Inductive Automation Blog

What happens when two passionate ladies in industrial automation meet on LinkedIn and decide to create a podcast? Magic. And growth, lots of growth. Dive into the journey of the Automation Ladies podcast and how it has become an engine for both business growth and network expansion. Nikki and Ali will unpack how amplifying your voice online can have real-world business benefits. If you want to grow your customer base, attract top-tier suppliers, or strengthen your community, this talk should have some actionable takeaways on the power of creating an authentic personal brand by sharing your journey with the world.

Transcript:

00:00
Nikki Gonzales: Welcome. That's her job.

00:10
Christine Lee: That's my job.

00:14
Nikki Gonzales: My bad. We hope you're in for a few laughs today.

00:17
Christine Lee: Hi everyone. I'm Christine Lee, and I'm an Application Engineer at Inductive Automation. And welcome to today's session with the Automation Ladies. It's called "From LinkedIn Connections to Community Leaders: the Automation Ladies Experience," and I will be your moderator for today. And to start things off, I'd like to introduce you to our speakers today. Nikki Gonzales, Head of Partnerships at Quotebeam. She was born in Iceland, and she started her career as sales engineer in machine vision systems and mechatronics before transitioning to the design side of engineering with multi-physics simulation for virtual prototyping of electronics. And finally, ending up in the supply chain space, developing chat interfaces for data analytics and using AI for forecasting and inventory optimization. That's a lot of words. So she's awesome.

01:16
Christine Lee: Sorry, I wasn't done. Today she brings all of that experience together, building an online procurement and workflow automation platform for industrial automation distributors and their customers to collaborate on the BOM procurement process with Quotebeam. Okay, now clap.

01:46
Nikki Gonzales: And that was 30 minutes. The end.

01:49
Christine Lee: And to my right, Ali G., Owner of Process & Controls Engineering, LLC. Ali G. was born in Mexico. She holds a Bachelor's of Science in Chemical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Before starting her own engineering company she spent 10 years in engineering. She started at process engineering and then transitioned to controls. She eventually went on to run a UL508-A panel shop and spent years traveling the US starting up burner and gas train control applications. Today, she provides controls engineering services across the US, through her company, Process & Controls Engineering. I'm so excited to introduce these ladies to you all, and I hope you have a great time. So please help me welcome Nikki and Ali.

02:41
Nikki Gonzales: Thank you. Okay, slides there, we go and get this right. So here's the topic of our talk, which I think you know, and that's us. So we obviously don't have to introduce ourselves because Christine did that beautifully for us. But what we've learned over the last couple of days is that not everybody knows that we have day jobs. Automation Ladies is our side gig/hobby passion project. So I would just like to quickly introduce Quotebeam, the company that I work for. It is a startup out of the Bay Area, and I joined as the first employee a couple of years ago. We're a team of 12 now. And we do a lot of software engineering because we're building connected platform, and we're very excited to hopefully integrate that with the Ignition community at some point through open APIs. And our friend Alex Marcy over at Corso Systems here has volunteered his time to build a prototype with us when the time is right. So look out for that at some point. But we help people procure parts, and I'd like to have Ali also tell you a little bit about PCE.

03:43
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah, I started my company after 10 years of doing all kinds of different engineering roles in industrial automation. And it's been amazing. But I'm a systems integrator out of the Pacific Northwest. But I got my first contracts and jobs in Rhode Island and Florida. So I was able to get visibility outside of the Pacific Northwest and kind of started making a name for myself in government contracting in the Pacific Northwest.

04:19
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah, so that's a lot of what we're doing right now. We've been working together on some projects over the last couple of days, and I am going to try to speak a bit slower. So we wanted to just tell you our story. We were asked to come present, and we really don't like to speak on topics that we don't know a whole lot about. And this is kind of a topic that we know a lot about because we did it. But it was a very interesting exercise for us to go back to prepare for this presentation. I almost call this presentation a scrapbook because I went through and looked at what happened. 'Cause we both have our recollections, and we get asked a lot, "How did you start Automation Ladies? Why did you start Automation Ladies? What is it? Is it a group?"

05:00
Nikki Gonzales: Is it a... Well, it's a podcast. But a little bit more than that. We do LinkedIn live shows. We like to do demos because we're both incredibly curious, and we'd like to know what technology is out there, what other people are doing. We wanna see stuff without having to go through a complicated sales funnel, or be gated, or be qualified. And we kind of got into some discussions about this, and instead of complaining, we wanted to do something about it. So even though neither one of us knew what the heck we were doing, we decided to do something about this problem that we kept talking about. And the other thing was just we've always kind of operated in little silos as women in industrial automation. You generally are one of a few people at a plant, or at a sales conference, or something like that.

05:43
Nikki Gonzales: And we're kind of geographically isolated. And obviously, COVID changed that. LinkedIn changed a bit. It went from being at posting your resumes to actually having conversations, making connections. And that is actually how we ended up meeting, on LinkedIn. I used to work in the Bay Area. I was a sales engineer in the Bay Area, including covering Folsom, when I worked with Keyence and Festo. And then I moved to Seattle, and we actually lived in the same area. We didn't know that for a while. And then I moved back to Houston during COVID and met Ali after that. And I was like, "Oh man, we used to live like 20 minutes away from each other." But LinkedIn is an online community that, I think, for us as engineers and business professionals, it captured something we haven't been able to do a lot because we are also a little bit siloed at home.

06:38
Nikki Gonzales: Like who wants to hear about SCADA systems in your friend circle or at your kids' baseball games? Not a lot of people, right? You go to a party, and people ask, what do you do? And I'm like, well, do I want your eyes to glaze over? Or I'm gonna say something like, "Oh yeah, I work with robots." Even though we all know that most of us don't work with robots at all.

07:00
Alicia Gilpin: I say factory computers.

07:00
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah. So we found this incredible comradery when we met and talked and realized that we love the Pacific Northwest. We love automation. We are also girls, which you know we have gender in common. That doesn't always mean that we wanna be best friends, right? I don't know if all of you men are always best friends just 'cause you're also a man. We don't find that. But we found each other, and we really got along. And this was about two years ago, LinkedIn reminded me. And our first message, so I remember seeing Ali posting a bunch of stuff from PACK Expo, and I started following her, and she was posting a bunch of stuff from YouTube, like how does a certain type of valve work or just all these things that she was studying and learning and content that she liked. And I started following her, and I think she had maybe, like, I don't know, 30,000-20,000 followers at the time. It was a lot. I was like, "Whoa, this girl's just sharing engineering stuff and I love seeing it and apparently other people like seeing it." So I sent her this message at some point, and it was just interesting to see like I had not looked at this.

08:05
Nikki Gonzales: But I said, "Hey, thanks for connecting. I love the videos that you're posting." And apparently we were like, yeah, we need more women to see, and support, and learn from. And she thought that I actually spoke Spanish. I'm not really Mexican; I'm just by marriage. But a couple of misunderstandings initially, but since then our LinkedIn presence has grown quite a bit. Ali is now up to, what is that, like 58,000 followers? It's crazy.

08:41
Nikki Gonzales: There's that many engineering nerds that like to see what we're doing out there.

08:42
Alicia Gilpin: Thank you.

08:42
Nikki Gonzales: And neither one of us are social media sharers anywhere else. Like I know, influencing is a whole big thing on Instagram and whatever. I don't got time for that, so I don't really know how it works elsewhere. We're not doing it for that. But it is really fun to have this community. And we met so many people here in person that we know from LinkedIn, that we really enjoy this. But that is how we met. And we actually did not meet at all before we started the podcast. Some of the things that inspired the podcast was this group chat. And I actually wanna hand it over to Ali to talk about how this happened. I had to remind her by pulling up this conversation. That was about a month after we initially exchanged messages.

09:26
Alicia Gilpin: So I don't remember if it was the one that was called Women in Industrial Automation or Women Play with...

09:29
Nikki Gonzales: "Girls Messing with Automation Hardware Chats," we called it.

09:33
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah. Okay. So that's what we called it. Okay. And so I knew some women that were doing the same stuff that we're doing and that are programmers or work with robotics or whatever, PLC programmers, even technicians. So we didn't even just get engineers like in on this chat. We got kind of, I don't know, a lot of women that I knew were technical and in our space. And yeah. So I invited them all to this, and she just showed me these slides yesterday, and I don't remember most of this, but like it's bringing back all these memories because everybody, I guess, this was different from anything that we had ever seen. And she was saying that like women are siloed for whatever reason, if you make it in a male-dominated field, the women are more competitive for some reason and we'd like to kill that. Which is part of why we do what we do and we talk to so many women, because if we can show enough women, the women stories, it changes the game, I think. And it is changing the game. But let's keep our slides. Okay. Go.

10:42
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah. So this really came out as our intent. Women content in automation is lacking, we thought, and this is Courtney Fernandez, who is actually now part of our team. She is at another event right now, but, and Ali says we need to either make videos or help each other make content. And if you don't wanna talk direct to the camera, then offer support in other ways. We just wanna put out content; we wanna change the game. This is way before we thought of the podcast. But Ali was out there doing it, and she wanted to encourage other women to do it in whatever form or fashion they feel comfortable with. It's not everybody want... Likes public speaking. Not everybody likes putting their face on a video. I hate hearing my voice. I've gotten over that. But it took me about two decades.

11:25
Alicia Gilpin: I saw a bunch of men that had like PLCs behind them or like switches, and I'm like, I have all that crap in my living room. So I'm gonna put some up. And yeah. So why can't more faces of... Or our faces do that. It's not... I mean, it helps. And actually, people think that I am a giant Siemens programmer. I actually like mostly know Allen-Bradley. But you wouldn't know that from the way that, like Siemens ended up sponsoring us.

11:48
Nikki Gonzales: So I fangirled real hard, and I was like, "Oh, I work for a parts procurement platform." I was like, "Ali, if you need anything for your turbo and tabulator thing or whatever you call it, let me send you something." And I sent her, like, some Festo connectors and cable or something.

12:03
Alicia Gilpin: Shielded, twisted... Yeah. Shielded, twisted pair for analog.

12:06
Nikki Gonzales: And I didn't even order it from Coby, and we didn't have it. I was like, I don't care.

12:09
Alicia Gilpin: It was golden.

12:10
Nikki Gonzales: This is from Coby. So this group chat really grew. And then a bunch of women were like, yeah, I don't know about this, but the chat is not active at the moment, but it really... It got things kickstarted. So somebody brought up the idea: "Hey, maybe we should have a meet and greet." And then Courtney actually put it into action. She started a, what I used to call the Saturday Zoom call. It turns out it was a teams call. I like to selectively like get Microsoft out of my brain.

12:39
Nikki Gonzales: But we had this recurring call on Saturdays in the afternoon, and it was like, "Hey, bring your kids, your dogs, whatever, and your robots, let's just chat." And Courtney had a UR5 in her garage at the time, I think, and showed us some demos, and Ali and I never made it onto the same Saturday call. So still, we had not met ever or talked other than over this LinkedIn chat. I wanted to mention and just give Courtney a shout out because she... Honestly, I don't know why she wasn't initially part of the show, but she really is a huge catalyst to it. And she co-hosts with us a lot now; she's also our in-house robot expert. And she's a Senior Automation Engineer for the United Robotics Group as well as a co-founder of her own company. They do IT and automation consulting, called FAST One Solutions.

13:29
Alicia Gilpin: She has a master's in robotics.

13:32
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah, she's a very smart woman. But we also... We really identify with other kind of like entrepreneurial automation women. 'Cause it takes another certain type of breed to go out and, like, start your own business...

13:42
Alicia Gilpin: Crazy.

13:43
Nikki Gonzales: And do something new. Yeah. So big shout out to Courtney. And then, after we had some of these meetings and whatnot, I was like this is so cool. This is something I didn't know that I was missing. 'Cause I always thought, "Oh, I'm fine being one of two women in a room of 300." Like, I've always had mostly guy friends. If you go to engineering school or, like, take AP physics, it's not like you're gonna have a room full of women.

