level system. We all know that Ignition has great power to be able to scale and structure data in ways and name entities and use naming conventions in ways that would allow us to supply and publish data into a Unified Namespace. Lots of great opportunities here to apply technologies that we're all thinking about today. Someone mentioned before, I think it might have been Nathan, how many clients? I got to count the number of clients. How many clients do I need? Where are they going to be? Who is going to be the audience of these clients? I can't quote this right now, Mr. customer. Need to get my arms around what this is going to look like and count all the tags. No, that's not the way we work today. The fact is, at each of these sites, it is a mini factory.

25:00
Chris Monchinski: And so they have a traditional HMI deployment. You can see in the top left screen, kind of a summary screen. It shows the general process flow in each of the different OEM skids in this particular location. And then they can drill down and see detailed information about operations, details inside the skids. So this is a single pane of glass view across all of the different automation or the balance of plant or the safety interlocks, the security systems around the facility. And it's all done in a secure fashion. And so they can see all this. And yet I mentioned that there's really nobody staffing these places 24/7. So they actually have to be able to see this data remotely. Each of these sites, given the scale and the size of the site, conflicts between, as we've now learned, 10,000 and 30,000 tags. So a pretty wide variability in the number of sites. So now if I want to deploy this to the end game, which is in the 40-50 range, I need to count up all those tags. But I don't want to pay 30,000 per site if half the sites only take 10,000. I got to know what those sites are going to take.

26:01
Chris Monchinski: And again, starting out fresh, first site, greenfield, I don't want to be wasting my time trying to count this stuff and estimate it and then get it wrong for my client. So as I mentioned, you need to be able to bring all this data together too. Which is another important, powerful feature. I think someone, again, Sean or Nathan, I don't know who to credit, but talk about counting screens. I think you both chimed in on this, and having to overload screens with dialogues and things like that, it's like, okay, so how am I going to bring this visualization together so that I have a central location to look at all the status of this information and even have flexibility to do other things with the data? Again, a lot of key stakeholders here; everyone was very interested in the power of this SCADA system and what it could do for them. Not just the operations folks, not just folks in safety and day-to-day operations, but logistics people.

26:52
Chris Monchinski: They're moving gears around, maintenance folks, all new equipment, all new OEM skids. I need to know what the run times on those pumps are. I need to set up a whole new preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance because we're in the 21st century in smart manufacturing, program in order to proactively keep these systems up and running. Compliance and accounting, as I mentioned, we've got to have accurate data in order to calculate carbon credits in order to be able to make this a viable business. So what we ended up building on top of all of those local SCADA systems, okay, which stitched together all the data and provide that mini factory, is we built a control central SCADA, a centralized SCADA system that brings together data through MQTT from all these different sites.

0:27:37.3
Chris Monchinski: So again, not great Internet connections. Need a little bit of store and forward capability at times; you got to get a lot of data through the system in low bandwidth situations, bring all that data up into a central location, and allow a central control room and a central set of operators and logistics individuals to see a bird's-eye view of the operation, understand exactly what's going on, where the trouble spots are, if any, and react and be proactive in keeping everything up and running across all these different sites. In additio n to being able to visualize this stuff and you can see on the right-hand side using the dashboard-based component, which is part of Ignition as well, to be able to build out cards and basically bring together key KPIs that people need to look at and concentrate on and really overload a screen now, and let people build their own screens from these widgets, which is a really powerful thing that you can do with an Ignition to give people the view that they need, all these different users, all these different stakeholders, the view they need of the data the way they want to see it.

28:36
Chris Monchinski: But in addition to all that, they actually have the ability to bring up all of the HMI screens from any individual site on this particular central SCADA. And it's done by replicating that project using EAM into the central SCADA so they keep in sync. And then the tags are actually published from MQTT. So the central SCADA actually sees the MQTT response tag. So we're bringing basically all of the tags at different frequencies from every site up into the system. And they can see it at the central SCADA, lots of tags. Just to give you an idea what this looks like, one site can generate 3 million records a day. And you can see the stats here. You go to eight sites; you're at 24 million records a day. You go to 40 sites; you're at 120 million records a day. 3 million in records a day per site. To start with, one site, each site, it's a tremendous amount of data. Not possible with older SCADA architectures. And you can see here in the diagram on the right-hand side.