14:03
Nikki Gonzales: And I was shoved into women in engineering conferences and just found myself going, "Ugh, I don't know what to do with myself." But here we just found like-minded women that we actually had a bunch in common with, and I thought, "I bet there's a bunch of us." Just one over here, one over there, one over there, and maybe they don't know that the rest of us exist, and we should put that out there. So we thought, "Hey, a podcast or something that is open to everybody to listen, you don't have to join, you don't have to qualify, you don't have to be cool enough; whatever it is, you can just participate in any way that you want." And I pitched Ali.

14:42
Nikki Gonzales: So I had been listening to this podcast called Office Ladies. If you are a fan of the Office, it's Angela and Pam, and they talk about the office and they're actually best friends, and I really enjoy it. And one day I was listening and I was like, "How cool would it be if I had a friend that I could just talk..." Yes. Comma.

14:57
Nikki Gonzales: I swear, I kind of have other friends too. But you know, this was literally my pitch to her: "Fan of The Office by chance? Wanna do an Automation Ladies podcast with me?" And then my bait and switch, which was my promise of I'll do all the hard work producing it, and you can just show up and chat with me. So Ali said, "Yeah, totally awesome; let's do it." Little did we know that this, is actually not easy and I would not have any time for it and all of that. But it really... We decided to do this, and we started posting about it as we were doing it. So by the time that... This was maybe... Two or three months later, Automate came around. They hadn't done the show in a couple of years, and we saw a lot of excitement around it. And they were seeing our posting that we had a podcast. I'm pretty sure they had no women doing anything at the show.

15:55
Nikki Gonzales: So they were like, "Hey, would you like to come speak or do some podcasting or something at the show?" And that is literally where we met in person for the first time. It was at Automate two years ago, and... Or no, it was Automate last year, so it was really a year and a half ago or so. And thankfully, we actually liked each other. Like, you know, you get catfished online or something. We met and we were like, "Oh yeah, you actually are cool. Thank you. I'm glad I didn't just commit to this like long business relationship with you where we have to like be on camera together and be friends." We actually are friends, which is pretty cool. I don't know if you have anything to say about this slide, Ali. Other than, when I read that promise to her that I would do all the hard work, she just laughed for five minutes. Really hard because it didn't turn out quite perfect.

16:47
Alicia Gilpin: It got complicated.

16:54
Nikki Gonzales: So our next slide. Oh, we're gonna play you this. Please, do I have to press... Oh, do I have to press something to play it? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And I'm just... Yeah, I don't like the sound of my own voice. So excuse us.

17:13
Nikki Gonzales: Welcome to Automation Ladies! The only show that we know of where girls talk about industrial automation. We are your hosts. I'm Nikki Gonzalez with Quotebeam.

17:24
Alicia Gilpin: And my name is Ali G. with myself.

17:27
Nikki Gonzales: What's the name of your, company Ali?

17:30
Alicia Gilpin: Process & Controls Engineering, LLC. But I just go by PCE LLC for short.

17:38
Nikki Gonzales: So... Yeah, making a podcast isn't quite as easy as we thought. We took a lot of takes of a lot of things, including our intros. We actually got some sponsors, and we had to figure out how to say stuff like that. Read ads. I don't know. It was uncomfortable. I really didn't like listening to myself and being the producer. I was supposed to listen and edit and stuff like that. And it was incredibly excruciating and hard, and nothing ever made it past my post-production stage because... I was talking to Alex about this earlier, but like your own work will never be good enough if you're the one judging it, right? I don't know about you guys, but that's how I feel about anything I put out. So we grossly underestimated how hard it is to run and produce a podcast, especially when you run a company and have a full-time startup job, which is just a little bit more work than like normal jobs. But we kept trying because we made a promise to each other. We really wanted to do this.

18:39
Nikki Gonzales: And initially, we also told each other... And I don't remember if it was something you said first, but this is not about... Automation Ladies isn't about us. We wanna get out there and try it so we can show somebody else that they can do it, and hopefully they do it better than us, and then take over and we can crawl into a hole and go away.

18:55
Nikki Gonzales: It was really not something that we wanted to do to make ourselves famous. And as much as... A lot of a takeaway of this is kind of like, at the end, we'll talk about what you can do. And we do see a huge value in getting a personal brand and putting your content out there. We didn't start this to do that with that kind of commercial mindset. It just happens to be a perk if you do this type of thing. But yeah, we struggled with audio quality, as you could hear earlier and streaming. How to set up recording.

19:23
Nikki Gonzales: I tried recording in a space in my house that turned out to be completely terrible 'cause there was so much echo in there. So our first five episodes we recorded, and then I listened to them, and I was like, "Oh, this is all garbage. We can't use this at all." But what we did during that time is we kept posting about what we were doing. Ali, I'm like, "Oh look, I created a placeholder page," And she sent it out to her, whatever, 50,000 followers. And we're like, "Here's the thing." And I'm like, "Oh, shoot. Now, there's a thing. I really gotta follow through with this." So really, we pushed each other. We wouldn't have been able to do it. If it was just me alone, this would've never happened. We struggled with tools, recording software. We used a production, an editing service, but then it turned out we actually needed a producer. I'm apparently not a producer, and it didn't have time to learn to be one.

20:16
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah, consultants are not producers.

20:18
Nikki Gonzales: We tried really hard on our own, and then as we just kept talking about it and trying to get... We didn't really ask for help. But Ali actually met somebody that she wanted to get on the show who knew somebody that wanted to be a producer, but she was working as a barista. And we were like, "Oh, that's perfect."

20:37
Alicia Gilpin: She studied sound engineering.

20:39
Nikki Gonzales: We don't know what we're doing.

20:40
Alicia Gilpin: She wanted to work on podcasts.

20:43
Nikki Gonzales: So let's get somebody on that doesn't really know either but knows more than us. And so we lucked into the amazing gem of our producer, who is an audio engineer as well as an office manager. Of course, she does it in her spare time, Laura Marsilio. And then at Automate, Sam Janes from Gray Solutions, who's an engineer that we met, was like, "Hey, you guys need music. I'll make music for this." So it kind of became like a community effort a little bit as people believed in us and said, "Hey, we really like what you're doing. Where's your podcast?" And we're like, "Oh, we're still working on it." They're like, "What... Do you need help?" So it was amazing in terms of just that kind of community support as we talked about what we were doing. And I tried really hard to talk about the fact that we're trying to do this and we're not doing very well, but we're gonna keep trying. And I think a lot of people can relate to that because we oftentimes try things by ourselves in isolation, and it can be hard to keep it going if you feel like you're not getting anywhere.

21:39
Nikki Gonzales: So we didn't give up. And after months and months of trying, we finally published our first episode. And then, now we are up to 37 episodes. We've had two seasons. And we've done a number of LinkedIn live events as well, like panel discussions. Cybersecurity Awareness Month is coming up again in October. We did our first panel last year during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which was sponsored by Phoenix Contact, which was amazing. Really helped us pay Laura and things like that.

22:13
Alicia Gilpin: Do you have the stat on how many countries have made downloads from us?

22:18
Nikki Gonzales: Oh no, I don't remember, but it was a lot. It was like 50-something countries have downloaded Automation Ladies episodes. It's crazy to us. These are just stats for Automation Ladies. LinkedIn is a little hard to pull this type of information from, and they don't go back more than 365 days, from what I could tell. But again, I'm not an expert at this. So I pulled the stats for just Automation Ladies for the last year. We are almost up to 10,000 followers. I think we're like 200 shy as of today. So if all of you guys wanna go follow us, that would be amazing.

22:48
Nikki Gonzales: We've had about 14,000 page views of just the Automation Ladies stuff. About half a million post impressions and about 5,000 downloads of our podcast itself. It averages about 500 a month or so when we're actually producing episodes. So we have season three starting next week. So if you tune in on iTunes, or Spotify, or wherever you listen, we'll be dropping our first episode of season three next week on Thursday. And we tried to do an episode every Thursday or so, for a season. And then turned out we needed a break this year, which is why we're starting up now in October.

23:23
Nikki Gonzales: But the point is, you can't... You have to start somewhere. And what you have to do is just try and be consistent. And eventually, if, You know... There are people out there that will wanna hear what you have to say. Some people have told us, "Oh, we do better if we do audience research or we choose topics that people wanna talk about." Things like that. But then we wouldn't be getting it done because, for us, this is very much kind of a labor of love, that we have a hard time fitting into our schedules, but we make time for it. We're not marketing professionals. We don't get paid for this. So for us, it's really, we wanna have the conversations we wanna have. And if it's your cup of tea, great. You can listen to us, you can be part of this any way you want.

24:01
Nikki Gonzales: Come on the show, come in the comment sections of our lives, participate. We love that. It really keeps us going because, again, this is not supposed to be about us. But I liked this little. I found this picture the other day. Your first workout will be bad. Your first podcast will be bad. Your first anything will be bad, but you can't make your 100th without making your first. So put aside your ego and start. For me, one of those things was getting over the fear of my own voice sounding terrible. I feel like I sound like a 12-year-old, and I've never enjoyed listening to myself. So podcasts was the furthest thing from anything that I would ever imagine doing, 'cause it is literally only my voice. But you evolve, and you realize that it doesn't really matter. Just do the thing if you want to.

24:46
Alicia Gilpin: We like to be uncomfortable on purpose.

24:48
Alicia Gilpin: For growth, right?

24:49
Nikki Gonzales: Well, I think, also as being in this profession, we're pretty used to being thrown at things we don't know what to do or challenges we quite don't know how to solve. But we have tools. And we try to learn from every experience. And I personally find myself the happiest at the bottom of a steep learning curve because once I've really learned something and I'm just doing repetitive work, it gets boring to me, and I wanna learn something else. So we'll see how long we go with this before I think of another crazy thing that we need to do, but we're keeping ourselves busy. We like variety. So we're doing demos; we've done software demos so far, 'cause that kind of makes sense for the online format. But we're doing our first hardware demo next month, so that's kind of exciting.

25:31
Nikki Gonzales: And we're very much open to any kind of ideas and collaborations that we can have with the community. Whether or not we've done them before, we don't really care. That's kind of the fun part about this. It's a little bit unpredictable. How has this actually helped us? Has this been worth it? For me, it's a resounding yes. And I think that Ali would probably agree.

25:51
Alicia Gilpin: I do.

25:53
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah. So we thought about what benefits has this brought us, going through this, putting it out there, putting ourselves out there. There's definitely some negatives to it. You get criticized. Some people, send us creepy messages on LinkedIn and stuff like that.

26:10
Nikki Gonzales: But overwhelmingly, it's been an incredibly positive experience. So having this type of network or people, knowing who you are a little bit, or being able to reach out. It's so much easier for me to reach out to someone and say, "Hey, I'm with Automation Ladies; I see that you're a cool lady automation engineer; would you like to come on my show?" than to not have a good reason to reach out to people. It's not a sales pitch of any kind. It's a good... It's a way that makes me feel good about reaching out to people. And it's really result in... For our businesses, doors open more easily to customers and partners when they kind of know who you are. Vendor relationships, recruiting, and hiring. Ali's most recent hire, Carlos, listened to me on another podcast and heard about Automation Ladies and PCE through that and was like, Hey, I'm in Seattle. I wanna work for Ali. So that's been pretty cool. We get invited to places like this, conferences, both to speak and then sometimes just to learn. And we are still learning a whole lot. We've made a lot of new friends.

27:15
Alicia Gilpin: Every kind of friend.

27:18
Nikki Gonzales: Every kind of friend.

27:19
Alicia Gilpin: OEM friends, hardware manufacturers, other integrators, I mean, people that work in IoT, cybersecurity.

27:30
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah.

27:30

Alicia Gilpin: And yeah, we've had panels about... We've had panels about cybersecurity.

27:32
Nikki Gonzales: So all kinds of stuff. Yeah, huge support network as well. As Ali is a smaller systems integrator. So to be able to take on projects where she knows that she knows other systems integrators, or contractors, or people that have expertise in areas that she doesn't, our network has grown in a huge way through this. And she can now bid on projects that she never would've been able to by herself because of the network of subcontractors that she can call on for different areas of the country or different expertise.

28:00
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah, even just the technical network.

28:02
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah.

28:02
Alicia Gilpin: Because of the type of followers that I have and how community-based it is. If someone comes to me, and they do, they'll send me a video of something messed up. It's some kind of hardware, or some kind of legacy, or maybe even new software that they've done. At one point I did get an Ignition call and got someone who's in this room and yeah, to help me, but basically...

28:25
Nikki Gonzales: Right there.

28:26
Alicia Gilpin: People from different countries are sending me, "Oh, I know how to do that." Or, "Do you need this or do you need that?" And so it's just amazing to have that technical resources. You just post that and say, "Does anyone know anything about x?" And so many people can see that. And so people wanna... People do wanna show off their... What they can do. And for a free shoutout, you build this entire place you can go and they're gonna produce. And it's always multiple answers or multiple people being like, "Hey, did you get a... Did you get an answer to that? OSI Pi question you had?" Or whatever. So that is incredibly powerful, especially with building connections with technicians, engineers, engineering managers, people that are out there. If you're able to do this, that's huge.

29:18
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah. So it's helped our businesses, PCE, and Quotebeam. And then Ali just recently started a new nonprofit called Kids PLC Kits, because we were inspired by one of the guests on our show. We... For season one, we interviewed a little girl. She has a YouTube channel called Little Miss Fix It. And her dad is a HVAC engineer, building automation systems.

29:41
Alicia Gilpin: HVAC and a master plumber.

29:42
Nikki Gonzales: And a master plumber. And so.

29:43
Alicia Gilpin: But he dabbles in BAS, so he knows, PLC-ish.

29:48
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah.

29:48
Alicia Gilpin: Right?

29:49
Nikki Gonzales: And he has two kids. He has an older boy and a younger girl. And his older boy is not interested in any of what he does, but his girl is. And he decided to help nurture that. And he helped her start a YouTube channel, and she changes a toilet, and a dishwasher and a light fixture in their house, and all this cool stuff that you normally wouldn't see an 8-year-old or a 9-year-old girl do. And we thought it was really cool. So we said, "Hey, you wanna come talk to us on the show?" And then, at some point, she asked Ali, "What's a PLC?" And Ali sent her a PLC, and a solenoid, and a bunch of other stuff.

30:22
Alicia Gilpin: And an HMI.

30:23
Nikki Gonzales: And an HMI.

30:24
Alicia Gilpin: It was a starter pack, a Micro 850 starter pack, so you can use connected components workbench for free. And her dad just took it to a level that... Like basically created that nonprofit or made me create that nonprofit. Because the video that she produced... Well, that they produced together, obviously, is just like a 10-year-old girl in her room. She's got... She, they built, on wood, they mounted DIN rail. She cut like Panduit. She... And the video shows all of this, and she's wiring the PLC. She actually had... I sent her PLCs twice: the first PLC... The first time I sent her a PLC, I wanted to show her a Siemens logo and a Micro 800, the dumb one. And I put those... I sent her both of those. And then I sent her that starter pack.

31:10
Alicia Gilpin: But in this video, first she uses the logo, and she's doing stuff with her phone. So she's clicking relays on and off with her phone. And she shows wiring, programming. She shows opening connected components, we're dragging objects and connecting. So she's showing the programming, and she's 10. And you're like, I don't know that many engineers can wire that necessarily, like holy crap. And so I saw that, and I was just so incredibly moved that I had to figure out a way to reproduce that. Obviously, not all the girls are gonna have this amazing dad. But that doesn't mean that we can't figure out, like, how do you put real industrial hardware in front of children? Not children, but 10 and all the way to 17 years old, and why shouldn't we show them the real stuff?

32:00
Alicia Gilpin: And the reason that I felt so passionate about this is because I remember coming up in the industry and knowing nothing. Even I knew what a PLC was, but not... I couldn't recognize one in a cabinet. And I studied chemical engineering, and I knew Laplace transforms and whatnot and know nothing about the inside of a cabinet. And so when I did finally start learning that stuff, I felt empowered when I would re-see in a new plant things I've seen before, that kind of valve, or that kind of power supplier, whatever. And so I'm like, if we can show them the real stuff before they get out there, they're gonna be amazing when they're out there. 'Cause they're gonna be like, "I know what that is, or I've seen that." What? That's a PLC. They're like, "Oh, I know how that HMI kinda talks to this. I bet there's a switch in there."

32:44
Alicia Gilpin: And so our base kit is just mostly like, digital inputs and outputs. So the smaller PLCs that already have the built-in I/O, we take, basically, hardware from everybody. We take people; it originally was just like, I know you guys have some spare hardware; send it to me. And that's how I originally asked for the stuff. And I... That was eight months ago or something. And then I started... It started getting more serious and then brand new OEMs because of the way that I had already had these relationships with manufacturers, Phoenix Contact, PATLITE, Siemens. 'Cause I've always been at, like, I wanna know all the different brands. And that was just part of me always purch... I was huge in buying the components 'cause I would spec everything, including instrumentation or everything inside of the control panel.

33:29
Alicia Gilpin: So I knew all these vendors, and so I started communicating with all of them. And so they knew what I'm doing, and I have this following, so they're now sending me free brand new stuff. Siemens just sent like 24 of everything. S7-1200 PLCs, HMIs, stack lights, buttons, basically their own kit switches, power supplies, and 24 of every single one of those. So everyone else has now gotta step up their game, but before that... PATLITE would send stuff. And so many, really just like people that rip stuff out and they're like, "Do you want... I rip out banner sensors and or whatever?" 'Cause they re-do machinery. And so all these people are just sending this stuff. And so now I have all this stuff in my apartment, or my headquarters.

34:17
Alicia Gilpin: And, but I have interns coming, and I already had a really successful... Basically, we built kits, 10 kits Court... My intern Courtney built 10 kits, programmed them all, and then showed them too kids in a workshop in Clover Tech... Or Clover Park Technical College. And it was like, 13-14-15-year-old kids, that were kind of looking at. And she had the presentation, and she showed them the code and everything and kind of explained everything that they were looking at, and they all had a kid in front of them. And we got... That was our first; like, we rented that, and then we'll use that money to like ship. But we're figuring out everything. We... Well, we finally got our website live.

35:00
Alicia Gilpin: But what we want is to get as many... The motto is "if the kid's free, the kit's free." Meaning we're trying to give these kits to public schools. And if you wanna get them in outside of public schools, we're gonna sell those. But the stuff that we get donated, like that, was donated to be given to kids. So that's where it's gonna go. If we can't use it, then yeah, we'll figure out how to use that money. We'll sell it or get rid of it and use that money to keep doing what we're doing. But we work with the teachers. We don't send kids PLCs, and we also don't do any high-voltage stuff, like no motor controls. Everything has to be 24 volt DC. And yeah, but there's a lot of... A lot of what? I don't remember.

35:44
Nikki Gonzales: Well, what inspired this nonprofit is what we learned through the show.

35:48
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah.

35:49
Nikki Gonzales: So we interviewed a lot of girls, or women, or people in the industry, and we... First question we ask them is, "How did you get into automation? Tell us your story." And most people got into it by some weird happenstance.

36:00
Alicia Gilpin: Accident.

36:00
Nikki Gonzales: Or they happen to know someone. Nobody was like, "Oh, I grew up. I wanted to be an automation engineer." Because people don't know what we do. And we've also been told by men, like, "Oh, just women aren't interested in this stuff."

36:13
Nikki Gonzales: And we're like, I... Probably less women in general. If every woman on the earth was exposed to industrial automation, yeah, probably still less women would wanna do it, but way more than do it right now because we just don't know. And Elena proved to us that you can put this in front of a girl, and some of them are really interested.

36:29
Nikki Gonzales: We also spoke to a lot of people that do education, and Amanda Beaton with Siemens, and we spoke to someone from ABB, but they're all focusing on the college level and up, maybe high school. And at some point, sometimes that's too late even. So we really... Through everything that we learned...

36:44
Alicia Gilpin: They've already decided they're gonna work at Facebook at that point.

36:46
Nikki Gonzales: From the show was that, "Hey, you know what? This is a need, and maybe we can fill it." And the network we've built from the show has helped us build this. So if you're interested in participating in KPK, there will be a address that you can look up after this or contact Ali. But that's really... It's given us a lot of opportunities to do what we love, both in our actual day jobs, which is thankfully why we can do both. But it... Yeah, it has really helped us and the companies that we work for and/or of the organizations that we're trying to support.

37:17
Nikki Gonzales: So what can you do? Telling people, "Hey, go start a podcast." You may not wanna do that. It's really hard, and you have to stick with it for forever. And maybe, audio format isn't your thing. But what we really have seen is the power of doing something you love in front of people, letting people see it, letting people know what you're learning, what you're interested in. People will want to help you.

37:42
Alicia Gilpin: Helping teach. Helping teach is huge.

37:43
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah. There's a bunch of other stuff that you can do yourself or as an organization to get this type of network community built. And I know, Ignition is all about community. This is a community conference, right? So you all already know the power of community. We don't run an official community at Automation Ladies, but we kind of call it a community because we really do... If you come on the show or you are part... You interact with us in any way. We're around to help you, and our network is around to help you. And we do feel like that is kind of a community. But there's a lot of other things that you can do. So if you're not already, your company or yourself, doing something, I wanted to put together some actionable takeaways other than just like, look at our blind luck, and we did this. I hate seeing like how-tos, they're like, "Oh, look, it's so easy. I did it." And I'm like, well, if I did it, I wouldn't have those results.

38:28
Nikki Gonzales: But there's a bunch of stuff that you can do. So do you already have someone at your company that likes producing any kind of content or is willing to share their expertise? Let them, and maybe don't have it be from your corporate page. People kinda like to learn from other people. It seems people care about people. We all know that, especially the sales side of this, it's a people business. You wanna work with people that you know you can trust. You wanna work with organizations that you know are competent. You wanna know with... Work with people that you know that they are resourceful. So that really helps with business development. Sometimes just don't, obviously use it specifically for that, but it can help. What we've seen is, and our production value is not high. But people tell us all the time, they like that. It seems authentic, it's not overly produced.

39:17
Nikki Gonzales: So don't worry that it has to be 100% perfect and corporate. It doesn't. Somebody will like what you're doing if you put your expertise. So share your expertise and be a resource. I know you hear this a lot, like share value. In your marketing, but engineers especially, they want to know how to do stuff. They want to have have technical content. They don't always like to raise their hand and ask, but they wanna find information. So be that resource in whatever way you can. Blog posts, videos, just pick something and do it consistently, and don't pay attention to who's watching because you will psych yourself out in month three because nobody cares about what you're doing.

39:53
Nikki Gonzales: But it doesn't matter because eventually, as long as you do it long enough and consistently enough and you're true to yourself, some people are gonna gravitate towards that. Your audience will find you as long as you keep doing what you're doing because that also shows that you care about it. You're being authentic. You're not just doing it for the likes, or the followers, or the sales. What I wanna say is, if you think that you're gonna get a bunch of sales in month three and your marketing team is tracking the ROI of what you're doing, don't bother, because you're very unlikely to have instant success.

40:24
Nikki Gonzales: This is a long-game-type situation. If you think about how you build your business relationships, if you're not thinking about the long term, in my opinion, you're not doing it right. And the same goes for any of this kind of content stuff, personal branding, think about the long term. What are you building for yourself? What do you want 5-10 years from now? Do you wanna have a bunch of friends, or do you wanna have a bunch of shiny TV appearances? I don't know. But whatever those goals are, I think if you're authentic about it yourself, you have a good reason to do what you're doing, people will gravitate towards that. I think... I don't know if you had any other things you wanted to add on this particular point, but I know you were like.

41:01
Alicia Gilpin: Just answer questions.

41:03
Nikki Gonzales: Just get out there and put something out there. Add value to people.

41:06
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted to say, the more... I learned that like if you want people's email, you want people talking to you have to give them something, which is a white paper. Some information, maybe something you learned, it really makes a huge difference. Otherwise there... Yeah, there's... There won't be engagement, not natural engagement.

41:26
Nikki Gonzales: So, yeah, I think, we are ready for some questions, and if you wanna reach out to us, we are in a bunch of different places, but mostly we're easy to find on LinkedIn. And we would love it if you subscribe to our podcast. We're really bad about saying that whole thing, but subscribe and like, and my 5-year-old knows it better than me. She...