29:38
Chris Monchinski: And as many of you know, you can build a multi-tier architecture with Ignition in the central SCADA. We have that where we're using distributors, we're using backend engines, and then we're using frontend engines with load balancing on top of that, which is not depicted. But that allows us to say, "Hey, what are the breakpoints? Can we scale this? Can we add another distributor? How do we arrange this?" Lots of different options here that we have in order to bring this system to scale. And all done with essentially a gateway install and the standard Ignition modules. So just to summarize what I've shown here and to re-emphasize the things that Don and the team here are going to talk about, unlimited tag support, unlimited capabilities with Ignition gives you the freedom and flexibility to grow, to be able to say to the maintenance individuals that, who are saying to me, "Yeah, you got all your process information, but I didn't know my pump run times." Yeah, I can give that to you.

30:26
Chris Monchinski: Here's a UDT; now you can go feed that into your CMMS system, and you can feed that. The SCADA becomes a central data platform for an awful lot of important business-related operations. Accurate data, confidence from scope to deployment. As I mentioned, centralized SCADA at scale, connectivity to many of this different OEM PLCs, lots of different drivers and capabilities. I don't have to worry about the number of accounts, standardized objects, and UDTs. Again, unlimited tags. As Don said, never having to say no to my customer. And that's really what this project's been about. It's been a very exciting opportunity for us and to see this customer succeed. So, Don, thank you very much.

31:02
Don Pearson: Chris, that was fantastic. Totally appreciate it. Also, just your little marketing play on words was not lost on me at the beginning, where you said, "From cow to cash, you have created a cash cow. So that's great."

31:18
Chris Monchinski: All those shorthanded jokes that have already been passed around for a couple years now.

31:23
Don Pearson: Yeah, I thought it was kind of cute. All right, let's go forward then. And Sean, are you ready to take control here and move forward? I think we're DSI Innovations now.

31:36
Sean McFarlane: Yes. Let's see. Make sure I can click, and I can. So great. Thank you, Don, and thank you, Chris, for that lead-in. I wanted to start off by just adding on to what Chris and Don have already said about always being able to say yes. As an integrator, as a consultant, as a service provider, whatever you want to call it, it's obviously always in our best interest to say yes to our customers. Obviously we want to win the work, and we want to develop good relationships. But I'd say there's a difference between saying yes and being able to say yes with confidence, saying it with your chest. And that's something that Ignition gives me the confidence to do when we're looking at these complex applications that may not have a simple path forward.

32:20
Sean McFarlane: So saying that, I'd like to talk about our project today. So this is a customer that's right here in our own backyard in North Carolina, in the metals manufacturing industry. They had a custom-built Visual Basic application in conjunction with some HMIs spread throughout the plant, running their entire production system from entering work orders to production to testing to inventorying and shipping and receiving. These were all, as I said, custom built, spread throughout the plant. Windows XP machines in very specific areas. So if you had to perform a function in your work order entry system, you had to go to that PC. If you had to perform a function in the shipping and receiving area, you had to go to that PC. So it was a very complex system. It was very isolated and spread out and also basically unmaintainable. The people who had developed this software no longer worked for this company.

33:17
Sean McFarlane: So if they ever needed patches or maintenance or any tech support like that, they were basically relying on the goodwill of these ex-employees in order to get that done. On top of that, we had licenses for all this software spread out throughout the plant on these legacy Windows XP machines that, for obvious reasons, they wanted to get rid of. But they are a security risk and also an operations risk. This started out as open spec. I went in there, and I audited their whole system, and immediately I was able to come to the conclusion that they needed Ignition just because of the different business functions that this application had to perform outside of the plant floor operations.

34:00
Sean McFarlane: And then also the fact that we weren't going to have access to the source code for the existing application. And I knew that just looking at what they were doing in VBA and with their database transactions, I could just say, "Yep, Ignition can handle all that, no problem, so let's just jump in and start building something." So we developed an application in Perspective to unify all of these different programs. We consolidated all of these different licenses into a single Ignition gateway license that was controlled by their IT department and located in a secure environment under lock and key, automated backups, and the whole bit. So right there we eliminated a huge risk for the plant by getting rid of these legacy PC systems that, if they ever shut off and would not start back up for whatever reason, they would have to scramble to try and figure out how to rehost the licenses that were on those machines onto a new PC in order to get them back up and running.