41:45
Alicia Gilpin: She has a question over here.

41:51
Christine Lee: Hi, I'm back. I will be moderating now. But thank you for your talk. I love that you gave Sam Janes a shout-out. I was also an integrator with Gray Solutions before this gig, so yay. Okay.

42:11
Audience Member 1: So a lot of people here obviously aren't necessarily going to be big on social and things like that. So what are some ways that they can empower women and make sure that they're in leadership roles or in positions where they can take charge that maybe aren't so public but also aren't putting them on the spot at their own company either?

42:34
Alicia Gilpin: I mean, we highly support girl dads and like are so happy for so many of the man allies, people that have sisters, brothers. I think, talking to them and thanking them when you do see that publicly, I think makes them kind of wanna do it more. Or yeah, I don't know. I think that makes a difference. And then going to high schools if you can. I know that no one... Not everyone wants to do that. Or support groups Mavens of Manufacturing, who's going around to schools actively talking about that stuff. And then yeah, for, in terms of putting women in roles, I mean you just gotta... In terms of getting people into a company, you have to have women already there to kind of attract more of them. And so you just start hiring, and then, I don't know, post about it. Show these women and show the people in your companies; don't just show corporate things like show who's working there and then the people that... That's how you're presenting yourself to the world is through those people.

43:34
Nikki Gonzales: I would also say not all women, but a lot of us, we don't... Maybe we don't speak up as much in meetings, or we're a little bit more of a perfectionist. We're afraid of not being good enough when we say something.

43:47
Alicia Gilpin: Or being wrong.

43:48
Nikki Gonzales: So I would say if you are in a meeting situation and there's a woman there that you know has something to add, or maybe she tried and didn't get heard, try to be that ally that says, "Hey, oh, did you have something you wanted to say about that?" Try to get their voices out there more. Sometimes we need a little push or a little support, but I agree with you. Don't just like shove somebody on the stage and say like, "You go present now," or you be... Don't do the token woman thing. "Oh, we've got one. Look at her speak."

44:11
Nikki Gonzales: Right? But do try to... Do try to encourage them, and then make sure that you're showcasing. Like, if you have women at all in your company, show them. Because see... Seeing them on your recruiting page and all those things that will encourage more women to apply. Think about the language. If you're a big company that's been around for a while, you may have a lot of stuff that turns off women in a lot of your procedures and the way things are written and stuff. You... It may be time to like just look at that stuff and be like, "Hey, is this job description that says, he will do this?" Maybe turning off some great women candidates or maybe making some women feel like they're not material to be promoted to this role. Because it seems to be made for a man. There's little things; there's no silver bullet to that, but really, just try to encourage them, and being a quiet encourager can be great too. Send a private message and say, "Hey, if I can just ever help you, let me know."

45:03
Alicia Gilpin: That's cool. Very Cool.

45:04
Nikki Gonzales: Yeah, you don't have to do it in public.

45:05
Christine Lee: Okay, one more question.

45:07
Audience Member 2: Can you give us the website for the kids kits?

45:17
Christine Lee: Oh yeah.

45:18
Audience Member 2: I think it's really important for you to put it out and share that.

45:21
Alicia Gilpin: Kidsplckits.org.

45:21
Audience Member 2: There you go.

45:22
Alicia Gilpin: And it is a 501 [c] [3].

45:24
Audience Member 2: And there's donations on there too, so if anybody wants to participate in donating, there's donations on there. That's really important.

45:28
Alicia Gilpin: Yes. And we take volunteers to help the teachers when they have problems. If you know a specific platform, we'll call on you.

45:36
Nikki Gonzales: Or help develop...

45:38
Alicia Gilpin: Like, "Hey, this teacher's got problems right now. Can you help them?"

45:40
Nikki Gonzales: Or help develop curriculum if you're an expert in a certain type of PLC?

45:43
Alicia Gilpin: Yeah, we provide the curriculum.

45:44
Nikki Gonzales: We need to transfer the curriculum for all the different types of hardware that's out there.

45:48
Alicia Gilpin: We're trying to make them build Whack-a-Mole with PLCs and HMI. Yeah. Thank you.

46:00
Nikki Gonzales: Well, thank you for coming...

46:03
Christine Lee: My job.

46:03
Nikki Gonzales: And yeah, don't do Christine's job. I'm very sorry.

46:07
Christine Lee: No, it's okay. No, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for coming to the session, and also thank you to the Automation Ladies for coming here to ICC.

46:19
Nikki Gonzales: Thank you, guys.

46:19
Alicia Gilpin: Bye. Thank you.

In this session, we'll explore more than a decade of experience with Ignition, sharing valuable insights as a long-time member of the Ignition community. We'll take a practical look at how Ignition has evolved and its role in modern manufacturing, including topics like MES, OEE, AI, and more. It's an opportunity to gain practical knowledge and understand the journey from the early days to today's automation landscape.

Transcript:

00:03
Jean-Paul Moniz: I built a functioning demo, a OEE app, for a few machines and we didn't know SQL back then and it was like, "What's this SQL stuff?" and all that kind of stuff. And so we learned SQL and we built this demo and everybody's like, "This is exactly what we need," and so it sort of hit the ground running there and looking and auditing what was out there on the market. There was nothing else on the market that can sit there and compare with the feature set that you got with Ignition at the time. And so for me, it was a no-brainer choice. So how did Ignition sort of grow within CFM [Cameco Fuel Manufacturing]? Well, it started out very simple. We bought one gateway for the one plant, did that in about 2010, and then we liked it so much. We have our other plant, what we call Port Hope. It does all of the final assembly and so we bought another gateway for that. And then Sepasoft started up and said, "Hey, we have this neat, wonderful OEE module." And it's like, "Well, that's exactly what we're trying to do." So we bought the Sepasoft modules back in 2012, and anybody that's familiar with Sepasoft, you probably know the pains of version one, version two, version three.

01:19
Jean-Paul Moniz: I won't go through that, but we went through those pains. And then we started to investigate MES and track and trace in around 2015. I was doing some work with serialization of our product and whatnot and we understood the value of being able to sit there and digitally track your manufacturing operations on the production floor. So we started doing a big exercise. We engaged integrators like Grantek. We talked to other integrators like Brock Solutions. And what ended up in that, we did a big URS and FRS, and it was like 160 pages, and we ended up with this, well, if you pay a million and a half dollars, you can have this wonderful system. And we looked at that, and we said, "Yeah, that's great, but we think we need to go another way." And so what we ended up doing was sort of taking a roll-your-own approach. And so we deployed our first full MES production line on a specific process that was sort of bookended.

02:24
Jean-Paul Moniz: It was a really nice process to sit there and deploy it on or sit there and test out MES functionalities, learn how to deploy a system, see the value in it, and then sit there and understand how do we take what we learned here and deploy it out to two facilities across the board. And so we're actually just finishing that up on our second facility and once we have that finished, that will actually obsolete an old customs.net 1.1 and SQL application that's been in the plant forever. So from a technical standpoint, this is sort of what it looks like. We have one plant with about 12 projects running in Ignition, 25 modules combined with just regular traditional Ignition modules: Perspective, Vision, WebDev, stuff like that, and then all of the Sepasoft version 3 MES modules.

03:22
Jean-Paul Moniz: We have about 29 PLCs in that plant. We're starting to play with MQTT. We have about six OPC connections on that plant, and any given day, we have about 70 clients open up on the production floor. Of those 70 clients, there's about 14 that are dedicated specifically for local HMI control on the machines, and then about 56 operator terminals for MES entries and OEE tracking and all that kind of stuff. And in that one plant, there's about 82,000 tags and in the other plant, there's the same story in the other plant, less operator terminals and about 64,000 tags. And then we also have an enterprise server that where we network them through the Ignition gateway and then that one's more like an overview-type server where we have some projects in there and they're doing a whole bunch of things a lot with the MES, just reports, visualizations, stuff like that.

04:23
Jean-Paul Moniz: But then we also have some really weird use cases where we have one project no different than what's on Ignition Exchange for people signing in. So we use it for things like that, visitors to sign in and stuff like that. So the main use case that we use it for aside from all the OEE tracking, we do use it as a centralized HMI application for development and deployment. That was one of the things that especially being a traditional controls engineer sitting there and is going, "Do I want to put my HMI application up on a server and then if the server goes down, I have no HMI on my machine?" But we sort of got over that hump and it has a lot of benefits to doing it. Really, Ignition as a platform sort of lets us do that IT/OT convergence that everybody talks about all the way down to the machine. So in my HMI application, where I'm usually... And when I talk about HMI, I'm talking like cycle start, cycle stop for a machine and all the traditional stuff that you would sit there and think.

05:26
Jean-Paul Moniz: But then also maybe like from an OEE perspective, being able to sit there and add shift comments in as the machine's running, right? And then using Ignition's technology, maybe that shift comment is actually an integration of Microsoft Teams, right? And so that's where that IT/OT convergence really starts happening. And then the traditional issues around HMI development with traditional hardware: firmware issues, cost of the HMI terminals and everything like that, all of that stuff goes away with Ignition, right? We don't have to worry about firmware updates, right? It's essentially Windows 10, vanilla computer is perfectly fine, Linux is perfectly fine, ARM is perfectly fine. All of those opportunities come up. And then also for asset information and data management platforms, we have our OEE, so we're monitoring, sitting there and saying this is what our equipment's doing from our performance, but then rubber has to hit the road and we have to get in the continuous improvement and everything like that.

06:31
Jean-Paul Moniz: And so machines break down. They need support. So amalgamating all your information around the technical support of equipment. So for example, equipment drawings. Well, where do you store your equipment drawings? Well, maybe we store it in a SQL database, or maybe we store it in a document management system. Technology that Ignition provides allows us to seamlessly integrate wherever that data is and provide it to the end user in one common view, one common portal, right? They don't have to sit there and go over to the DMS system and go get a document or whatever system where that data is. And then also we do things like integration and SAP. I don't know anybody that uses SAP for plant maintenance or whatever or is familiar with ECC. I know a lot of people are migrating to the S4, but it's not intuitive for somebody to sit there and create a maintenance notification in SAP.

07:31
Jean-Paul Moniz: Well, with Ignition and things like the Business Connector from Sepasoft and 4IR, you're now able to sit there and create an Ignition screen, prepopulate all the information that SAP needs that the user doesn't care about, and just allow the user to sit there and say, "This is my problem. I need somebody to hit the button." And the next thing you know, that notification is in your CMMS system, whether it's SAP or whether it's some other CMMS system. The UX experience from the end user, they don't care about where that data goes off, right? They just want to be able to sit there and put in their use and go back to solving their problems, right? And so that allows us to sit there and create that sort of seamless environment for the end user. And then the same thing with what I was talking about for Microsoft Teams. So that resource that was shared on the Ignition Exchange through one of the last... Oh my god, build-offs or whatever. I forget who did it. Was it Vertech that did it?

08:35
Jean-Paul Moniz: I think it was Vertech that did it. If it was somebody else, I'm sorry, I apologize. [Note: It was Flexware] But taking stuff like that from the community and then sitting there and saying, "Oh, I can use it for this idea, integrate it into our system." And so for example, now we can sit there and have two-way communication for issues at the machine, right? So somebody says, "I have this problem." Maybe if it was just a note in the database, it would just go off that database, and how would anybody sit there and get the feedback back unless they went and read it? Now, with mobile phones and proliferation of everybody having something like Teams at their fingertip, now they can get an answer almost immediately, and it would show right back up on their screen. And then OEE, again, OEE integration with Ignition, it's been seamless, right? So now we get all of our OEE metrics within the same platform that we're collecting process parameters for the equipment or doing that integration with all the documentation. Everything is all in one system. Centralized administration of ISA-95 concepts and ideas, all of that's done within the same platform.

09:50
Jean-Paul Moniz: And then that allows us to build what we actually need. Instead of using some sort of off-the-shelf prepackaged solution, we actually get to build what the operators need, what the technical people need, what operations management, excuse me, actually need. So they get the tools that they ask for when they ask for it and then it also gives us the insight on our manufacturing operations, lets us understand where material is at any given time, what our inventories are, rapid access to information. And then in turn, it allows us to sit there and start shifting our culture towards performance excellence. So instead of just sitting there worrying about OEE numbers, we're sitting there creating a culture of accountability more about inputting the data and being accountable to that data and stuff like that. With the tight integration between the HMIs and the OEE system, we can sit there and create metrics, and sit there and... I don't know what the best way I can say this is, is ensure that the data going into the system is as accurate as possible such that we can actually create or fix the right problems for the end user.

11:14
Jean-Paul Moniz: So then MES and Ignition data modeling in the ISA-95 framework, that's been a huge thing that allows us to sit there and structure our data in the way it needs to be organized for the organization. And so the whole idea of enterprise, plant, area, line, cell, getting that data into that structure and having it easily accessible gives so many insights into what's actually going on in your plant. And one example is real-time insights, the work in progress, right? So now you can sit there and have full transparency. If you were let's say a legacy manufacturer tracking things on paper, you would have to send the same materials person out every day, sit there and count the inventory on the factory floor and make decisions based on that. Now we have real digital insight to where any material is at any time.

12:17
Jean-Paul Moniz: And then enhanced accountability on waste reduction, having the ability to sit there and track 10 units went into this process, nine units came out, and then to be able to ask the question, "Where did that other unit go," right? That brings amazing insight to manufacturers, especially if the material that you're producing let's say is expensive, right? So every piece of scrap counts. Now you can sit there and start asking questions. "Why are we losing 5% raw material on this process? What can we do about it?" So having that ability gives us great insight to sit there and fix problems like that. And then in-depth product genealogy, being able to sit there and ask the question: When was this made, where was it made, who made it, what were the settings on the machine when we made it? Being able to answer all of those questions, having a system that can do that is worth its weight in gold.

13:22
Jean-Paul Moniz: Sorry. So then that's what we do with it. And then I wanted to sit there and talk about ideas that, we're sitting there. Everybody's talking about AI and some people get bored by all the hype that's being talked about it. But I think there's some really useful conversations around using AI to enhance a lot of OEE systems that are out there and whatnot and around specifically operator feedback. If you sit there and take a look at what's going on nowadays, a lot of companies are putting in these OEE systems, tracking performance and the equipment, taking feedback from the operators, putting them in the systems. That's just getting recorded to a database. Well, what are we doing with that information, right? And AI gives us a new ability to sit there and search index and all that fun stuff to be able to start asking those questions and sort of closing the loop on some things. So the whole idea about analyzing feedback that your operators are giving, ask the question, "What are the top 10 things people are talking about?" Right?

14:29
Jean-Paul Moniz: And doing Pareto analysis on that and sitting there and going, "Okay, well, are we doing anything about it?" Right? Our people are giving us lots of feedback and ask the question, "Are we doing anything about it? What do we need to do?" Right? And then along that same line, we're looking at things, concepts of knowledge management with graph databases and whatnot. So now the technology is out there. You think of equipment that's breaking down all the time, and okay, it has this failure. Well, traditional in reliability, reliability means maybe you might have an FMEA that you put in a spreadsheet, and it gets locked off in the corner. It has all these nice answers on. If this breaks, this will happen, or if this comes out of adjustment, this will happen. Well, if you take that concept and digitize it and put it in a graph and then maybe you can sit there and connect it to large language models and whatnot. And so now new people coming in that don't have that subject matter expertise can now start asking digital systems, "This failed. What should I do?" It becomes a very, very powerful idea, right?

15:47
Jean-Paul Moniz: So some practical insights that we've seen from doing all this work with Ignition, sorry, the first thing is being able to embrace a culture of accountability. And when we talk about accountability, everybody sort of tends to think negatively about accountability, right? But it's really just about getting the right data so you can sit there and make informed decisions, right? And so you'll hear a lot of people talk about OEE and then sit there and say, "Well, the operator just presses the closest reason code that they can on the OEE system." And what Ignition allows us to do is to design the input system such that we make it as easy as possible for the operator to sit there and put in the right information. And if they don't, then we have the metrics and the tools in place to understand that that didn't happen and then go back and ask the question or fix the data such that we always have accurate data.

16:48
Jean-Paul Moniz: Sorry. And then leveraging data modeling for clarity. This one's becoming a big one for us, is not just focusing on really asking the question, what does a data model for my piece of equipment look like? Not just the simple idea of there's a temperature here or there's that pressure setting there or whatever it may be, but really thinking about the whole idea of digital twin, but what does a data model look for a piece of equipment and start asking that question and then how do we model that in our system properly? And then real-time visibility, so we invest in systems that provide visibility in the operations. So this allows us to be agile, right? So we've invested all this time into these MES systems and the OEE systems to sit there and give us all this data. It allows us to be super, super agile on continuous improvement. Continuous improvement is key, right?

17:49
Jean-Paul Moniz: And so being able to sit there and say, how did we perform yesterday and how do we perform? We know where we want to be tomorrow. How do we get there? And so using continuous improvement and using the data in the system to be able to sit there and come up with plans, to sit there and make impactful changes on some of these metrics is a huge benefit. And then stay agile and forward-looking. I think everybody sort of hit the note on the keynote this morning, but being able to sort of, in a way, future-proof yourself, but understand that things are changing rapidly every day, and being able to sit there and be agile with a product like Ignition. And a new use case comes up tomorrow. Being able to sit there and rapidly develop the application that helps solve that use case is hugely important. And then empower your workforce. Give your workforce the tools and the knowledge that they need to succeed.

18:54
Jean-Paul Moniz: Some of the concepts that I was sitting there talking about with the AI tools, that's all about giving people the information that they need. I have seen a big trend on... I don't know what the best way to say this is, but being able to capture the knowledge lost from tenured subject matter experts that have been in the plant for 20 years and they have, he hits it with the hammer this way, that's the way it's always done. Trying to capture that information and being able to provide it to newcomers coming into the workforce and equipping them with the information such that they can hit the ground running quicker and faster. And then embracing the future of manufacturing. A lot of people talk about Industry 4.0, and there's lots and lots of subject matter, and we're talking about it a lot over the next three days.

20:00
Jean-Paul Moniz: And Ignition, from day one, has been in a position to sit there and support all of the 4.0 initiatives that everybody sits there and talks about. I know there's a lot of hype going on right now with MQTT and concepts like Unified Namespace and whatnot. If you take a look at Ignition, Ignition supports that pretty much right out of the box. Digital twin integration, again, Ignition's a great platform to be able to sit there and sort of build on top of these concepts of digital twin integration. It might not be simulation that people talk about, but the visualization piece, access to information, Ignition's a great platform for that. And then, excuse me, edge computing and real-time insights. Again, everybody's familiar with Ignition Edge, but I'm a firm believer that equipment will get more intelligent over time to the point where you buy a piece of equipment, it's not just the equipment you're buying, but there's probably gonna be some level of compute resource, some level of data and analytics that just inherently are part of the machine because depending on what your time domain is with the equipment, some of that analytic processing and calculation will not be able to happen in the cloud just because of speed and throughput and whatnot.

21:38
Jean-Paul Moniz: So machines are gonna get inherently more smart with more technology on it and I think Ignition is in a unique position to be able to sit there and leverage some of those issues. And then customization and scalability. I think if you're using Ignition, you probably know this really, really well, but the ability to sit there and build what you need when you need it and then scale it out is a huge benefit. So lessons learned, what would I do differently? This isn't one I would do differently. This is what I would keep doing, but the whole idea of own your destiny, taking ownership of what you want to do and where you want to go, to me, that's a big thing. When we were sitting there talking about quoting out the MES system for a million and a half and just pulling the trigger and getting it deployed and making a decision to step back off of that and go our own way and roll your own, that was a huge decision for us, right?

22:43
Jean-Paul Moniz: And a lot of manufacturers struggle with that decision. And I would sit there and say that decision was probably the best decision that we ever did. One thing is it actually created two jobs because we had to hire two developers internally to sit there and do that work. It also prevented us from taking a million and a half dollars, spending it, and potentially re-architecting or changing the platform because when you sit there and go through that exercise, let's call it a URS or whatever you want to call it, you gather your requirements. Well, your requirements, they're only as accurate as the day you captured them. Tomorrow comes and the requirements change. So starting off small, trying things, finding out what works, finding out what doesn't work, that's a huge benefit to sit there versus Big Bang type projects and whatnot.

23:43
Jean-Paul Moniz: What I would do differently is get better about standardizing data equipment modeling, especially in our early days when we just had two basic Ignition gateways. We sort of had one team working on this one and one team working on that one, and you would have one team doing things this way and one team doing things that way, and things could get out of sync really quick, right? And so putting structure around that and coming up to agreements on this is how we're going to do things and this is what our data models are going to look like and stuff like that, that's a huge thing. This one, most people would sort of laugh at this one, but avoid mixed SQL databases. Again, if you start off small and you sit there and this happens a lot in manufacturing because cost is an issue, but maybe you sit there and say, "Oh, we're going to use MySQL over here," and maybe somebody wants to use Microsoft SQL over there and that you scale out and all of a sudden, it's like, hey, wait a minute. We have all these differences that we need to sit there and merge together and this code works great over here but it doesn't work great over there sort of thing.

24:55
Jean-Paul Moniz: So try avoiding that as much as you can. Improving project inheritance and dependencies. I sit there and look back, and some of this stuff didn't actually exist when we started in 2010. But as it came online, I would sit there and say, maybe I failed to recognize the benefit or the importance of doing that. Now when we look at our environment, the benefit of having that ability to sit there and have, let's say, a library that you can inherit into your project, that's a huge thing. And then the biggest one I would sit there and talk about is... And this was true for me, was eliminating bias. When I started off in my career, I had this very sort of biased view or perception that the only people that can do SCADA-type development or whatever were controls engineers, right? And so when we were hiring and recruiting for Ignition developers, I thought you had to know things about PLCs, I thought you needed to know things about automation. And we went down that road trying to recruit, and we got to a point and I said, "This isn't exactly working," and I sort of looked at myself and said, "Maybe I am biased here," and started asking the question, "Well, what if I hire computer science discipline or software engineering discipline or whatever." Right?

26:23
Jean-Paul Moniz: And we ended up doing that in 2019 when we hired our developers. Our two developers, they don't have a background in factory automation. They have a background in computer science and software engineering. I think that's the best decision. I think acknowledging that bias and then sitting there and looking at things from different viewpoints and bringing different skill sets onto your team was probably one of the best things we did as well. And then just my personal wish list for things that can be added to Ignition and stuff like that. One of them is the idea of a GraphQL module where you can sit there and develop your GraphQL queries inside of Ignition and then sort of maybe almost like the idea of like name queries or whatever sort of expose that for visualization and whatnot. Better visualization components supporting graph use cases. We're actually actively working on that right now building our own modules so we can sit there and do that but as that type of database system becomes more... Proliferates more into industrial use cases, having components to sit there and support that would be awesome.

27:47
Jean-Paul Moniz: And then the idea of a WebGL module where you can sit there and take sort of open modeling standards or 3D modeling standards and leverage technologies like WebGL to provide better visualizations. And then I think this one's getting dealt with in 8.3, just improve aggregate functions around historical data and the idea of being able to sit there and calculate certain aggregates on the fly or through the API on the historical data. And then I know this one gets a lot of talk, and I'm sure they have a plan for it or whatever, but some sort of runway on what's happening with Jython 2.7 and how do we get things like Python 3 in the platform. And I know that's a hot topic. Questions?

28:46
Audience Member 1: I was just wondering if you had any lessons learned or bits of advice when it comes to developing with the Python code right now. Sometimes I find myself dumping it into like a VS code or something like that to kind of get it right and I was just wondering if you had any lessons learned.

29:06
Jean-Paul Moniz: I think it really depends on the individual developer's preference and stuff like that. Me personally, I'm sort of backed off of development. I'll try out new ideas and stuff like that, but I tend to use things like VS code myself. I know our other two developers, they have their preferred methods. They're more IDE-focused, but I think one of them uses IntelliJ. But using an IDE is always a good thing, and then not only that, but depending on how advanced you are in your Ignition infrastructure, just using an IDE for basic saving, maybe saving it off to a Git repo and stuff like that outside of your project, it's handy for that too.