34:53
Sean McFarlane: And part of this, where the unlimited licensing really flexes its power, is as we were developing this application, we started gaining the attention of other people within the plant that previously had had no visibility into their plant floor operations. So we deployed additional clients when we got to the conclusion of the project to the plant manager, to IT, to the shipping and receiving manager, to the maintenance office at no additional cost. They just said they wanted to see the SCADA on their screen. And so we pointed them to the URL, and they were able to pull it up and get visibility that they had never had before. And shortly after we completed this project, CrowdStrike, as I'm sure everyone here on the call aware, back in the summer they had that massive global IT outage after that bad patch. And while they were working on the fix for that, our customer replaced the PCs on the plant floor and pointed to the URL, brought up the Perspective application, and they were back up and running within hours of this outage happening, which is a really huge deal.

35:56
Sean McFarlane: With the traditional SCADA licensing models. You would have been fighting against rehosting and doing offline activations probably for a couple of days while you tried to figure this out. Don mentioned future-proofing earlier in the presentation. So we have other projects that we're looking at at the plant, and my customer can have the peace of mind that we're not going to be charging them for any additional license costs. When we're ready to connect the other PLCs to Ignition, we'll just type in the IP address and get online, and we can start building screens for them. And probably what is most critical for this customer is that they are in control again. So they obviously own everything on their site. They have all the source code; they have all of our Ignition work located there on their gateway. They're not reliant anymore on these people that live a few time zones away and can only support their system off of work hours.

36:50
Sean McFarlane: So that was a tremendous risk for them that we were able to solve by putting in an Ignition system. And they're very happy with it and are considering more plants for the same type of system that we built. So thank you very much.

37:04
Don Pearson: Well, that was great. Thanks so much, Sean. Appreciate that. And we'll get a chance to have a little discussion and answer some questions as we get towards the end. Let's go ahead and move forward then to Ignition unlimited licensing. Nathan, NorthWind, over to you.

37:20
Nathan Kramer: Hi, Don. Thank you. So the project that I would like to talk to you guys about today is an MES system that we put in for a long-standing partner of ours in the pet food industry. That plant had existing NorthWind controls throughout the entire facility. The project covered the entire process, all areas of the plant, from milling and batching to slurry extrusion, packaging, and palletizing. The goal of our project here was to enable the operations team with the controls we already had in place and a lot of the other software. We were already handing information to the accounting team and to the other executive team and those sorts of top-level business teams. But the operations team needed some information and easily accessible for them. So the MES project that we did, we approached that with an agile methodology similar to how we develop our software products. We met weekly with the stakeholders to develop the scope, and as we created the content, the users had access to that immediately. So they were following along with us as we developed the project. This allowed them to get involved early and start giving feedback and generating ideas.

38:32
Nathan Kramer: With this agile methodology, it is important for us to be flexible. And like we've talked about before, being able to say yes to the requests that come along the way is important. That's the whole point of the agile methodology that we use. Ignition unlimited licensing obviously supports that very well because we aren't constantly worried about, well, they want to do this now; I got to bring in another PLC, or I have to bring in another, or add another screen or report. So it's very easy to just say, "Yes, we can do that." We don't have to go back and revisit licensing costs. During the project, we brought multiple data sources together to help give the operators the insight that they needed without having to go do the work to find it. One example of this that I like to highlight is an inventory report that we put together that pulled the bin levels from the continuous levels on the control system, the density of the material from the ERP system through an API. So then we calculated the inventory in the bin using the volume of the bin and the level, showed that right next to the inventory that we pulled from the ERP system through the API so they could do their inventory adjustments periodically.