30:00
Audience Member 2: I have a question that I think you mostly answered already, but I'd like to hear a little bit more about, I was wondering, the system that you built internally, how you went about building it, and then you said you hired two developers. So I was asking from a perspective of did you staff that internally, and was it 100% internal staffing, or did you have some sort of service provider or external resource to help you get through the milestones?

30:31
Jean-Paul Moniz: No, we did it completely internally. All of our development's done internally. The only thing that we do externally is sort of emergency overflow stuff or stuff that isn't our priority. So maybe it might be we're putting a new piece of equipment in and it needs some HMI work done on it. We might send out the HMI work because we view that as sort of academic, if you want to sit there and call it that type work. So we really try to focus on where the high value is. So mainly around our MES system is where all of our development is focused in. Does that answer it?

31:14
Audience Member 3: So before you hired those two personnel who didn't have a controls background, what could somebody have said to you to convince you that your bias was getting in the way.

31:28
Jean-Paul Moniz: I don't know because I would sit there and say... Just naturally being a controls person myself, I would sit there and say, generally, my opinion or view is generally you surround yourself with other controls people that just amplify your own echo chamber. And so when I look back on it, it was more of we know what the need is, we know a lot of the work is mainly focused around traditional computer-science-type skill sets and everything like that. Hey, maybe let's try thinking out of the box a little bit and going down this road and seeing what it yields. And we started off very simple by just bringing in some summer students and giving them some tasks and sitting there seeing where they went and the result was this can work. And so then that's what made us go down the path even further.

32:29
Audience Member 3: Okay.

32:31
Audience Member 4: Right here. One more for you. When you were describing the HMI screens and the way that you moved them to Perspective, you said that there was some hesitation or some fear around the risks of that. I just wondered how you guys overcame that.

32:54
Jean-Pau Monizl: Yeah, absolutely. And just to clarify, the HMI screens are actually done in Vision. The title might be a little bit misleading on the presentation, but the HMIs are definitely in Vision. To me, I think it was just traditional viewpoints on equipment's got to run 24/7 every day all day right. And so the idea of a server going down and then let's say we have it on 14 assets right now. So if that one server goes down, there's 14 assets that are not doing anything or theoretically they'll run until they stop. But it was that idea, but to me, I sit there, I sort of flip on that thought as, well, the focus should be on not letting the server go down. That needs to be the mindset, not what if this happens? It's like, well, if you're worried about that, then make sure that that doesn't happen. That needs to be the mindset sort of thing.

33:55
Jean-Paul Moniz: Now, the one thing I would sit there and say is I was going to put it on, I'm still sort of on the fence because of as things scale up, there is an issue within... It's not an issue within Ignition, but just generally as that idea scales up. So now you have this MES and OEE system that's proliferated throughout your organization, and you're also using it as an HMI server. There's a point, I think, where you scale out, that you start backing that idea out because it just gets too big to manage, if that makes sense. Now if you scale it out by running the HMI server on its own dedicated gateway and keep the other stuff separate, or do you go back to something like Edge, I'm still sort of 50-50 on.

34:41
Audience Member 5: I appreciate your talk, and it's helpful, but it brings up a lot of questions from my perspective, but I'm going to try to focus on one, specifically the knowledge transfer that you were talking about that needs to occur between the people with the very specific plant information. And I see two things that are augmented reality and then the implementation of context-specific NLP embedded agents in like your UIs, that kind of thing. Could you maybe talk a little bit about what you're looking at doing with respect to that?

35:15
Jean-Paul Moniz: Yeah, absolutely. So to me, I look at it from a couple of viewpoints, is if you sit there and take the idea of structured versus unstructured data, I think, I would hope that we can all agree that we live in a very unstructured data world when it comes to policies, procedures, manuals, instructions, and stuff like that. We still love the word processor and generate lots of unstructured data. And my thought is let's get rid of the word processor. If I have a manual, let me create those instructions in a structured format, whether it's in a relational system, whether it's in some type of a labeled property graph, whatever it is, but have it in a structured system such that then we can do things like embeddings and all that kind of stuff and use the power of large language models and stuff like that to be able to sit there. Everybody talks about ChatGPT and its hallucinations. Well, how do you stop the hallucinations? Well, ground it in fact. Well, how do you ground it in fact? Have systems of structured information, right? And so that's where my head's on, is taking that information, getting it in a structured manner such that when I ask a question, I know I'm going to get the result I want. Does that make sense?

36:43
Jacob Wever: Were there any more questions? I had a question actually. When it comes to Ignition, my experience from software is more of a troubleshooting background. It's always come with issues. What is an issue you've experienced with Ignition, and it's memorable to you, and how did you go about resolving it?

37:08
Jean-Paul Moniz: There's been lots of them over the years. I'm not saying there's no issues. There's been lots of them over the years, but to me, I think starting from the start, having the logs in the system to be able to sit there and say, "Hey, this is broken," and then starting to go through the process of intuitively, "Okay, what's broken and what do I need to look at?" Having that ability in the platform is I guess paramount, but it's invaluable. And I would sit there and say, from my background, not being truly software development or software engineering, sort of understanding Ignition as a product and JVM and Java language and whatnot, learning how the product was built and what some of these exceptions actually mean and stuff like that, that was a little bit of a learning process.

38:09
Jacob Wever: Thank you.

38:11
Audience Member 6: Do you have any plans for DevOps?

38:16
Jean-Paul Moniz: Ask the DevOps guy. And James [Burnand from 4IR] asked that question for a good reason and we do have... We're working on that plan right now for DevOps. That is a good point that I probably should have put in the presentation. But as our system scaled, especially in manufacturing, I keep saying in manufacturing because if you use the IT lens, there's structures and systems around supporting information systems. They know that very well. But on the OT side of the fence, right, there's no structure, there's no systems for supporting that system. So what we're working on right now is implementing IT-grade DevOps system for our OT assets. And so we have three physical blades in each plant right now running VMware, running a whole bunch of virtualized servers and supporting all this and that's our infrastructure. And what I want to do is be able to sit there and simplify that infrastructure to the point where I don't need in-plant resources to sit there and support it. Maybe I go to a managed system or whatever, but the whole fundamental idea is my technical people in the plant are focused on value creation, not supporting infrastructure systems.

39:40
Jean-Paul Moniz: That's not where their value is needed sort of thing and so we're working on that right now with 4IR, doing a sort of hybrid cloud design. So our dev are implementing a full development QA test system that will be up in the cloud. We can spin it up and spin it down as needed when we do development. But then when we migrate it over to production, what can run in the cloud can run in the cloud, but anything that needs to be in the plant because of latency and all that kind of stuff will be in the plant running on cloud-supported infrastructure such that we can do development, push it over to QA, test it, and then push it down to production as quick as possible. So in OT, running a patch is a big deal.

40:33
Jean-Paul Moniz: Applying a patch is a big deal, getting the right outage, but if you have a good dev QA development system, then you can shorten up that patch cycle with a lot more confidence to sit there and say, let's take a 10-minute window and see how it goes because I would sit there and say, I have lots of experience maybe to your question on what happens when patches don't apply properly. And just to your point, if you have more questions and you want to sit there and talk, feel free to grab me. I'm more than willing to sit there and talk to you one-on-one. I'm all about sharing information within the community. I just want to sit there and actually point out Chris [McLaughlin] from Vertech on the Keynote, he won a Firebrand for that, right? So that was super cool to hear, all of that volunteer work for that homeless application. That was awesome to hear.

41:31
Jacob Wever: Alright. Thank you so much, Jean-Paul, for coming and thank you, the audience.

41:33
Jean-Paul Moniz: Thank you.

The folks at Flexware are no strangers to a challenge. When the opportunity to convert a large system over to Ignition arose, they took it head on. Join them in this session where they'll talk about the project and share their lessons learned, talk about custom tools, and describe their thought process.

Transcript:

00:02
Chaz Cooper: Hello, I'm Chaz Cooper from Inductive Automation Support, and I'm a Software Support Engineer. Welcome to today's session, "Rising to the Challenge, Adventures in System Conversions." I'll be your moderator for today. To start things off, I'd like to welcome TJ and Jen. TJ is a Team Lead at Flexware Innovation. He leads a team of seven engineers who focus on Ignition's Perspective SCADA application. He developed a Flexware SparkSCADA, agnostic framework of process objects, face plates, UDTs, navigations, and ad hoc trends that won Flexware a Firebrand Award in 2022. With over nine years of industrial automation experience within steel, water, wastewater, and more, he's always looking for a new challenge. In fact, TJ made a playable instance of Doom within Ignition's Perspective. And then next we have Jen. Jen is a Senior System Engineer at Flexware Innovation, where she has focused water and wastewater SCADA conversions to Ignition. She has 10-year history in SCADA systems and automation controls with a vast background in water and wastewater, steel, chemical, automotive, animal health, and food and beverage industries. She enjoys working with Ignition so much she developed her own Perspective mobile app in [Ignition] Maker to help take care of her indoor plant collections. Please welcome TJ and Jen.

01:28
TJ Holt: Thank you. And welcome. So this is "Rising to the Challenge." My name is TJ Holt. I lead the development of SparkSCADA. Fun fact, my first name is TJ, and as Chaz said, I have background about 10 years of controls automation. Yeah.

01:49
Jen Conner: And I'm Jen Conner. And I've been with Flexware for about four and a half years. I actually more recently moved to our Ignition team. I've been with our Ignition team for just over a year. But same as TJ. I have around 10 years of experience in all different kinds of industries. And a fun fact about me, my house is essentially a zoo. I have four cats, a dog, four snails, and a slug. And that house plant collection that Chaz mentioned with my Maker Edition app, I just hit over 100 house plants. So thank you so much for being here and spending your afternoon with us. I know we're right before the Build-a-Thon. That's the main event. So thank you so much in joining here with us today.

02:27
TJ Holt: Thanks, Jen. So before I go over the agenda, I wanna set the precedence here of what this is. So this isn't a very technical speech. This isn't a... We made this magic tool to convert all your systems into Perspective. This is a project workflow best practices, lessons learned through our experience as well as some utilities and some tools that actually built for our platform. And then I'll release to Exchange we'll kinda get to those a little bit later. But anything that you see or that we talk about and you're like, I wonder how they're doing that, or I wanna get more information. Come find us, we'll talk, we'll talk technical. But this presentation is not deep dive in technical. This is just basic workflow and case studies. So, getting to the agenda, we're gonna go over the projects.

03:14
TJ Holt: Jen's gonna talk about our eight-step process flow and lifecycle. In between, there will be some references to the tools and utilities that I've created. And then we'll have a summary, and then we'll open up the floor to Q&A. Jen.

03:29
Jen Conner: Two.

03:31
TJ Holt: That's me. Yeah... So who we are, right before we get into that. So Flexware, we've been in the Top 10 Integrators the past three years, 2022 Firebrand Award winner for our SCADA platform. We have 35 active projects, over 30 customers. Our team of engineers, there's 35 of us, all Gold Certified. The industries that we're in, we have life sciences, food and bev, water/wastewater is a giant customer of ours. And we have our typical architecture. So the SCADA platforms, you'll have your central hub, and then you have your devices. So like our SCADA platform and way that we do things, we try to make sure that it's tablet, mobile, desktop, all friendly. Utilizing MQTT and partners with Stratus. So there's just a little background of like who we are as a company and give us some I don't know, credibility if you will. Now I'll give it to Jen.

04:32
Jen Conner: Yes, thank you so much. Alright, so I'm gonna take us through what a general process flow for us looks like when we approach a SCADA conversion. We've kind of summarized it into eight steps. And what I'm gonna do here in the next couple about 20 minutes, is I'm gonna take you through what this process looks like for us. Before I do that, along with going through the process, one of the things I wanna share with you is some life lessons that we've learned along the way. We haven't done everything perfectly. It's really easy for me to stand up here and make us look good, but the reality is, and I'm sure, as you all know, humans make mistakes. So I'm gonna be sharing with you some anecdotes and some things that we've learned along the way that you can take those lessons and apply them to your own conversions.