39:42
Nathan Kramer: All of that replaced the operator having to go fetch all of that data from the different places, put it into a spreadsheet, get the calculation, and then do their inventory adjustments. So just highlights how flexible Ignition is with pulling all those data sources together and presenting it to the operator or to the user quickly. We also wanted to make that data easily accessible, so we didn't want client installs. We wanted everybody that needed the data to be able to access it easily and wherever they wanted to get it from. So TVs, desktop, mobile wherever, wherever they may be working from, we wanted them to be able to get access to that data. And I think Sean mentioned it; as you start putting in some of these systems, it quickly spreads so people see it, and everybody wants a little piece of that. And they want to see what's going on. They want to have the information at their fingertips. So having that flexibility to roll out additional clients is very nice in those projects.

40:41
Nathan Kramer: The Ad Hoc Trends, the picture that we're showing there on the right side, or one of the pictures we're showing on the right side, is another tool that gives, that enables the operations very quickly or very easily. So they're able to go in and grab any data point off of a PLC or off of if we're pulling it from a database or if it's a data point that we're pulling off an API somewhere; they're able to pull that in and look and troubleshoot different issues that they see within the system or troubleshoot different scenarios that they're trying to hunt down within the system themselves so they don't have to be in front of the HMI. They can pull up the URL, go to that page, and they can start digging right away. So for the results of that project, we were able to reduce the plant paperwork by adding, taking their equipment checks, their different maintenance checks, QA checks, those things, and taking them from paper and making them digital.

41:36
Nathan Kramer: So that not only reduces the paperwork and saves the trees, but that also is going to make that data immediately available to the people that need it. So once they do that check, that's immediately available for the supervisor or for the QA person or whoever is trying to get to it. Improved accuracy of labor and machine clockings to the ERP system. Before, the operator would have to manually or go to the ERP system and clock in, and then they'd have to switch their clocking when they changed which order they're working on. With the MES system that we put in, they were able to just sign themselves into the system. And then as the system changed shop orders, or as the system went up and down for downtime or different reason codes, they were able to send that to the ERP directly. So a lot of reduced labor on their part there.

42:23
Nathan Kramer: Streamlined communication between plant areas and area leads. So not all of these areas are close to each other, but they all rely on each other. So the milling and batching needs to feed the extrusion. The extrusion operator needs to know when the next load of feed is going to be there. And the mill operator needs to know which one the extruder operator needs next. We can show that all to them on a dashboard so they have it readily accessible. And they only need to make phone calls in edge cases or in upset conditions and gave operations team access to valuable data when and where they needed it. So didn't matter what it was. If it was inventory from the ERP system that they needed to know what the current status of, we could put that up on a TV. If they needed to know what the status of a machine was downstream or upstream, we could show that to them. The Ad Hoc Trends, like I mentioned, where they wanted to go in and do some troubleshooting, that was all available to them. That's all I have. Thanks, Don.

43:22
Don Pearson: All right, thank you. Wow. I do have to say that watching these slides and listening to your presentations from all three of you, it never gets old to me because what you're doing in terms of innovation and how you're taking the benefits of Ignition and then taking your skill set and saying how we're going to solve, how are we going to make this project work for the customer, is actually really exciting. I think one of the byproducts that happens with webinars like this is I get to sit and listen to them as you guys talk and see that some of the things I mentioned in the beginning about the benefits of Ignition are put into practice by you, particularly the one of undoing or unleashing innovation. So thanks for sharing the projects. It really does help us understand how unlimited licensing can really make a difference in the real world.

44:13
Don Pearson: Now, before we go into a Q&A, in the interest of innovation, one of the things that happens with attendees is they get excited because they start thinking of ideas of their own. So I just would like to ask each of you as we wrap up, is what kind of projects are you looking forward to working on in the future, and how will Ignition play a role in that? So I'm just going to go back down the line again, starting back with you, Chris, and then ask Sean and Nathan the same question. So, Chris.

44:44
Chris Monchinski: Yeah. Thank you again. So it's interesting when you think about when we saw, I think it was Sean who presented, of course, an MES. One of the interesting things that's changing for us in this industry is that, again, these traditional level two systems, the SCADA system, the lines are starting to blur, and they're so much more powerful. The data that they contain is so much more important, and therefore, we can envision extending these systems up and adding to these systems for audiences that aren't the traditional folks that we work with. So again, we might work with the process control folks or operations on the floor. But from the MES perspective, it's information. It's curated data that is supplied then into upstream systems in order to count value ultimately and drive value and understand efficiencies within the environment, both equipment, labor, material throughput.