05:12
Jen Conner: Flexware Innovation is a system integrator. So I'm gonna be talking from the integrator standpoint. I realize that some of you may be end users, and I'm hoping that by going through this process with you, you may learn a few things to go through your own SCADA conversion or at least some topics that you can approach an integrator with. So you can talk through maybe what their process looks like. So I'm thinking everybody can get something out of this here today. So let's go ahead and dig in. So when we approach a SCADA conversion, the very first thing we wanna do is define the problem. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well, it's a SCADA conversion. Isn't that the problem? But the reality is, is that there's always a deeper problem that is underlying into why somebody is wanting to convert their SCADA platform.

05:53
Jen Conner: Is it old technology? Is it a poor user interface or a user experience? There's always something a little bit deeper and it's important to understand exactly what that is so that you can make sure that when you're developing your new solution, you are fixing that problem. So if it is a bad user experience, we wanna make it a better user experience. A lot of times too is, it could be just an obsolete application. There's still a lot of 32-bit SCADA applications floating around on Windows XP, and as we all know, it's gotta go. So sometimes, it's just a little bit more than just doing a plain SCADA conversion, taking this rectangle on this screen and making the same rectangle on the new screen. And it's just important to kind of understand that. Once we define what that problem is, the next step is to understand what the existing system is and what it does.

06:44
Jen Conner: It's important to understand this functionality because, of course, we wanna make sure that our new solution performs the same function. Documenting what exists doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna walk out of this step with a formalized document that you'll probably never look at again. Really the intent is to go through the existing system and understand exactly what it does. I'm talking about what tags are being used, what happens when I click this button, what scripts are going on, what hidden objects you have. As you're going through this process, and if you've ever seen a SCADA system that's been around for a hot minute, you know that at least 15 different people have approached that SCADA system with 15 different ideas of how to program something. And there's some weird stuff in there. We've learned the hard way. Don't ignore the weird stuff.

07:32
Jen Conner: I myself, for example at a project that I did last year, found a hidden button on a screen and it had about 50 lines of code in it. I'm like, oh, it's weird. It doesn't really look like it does anything, whatever. It turns out during commissioning, out of those 50 lines of code, there was 49 that did nothing, but one of them did. And it turned out it reset something in the PLC for the operator. They were looking for the button. My ego was a little hurt, but just remember, don't ignore the weird stuff. That kind of stuff tends to come back and bite you. So, like I said, this phase is not about coming out with a formalized document. It's really about understanding what the existing SCADA system does. Once we have a good handle on that, we can go ahead and design our dream SCADA.

08:15
Jen Conner: We wanna make sure that we approach design with best practices in mind. And what those best practices are can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Some of the top hitters though, are how are we gonna navigate through our solution. Navigation's key. SCADA is generally a hierarchical design. How are we gonna get from the very top of our application to the very bottom in an efficient manner. And one of the tools that TJ's gonna be talking about a little bit later is the method that we use for navigation that we think works really well for us. So I'm very excited to share that with you guys. Also, remember that just because it existed in the original system doesn't mean you need it. We have converted system where there's a tank level and there's a cute little goldfish symbol in the tank.

09:00
Jen Conner: I know this might be shocking, but that goldfish does not add any value, even though it is adorable. So clean up the garbage, just because it exists doesn't mean you need it. Use your best judgment and you as a subject matter expert can define what that looks like what you need, what you don't need. Make sure that you're using consistent feel and language. How I start a motor over here is exactly how I should be starting a motor over here. I don't care what the context is. Make sure that an operator can look and understand from anywhere in your application how to start things, stop things, etc. If you are finding yourself needing more than one of a symbol, standardize it. Templatize it. I tend to draw the line at three. If I have more than three motors, then that tells me I need a template for motors.

09:44
Jen Conner: It's much easier to update one template instead of trying to find 50 of the same thing through an application. So just try to do yourself a favor, templatize and standardize whenever you can. If you're not familiar with what a best practice standard might look like, we would highly recommend you taking a look at ISA 101. So if you're not familiar with the ISA 101 standard, it is an International Society of Automation. That's what ISA stands for. And this is the high-performance SCADA standard that talks about best colors to use, best alarming methods, what your pop-ups should look like, what your navigational structure should look like, all that good stuff. So if you're not sure how to approach your conversion, I would highly recommend taking a look at that standard because it has lots of good stuff in it, although it is a long read.

10:36
Jen Conner: And also make mockups. I don't think it's a secret that a lot of SCADA screens can be pretty complicated. There's a lot of stuff going on, especially depending on the process. So if you have something that you need to take and just kind of slam out on a picture, I don't care if it's a bar napkin, Visio, Microsoft Paint, it doesn't matter. Make a mockup. It's much easier to talk through with a colleague or if you're an integrator, it's easier to talk through something with a client if you have a picture that you can reference. And also at this step, it's really important to understand what matters to operations. At the end of the day, I'm gonna guess that you aren't gonna be sitting there from 8:00 to 5:00 trying to operate the system. So what's important to operations?

11:18
Jen Conner: Last year, I commissioned a system and I thought it was the best system I've ever done. And I get to commissioning and the operator comes up to me. This was like the last couple days of commissioning, and the operator comes up to me and says, "Hey, I gotta fill out this report once an hour and I need like 20 data points," let's say. And none of these data points were together. They were all over the place because I didn't realize that they needed all these data points together. So I made it right, fixed the screen, whatever. But had I known that ahead of time, I would've approached design much differently and made sure that all that information was in one place for the operators. So make sure you talk to operations. Don't develop and design with your blinders on. Understand what's important to that end user.

12:04
Jen Conner: Once we've designed our dream SCADA, now we gotta pitch it. If you're an integrator, this is about pitching it to the client. If you're the end user, maybe you need to justify why you need CapEx money and you need to pitch it internally to management. So this is where you take that design that you just did and spent all that time on and sell it essentially. Use those mockups that we just talked about to help lead conversations. Again, picture says a thousand words. It's much easier to talk about things conceptually when you can reference a picture. Also make sure at this point you identify any misalignment. So if you feel like you're trying to talk through your design with somebody and they're not getting it, maybe you feel like you're talking right past each other, you probably are.

12:47
Jen Conner: So make sure you have a fully transparent conversation. You wanna make sure that everybody's on the same page before you start developing. Also, remember, and this is mostly for integrators here, the customer is not always right. This isn't Macy's, right? It is important that you as the subject matter expert, use your best judgment. Sometimes if a client approaches you and said, "I want a turquoise background with high hot pink text," I think we all know that's not a great idea. So make sure that you are having a transparent conversation using your own knowledge. You are the subject matter expert, and come out of this conversation with confidence in your design.

13:27
Jen Conner: Once we have pitched it and everyone's on board and super excited, we wanna go ahead and start developing. And I'll be honest, the development stage is actually only my second favorite step. We're gonna get to my favorite step. But the developing is really where the rubber meets the road. We've spent all this time doing the design. Now we wanna do development. We found as a best practice, develop against PLCs. If you have one in the office set up as a test bench, use that, download to it, develop against it. We wanna make sure that we are not developing in a bubble and we think we got all of our tag paths right, and it turns out we didn't get a single one right. Naming conventions are key. I don't care if it's a script, a tag name, a view name. This is not 1992 anymore.

14:12
Jen Conner: We are not limited to eight characters. Use fully described names. I wanna make sure that if TJ and I are on the same project and we're codeveloping that the script I just made, he's gonna know what that script does just by looking at the name of it. So use fully described names. It's also really important as an integrator if you're gonna hand this over to the client, that they're gonna be able to take that system and run with it. We don't want secrets. We wanna make sure that everything is clear as day so that they can take it, they can maintain with it, they can develop it. Remember too accessibility matters. So that ISA 101 standard that I mentioned, one piece of that standard talks about accessibility. You don't wanna create a system that is completely based on red and green and then hand it over to an operator that's red-and-green colorblind.

15:02
Jen Conner: So you're gonna have operators that might have colorblind issues, hearing issues, sight issues, things like that. You wanna make sure that anybody and everybody who is gonna be using your SCADA system can successfully use it. So always keep in mind accessibility matters. And one thing that we have had to learn the hard way is keep your eye on changes on site. So the SCADA system that you are converting is currently in production. So make sure that if new projects are happening, maybe breakdowns are happening, things are changing on site, that you keep an open conversation with the clients. Or if you're the end user, you keep an eye on projects so that the solution that you're developing has all of those changes already integrated to them when you get to commissioning. You don't wanna walk on site and realize that you are missing five screens 'cause that is not a good feeling. Been there.

15:52
Jen Conner: And also one thing that we found that really helps us is to have remote access whenever it's possible. So I understand that not all infrastructures or IT groups may allow that, but if you can VPN into the client's site or if you're on site 'cause you're the end user, it helps to push updates as you're going through development. It helps, one, so that when you're going on site for commissioning, you're not just doing a huge dump with a whole project. But it can also be very helpful from a troubleshooting standpoint. If I'm pushing screens on site ahead of time, I can go ahead and set up my device connections and make sure that all my connections work. You don't wanna be finding out when you go out there for commissioning "Oh, whoa, we don't have any IP addresses. I don't know what I'm looking at."

16:38
Jen Conner: Just get it done ahead of time, and it helps to have that remote access whenever you can. Once you are done developing, it's time to test. So I mentioned earlier that it's like a good best practice to develop against simulated PLCs. So you might be thinking to yourself, well, yeah testing of course. I actually just did a commissioning a month ago where we were converting a Ignition Perspective project that another integrator did to our framework. And we found that you had to start the motors by clicking the stop buttons and you had to open the valves by clicking the close buttons. So as much as it might be obvious to test your system, whoever made that system apparently did not to come to work that day. Don't let your ego get in the way.

17:27
Jen Conner: We all might be the best developers that we've ever met, but I promise you, you're not perfect. So just make sure you're fully testing your system. Test, test, retest. I cannot stress it enough. If you did not develop against a running PLC, now would be a really good time to test against PLC code. We just wanna work out any bugs and be really confident in our solution before we even get it on site for commissioning. So this is my favorite step. I love commissionings. I love them because the goal is for them to be as boring as possible. Everyone can remember a time when they had a really bad commissioning because those are the only ones you remember. A good commissioning, you're never gonna think about it again. So I love this. I love organized checklists. Like this is my favorite step of the process.

18:15
Jen Conner: It's a really good idea to get a checklist ahead of time. We have a cool tool that we created that TJ's gonna talk about that allows us to export any OPC tag, an entire SCADA system that we've created, that we use as a checklist. What passed the test? What didn't pass the test? If it didn't pass, what was wrong with it? If it did pass, what was the date of passing? And are there any notes? It's always good to approach on site with a very organized idea of exactly how you're gonna get things tested. Along with that, it's important to create a form of schedule. Again, this might be a duh moment but if you're an integrator, make sure you talk with your client about what you can and can't test. We've gone on site and thought we were gonna be able to test everything in December, and it turned out part of the process had been winterized. So make sure that you're having a good conversation with your client ahead of time to put a formal schedule together. And also don't forget training.

19:11
Jen Conner: You can make the best SCADA system on the planet, it doesn't mean I can walk up to it and use it. And same thing for operators, make sure that your SCADA system, when you hand it over, everybody knows how to use it and you're gonna have to do some really good training to do that. We've actually had issues where maybe we didn't involve operators in the right steps, we didn't do as good a training as we could have and operators were a little bit weary about using our system. We got past it. But it's much easier for operators to be properly trained, have ownership of the system, so that when you get on site and you're ready to be done, you are done. You walk away, everybody's happy. And then of course, our very last step is post-launch support. If there were any requests when you were on site that maybe you didn't get to if there was any kind of documentation that's required for you as a deliverable. Now is when you're gonna take care of all of those items, and that is gonna help you finish up that project on a good note. And that's it. That is our eight-step process. So I mentioned a couple of tools earlier that we were gonna talk about. I'm gonna hand it over to TJ, who's going to take it from here and talk about those tools.