45:38
Chris Monchinski: So lots of neat projects that will involve the integration of MES-type systems with Ignition. One of the interesting things about Ignition, of course, is that they can extend their tag database. Obviously, you can build a lot of complex UDTs and represent a lot of the concepts of Unified Namespace in that tag database, but you can also use the SDK to actually do integration at the tag level. You can build a tag database with Ignition that feeds directly into MES systems. There are several vendors that actually do it. Now, that's a pretty exciting innovation where Ignition becomes the glue and really becomes the central focus for all of this OT data. That's pretty exciting. I think a lot of those projects are going to be very exciting for people to work on.

46:19
Don Pearson: That's really great, Chris. I think it's, we get excited about, and you described it, we know when we started 20 some years ago with a SCADA solution, which was the legacy products that turned into Ignition, it was like, well, okay, we're SCADA, but SCADA puts a certain limit around what you can do with it as it evolved. Then we started calling it the new SCADA, and then that evolved, and we said, "Wait a minute. It's an industrial application platform for anything you need from center to cloud in relation to bringing our whole solution together for Digital Transformation." So as the capabilities and the modular functionality of Ignition expanded, the definition of what it is is really only defined by what you can do with it, as you're mentioning here. So it's good to see the breadth of its capability really used far beyond just SCADA. And the lines of the produce system and the five different levels start blurring because you're building an enterprise system here. But it's really basically from the ground up, from the sensor up to the cloud and back. So exciting. How about Sean? Your thoughts?

47:28
Sean McFarlane: Yeah, we have many different Ignition projects we're considering right now in addition to the ones we have going. Right now, I've got a computer next to me that's about as old as I am from one of our customers that runs a production system that relies on three old Windows NT PCs. And so we're developing a scope of work right now to replace those, and it's going to be very technically complex. They put off this upgrade for a long time because they weren't sure they'd be able to find a system that could combine all these different obsolete and bespoke technologies into a unified system. So I'm excited about that one. It's going to be tough, but I'm getting to dig into some stuff that I haven't seen since I was a kid. So it's been really exciting. As far as flexibility goes, as a consultant, it's really great to be able to demo in front of our customers in real time some of the features of Ignition. And knowing that I can just run it in trial mode and I can show them the full experience is really helpful.

48:32
Sean McFarlane: Just last month I was in front of a customer, and they had mentioned wanting some CMMS system integrated with their environment. So I downloaded the simple CMMS off the exchange, added it to my gateway running on my PC, and we started playing around with it in front of them, and they were very happy with that. So yeah, the flexibility of Ignition is incredibly useful to me as an engineer and as a salesperson to show the power of what we can do in Ignition for our customers and get them as excited as we are about deploying it.

49:05
Don Pearson: Thanks so much. Appreciate that, Sean. Nathan, your thoughts.

49:10
Nathan Kramer: Yeah, thanks, Don. So we're doing the MES systems in Ignition. We have, we worked through the one that I talked about and numerous others, and we're also looking at doing more of those. We have more customers out there with our control systems and some without, and just looking to help enable them, bring them the data that they need from no matter what source it is. And we're also looking forward to staying close to the customers that we've helped so far because that agile process I talked about before, there's always new ideas. Systems are always growing or changing. So we also look forward to staying close to the customers that we've helped so far and help grow those systems and help enable them further as they have new ideas.

49:54
Don Pearson: Thanks, Nathan. Thanks to all of you for your comments on that. I totally do appreciate you taking time to give us a little sense of what the future might hold. We just got a few minutes left. I want to do a little wrap-up, and then we'll get to a couple of questions with the time we have left. But for the attendees here, if you haven't yet tried Ignition, you can download it free trial mode; it takes about 3 minutes to download, and you can use it in trial mode as long as you like. You can completely develop any project you want to develop in the trial mode before having to make any kind of a purchase. So go at it, have fun, see what you can do with it. Additionally, there's another way to learn more about Ignition. Go to Inductive University. It's free. It's online training website. Hundreds, over 600, I think, videos right now. All sort pf a two to four-minute range, maybe two to six minute on the top end. You can learn Ignition step by step and do it at your own pace. There's also a comprehensive online user manual that you can refer to at any time.

50:57
Don Pearson: If you're out of the country, for those outside North America, we have a network of international Ignition distributors. It can provide business development opportunities, sales, technical support in your local language and your local time zone. So if you want to learn more about that in your region, please visit their websites listed on the screen here. Or you can contact our distribution manager for international distribution, Yegor Karnaukhov and find out from him. And if you'd like to speak with one of our account representatives at headquarters in California, here's the number. Also, reach out in Australia; please call the number at the bottom of the screen.

51:35
Don Pearson: So we just have a minute or two left in terms of Q&A. So I see... I'm just going to grab a couple questions here, and then we'll wrap up. But I think I understand this question. It says, "Can we implement unlimited clients in case of unlimited license?" I think I understand the question. Well, yes, as I mentioned earlier, unlimited clients, unlimited tags, unlimited device connections, they're all a part of the unlimited licensing model and the server licensing selling that we do of the Ignition license. So that would be absolutely a yes. And maybe you guys have a little bit of experience with this, but I will ask it and ask each of you to comment. "Does Ignition work with older legacy equipment? How about the Legacy Equipment Challenge?" Can we get some comments on that?

52:25
Chris Monchinski: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, Ignition can work with quite a few different types of protocols. They've got built-in drivers. Of course, Ignition really adopted among many different technologies in the modern technology stack, OPC and OPC UA. So where Ignition may not have a particular driver, it plugs in very nice with OPC UA and OPC toolkits that can open up the door to serial devices. Anywhere between 180 and 200 different drivers are available out there. So absolutely, there's plenty of opportunity to connect to legacy equipment through various means.

53:06
Sean McFarlane: Plenty of slick 505s and otherwise. And then when worst comes to worst, there's always Modbus and Modbus TCP.

53:13
Chris Monchinski: Yeah, absolutely.

53:15
Don Pearson: Anything else? Any other comments? What I'd like to do is there's a longer question here. Maybe I'll just... Unfortunately, I think it's going to take more time than you can answer, but I'll read it real quickly, and then if anybody has a quick comment, I'm going to say to Joey, you're probably going to want to get a more thorough answer than we can do in a couple minutes. He says, "I'm working with an automation integrator to bring in new equipment while my team is also introducing Ignition into our system. Equipment's still being fabricated, and we don't have access to the PLC code yet. Given this, what's the best practices for ensuring scalability and maintainability in this situation?" Comments.

54:00
Chris Monchinski: Well, obviously there's a difficulty there in that they don't have a tag list; they don't have a dress list per se, but I hope they know some specs about the equipment. Such as, what is the automation under the hood? Is it a Siemens PLC, an Allen-Bradley, a Schneider? So we know a little bit about the connectivity capability and, again, limited connectivity. Is it a common driver? It's new equipment. So it's probably something that Ignition already has built in, but let's go verify that first. They don't have access to the PLC code, but do they have access to functional specifications so that they have some screens, general process flow, how the machine operates, get a general sense for how operators are going to interact with that system, how many displays they need to create, and they can estimate some of the devices and tags.

54:41
Chris Monchinski: So not having the PLC code is not, I mean, that's ideal because then you can count the tags like I said. But if you don't have that, you certainly hopefully know the number of devices and how you want to represent that, and you can start counting that up and do some quick back-of-the-envelope estimation on what that looks like and get yourself prepared. But as we've all pointed out, I mean, you want to prepare yourself. But the reality is licensing is not going to be a constraint in reality; you're going to be able to accommodate this device, connections, tags, screens with Ignition.

55:12
Don Pearson: Thank you. That is a pretty good answer in a very short period of time. So I definitely appreciate that. Well, we have come to the end of our hour. We're at our last minute. I just want to say thank you to everyone and also welcome you back, March 27th. I'll be moderating also that webinar. It's another Ignition webinar. Until then, stay connected with us on social media, our weekly newsfeed email. You can also stay up to date through our blog, articles, case studies, lots of other helpful content on our website. So please check it out. So thank you very much for joining us, and have a great day. We are concluded.