20:21
TJ Holt: Thanks Jen. Recently I had a large project. It was done in ICONICS' 32-bit. There are over 1,200 screens, so that all needed to be converted into Perspective. Now it's commissioned and there are... I want to say it's like 800 screens still, 112,000 tags, and 114 devices connected to it. So it's a very large project and a lot of the sites were duplicates. So we templatized views and we were able to utilize history migration, and we were able to utilize the commissioning documents so that we can make sure that we're checking off every single one of them. Because the scale of this project was just so large. The first thing that we'll talk about... Is our location model. So this is our navigational structure. So this is a semantic hierarchy where you have like your enterprise, your state, your site, and then your process, and eventually down to your components. All of this is done in the backend on SQL. We also bring this back into tags so that if you lose your connection to SQL, you don't just lose all of your navigation structure. We do this in a way so that we can identify what location we're at and then dynamically update tags and bindings because we know where we live in the semantic hierarchy.

21:46
TJ Holt: So if I'm in this distribution system, I can follow that hierarchy through my tag paths and I can follow it through my view paths and I can dynamically create multiple views. Typically we create one view for some P&ID. Let's say that similar PID lives everywhere else. I make it once I just copy-paste it throughout my view structure and then when I launch it into the client or push it to the client, all of my tags, all of my view bindings, everything just starts working. So this view structures is really helpful for rapid deployment, for rapid development, as well as a clear understanding of where things live and how to navigate to them. It allows you to jump from all the way from the enterprise down to your process layer and just move around the whole location model just because of the hierarchy that there is. Next one, Jen's favorite, is documentation. So this is a commissioning export. What this does is it takes a tag tree and then it recursively goes through the entire tag list, and it pulls out the OPC item path.

22:49
TJ Holt: If you have a huge system, like we did with 114 devices and 112,000 tags, it's hard to say that you've touched every single thing. Oh, we turned that motor on. We hit the start button and it turned on. But you forgot that there's a motor overload alarm or you also have some in-service, out-of-service button or what have you. Well, this is going to eliminate some of that lost time or missing these pieces of data where export this all to Excel. You get your columns to know when this was checked off. You can go through systematically for each and every point inside of your Ignition project and validate it and check it off with the customer and make sure that someone's looking at the PLC code so everything is working together. The last is the tag historian migration. So if anyone's following the Exchange resources, Travis Cox developed a Vision app for tag historian migration, which is why this looks really familiar. This is done in Perspective. So I built this in Perspective 'cause not all of my clients have a Vision license.

23:58
TJ Holt: And yes, you can run it in trial mode, but I just really like Perspective more. So what this does is it takes an Excel backup. You have some Excel document that says, this is my tag, this is the timestamp, this is the value. You can shove it into here and then it'll create the partitions. It will backfill all the data for the tag, for the new tag and Ignition. And you can do multiple tags. I think I was able to do 1.2 million rows of data and it took like 30 seconds. So you can do years of data to backfill. So then when you're done migrating your system, you can kind of just go turn off that legacy thing and then your customer still has all of the historical data and they didn't lose anything. So, in summary, the workflow process, we have the document, the existing do more than recreate. We don't just want to take that rectangle and make a rectangle in Perspective. We want to innovate, wanna bring more to the client and to the customer. Ask questions. Don't develop in a bubble. You wanna bring more to the table and how... Get operations involved and get their insight so you can make their lives easier. When I do a system, I want to hand it off to them and I don't want them calling me. This is your system now. I want you to own it and have it.

25:23
TJ Holt: I'm here for support, but let's make sure that when we do these conversions that we're meeting all the expectations that may have been dropped from previous integrators or instantiations of your SCADA platform. And then consistency. I think this is like the biggest part. Everyone tries to be consistent with their naming convention. You're like, "Oh, I got motor one, motor two," or even your scripts, try to be consistent with the naming and what those things are. In your scripting you wanna do, if I'm gonna pull data, you're gonna get something. If I'm gonna push data, I'm gonna move or push. So that when you go into a system, there can be 20 engineers working on a project, but to the customer, it looked like one. If you can get that kinda consistency, it's gonna make a very streamlined process, allow the customer to be able to follow all of the different views, the scripts, everything that's inside of your project, and it's just gonna make everyone's life a lot easier. And then last is testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and testing and testing. So you're gonna want to just put it through its paces.

26:26
TJ Holt: You don't want to go to site and be like, "Oh yeah, that one thing, we forgot to do that one thing." And now your whole schedule is pushed back. There's no reason why you can't create testing in Perspective to go against your main SCADA platform or whatever project you're doing. Or if you have PLC code, you can write PLC testing to simulate logic and processes. This is a huge takeaway for anyone when they come to site, like, "Yeah, we made this pretty screen, I got cute buttons and I got motors. None of it works because we didn't test it against anything." So, in summary, those are the data flow or the process flow that we take some little antidotes that we had. And I appreciate everyone's time. We open the floor now to questions.

27:14
Jen Conner: Thank you.

27:20
Chaz Cooper: Thank you, TJ. Thank you, Jen. Can you guys make sure you guys ask the questions into the mic and then just raise your hand if you need any, if you have a question. It's kind of hard to see, though.

27:31
Audience Member 1: I have a question. So you talked about documenting existing applications. Do you have a tool that you like? Because I found I've got logic in this script. It talks to something over here and becomes such a mess that instead of documentation, I just have another mess I have to dig through.

27:49
Jen Conner: Yeah, that can be tough. And it also kinda adds another element of complication depending on what platform you're coming from, whether that's a FactoryTalk View, an iFIX, etc. We kinda kick it a little old-school. We do like an Excel spreadsheet. We do have kind of a general layout to our spreadsheets where we break down element by element exactly what's happening. And if there's a script, we summarize exactly what's happening in that script or mark something to follow up for later, and then everybody on the team who's on that project utilizes those. It also helps too with tag paths so that you can kind of formulate the proper tag path later in Excel, so you can just copy and paste it into Ignition. It's kind of a standard, that's kind of a loose term I'm using, that we've developed over time that has worked for us. I would not say that we have the best method, but really, once you get into digging into the screens and start getting things together, you might find a standard that works for you. I think that's fair to say. That our standard, like I said, we kick it old school in Excel.

28:56
TJ Holt: If you can get a place where you can organize all your data, I think it's gonna to be the best way to do it. So whatever that is, OneNote, Excel. I can't see any...

29:03
Jen Conner: Yeah, I can't either.

29:04
Audience Member 2: Hi.

29:05
TJ Holt: Hi.

29:08
Audience Member 2: My name is Lamar. So you're working with a customer... Sorry. You have a lot of stakeholders, maintenance, say, operations, even IT but one of these big stakeholders don't buy in the project. It's frustrating. How do you deal with such situations?

29:29.8 TJ Holt: We fire that guy.

29:34
TJ Holt: It's difficult, right? So typically as a systems integrator, they're gonna come to us because they want to do something. So they've either already got an internal buy-in, but there are some times where you get a little pushback from this one group who uses the SCADA platform for their thing. And I don't know, we just do it gently, I guess. And it really helps if you kinda build a relationship and you don't just force it down their throat like, "You're gonna use this thing." You go, "Hey, I know you like your old platform. What part of it do you use? Well, what part of it don't you like that you do use? Why are you so apprehensive of going to Perspective? Is it because it's scary, Python in Java? Well, let's fix that. Let's do a training session. Let me get you comfortable with how Ignition works." It's not VBA, it's not iFIX or very simplistic. If it's that, then train them. If it's because they've done a lot of work or put a lot of effort into this thing, well, you got to validate that and go, "Yeah, I appreciate that, but it's gonna be easier to maintain if we only have one system and be consistent throughout your entire company as opposed to having two separate things." Typically people come around, especially once you start doing little favors, like, "Hey, it'd be really nice if I can have this table of data on this one page, instead of having to go around and find all of it."

30:53
TJ Holt: You go, "Yeah, I can do that for you." And you kind of get a little more buy-in from the customer and then kinda eases that tension of coming in and overtaking their old system, like, "No, you're gonna get Ignition now, 'cause it's cool."

31:05
Jen Conner: And I'll add to that as well. We found that by doing regular cadence meetings during the development cycle, it may help where your point of contact brings in other colleagues into those meetings. Whether it's operators or production, management, whoever. Bring those people into those meetings and get their feedback, everybody likes their ideas to be realized. Like, everybody wants their feedback listened to. So by going and listening to their feedback and implementing that feedback, people are way less hesitant about things because they kinda already bought into the solution. So that might be a good strategy for you as well, is just be open to having people review during the development cycle, take their feedback, implement the feedback if it's good, and by going through things that way, we found that that kinda helps.

32:00
Audience Member 3: Do you guys do upgrade PLC code at the same time that you're doing a SCADA rewrite typically? 'Cause in my experience, often the stuff you inherit in the PLC often forces you into a corner with the SCADA.

32:14
TJ Holt: Yeah, it does. You are right. It really all depends on capital. So if they realize that they have this degradated SCADA platform and the code works. PLC code works and it's fine. So they're like, "We don't really wanna upgrade that yet, but we really want the better visuals. We want be able to have it on our phone or be able to get a text message or what have you." It does kind of paint you into a corner. Now you gotta deal with this stuff, this garbage that someone else did or whatever. It's hard to navigate the way that we do things with templatized views and UDTs is we make it all agnostic. So what that means is you're not tied to an Allen-Bradley processor, you're not tied to whatever it is, and you're not also tied to an AOI, Add-On Instruction, inside the PLC layer. I can pinpoint what tags I want to use within my UDT and I can disable the ones that I don't. So that one motor over there, some guy programmed, and it has these 10 things and this other integrator came in now that one has 20 of them. Well, I still have one motor UDT, and I just fill in the pieces that I do have, and I disable the tags that I don't, and then the UI will interact with that. So now I no longer have that in-service, out-of-service button.

33:33
TJ Holt: I no longer have that one alarm, doesn't exist in the PLC, but now I'm standardizing, I'm templatizing, and it's one source of truth so that you have some consistency throughout your entire project. It's a little more involved and time-consuming. Individual tags as opposed to being parameterized to an AOI or what have you, but at least you can have some consistent on what you can touch and then just leave that off to the side. No one wants to talk about it until they come back for more money, right?

34:03
Audience Member 4: Can you talk a little bit more about how you actually simulate PLC? Do you create custom code that sort of does that for you, or is there some other way that you do that?

34:14
Jen Conner: Yeah. Yeah, so I love simulation. So we either utilize Ignition or we also have utilized Wonderware to essentially act as I/O that interacts with our PLC code that's maybe running in the corner of the office, so that once you hit the start button on the motor, that simulation tells the PLC, "Hey, I'm running." So we can see that then affect the Ignition screen. You can also utilize, like, in the gateway, the Ignition gateway, the simulation. I know on the Exchange, like, if you're dealing with Allen-Bradley, there's, like, the L5K parser that we've utilized to kinda create the simulation in the gateway if it's Allen-Bradley PLC. So that's kinda the way that we've always done it. But really it's just about whether it's Wonderware, Ignition, what have you, whatever you're most comfortable with, kind of essentially turning I/O on and off and making that process run. And we've done simple testing. We've done whole-process testing as well for an entire production line. So depending on the project, we'll determine what level of testing you want. But that's generally how we do it. We wanna make sure that we toggle all the I/O, we start/stop exactly how we expect by talking to the PLC directly.

35:34
Audience Member 5: Hey. So I actually have two questions. The first one, so you've mentioned that sometimes you'll go from one Ignition integrator, and then you'll kinda take over. So if you're dealing with an Ignition project that is using, like, let's say the gateway has a third-party module installed in it, and somewhere inside their system, they're using API calls to this module, I guess. Have you ever ran into a situation where you're trying to diagnose what the current system does in order to get all the functionality, and then there's just calls to this random module. You don't know exactly what it does if you've ran into that, how do you account for trying to port that functionality to your system?

36:21
TJ Holt: It's tricky. So it really depends on if it's, one, well documented, and we can just take it over. There's at some point in time where you get too frustrated, and I will just stop everything, and I will sit down with the customer and go, "What do you want it to do?"

36:36
Jen Conner: Yeah.

36:38
TJ Holt: Ignition is very powerful. So what do you think this thing does? What do you want it to do? And then maybe we can find a better solution for what that is instead of wasting time trying to understand this thing that someone made that no one knows. That's just, "Oh, don't touch that." Don't touch it. Because things go bad. That's all we know. We're like, "Okay, but what breaks if I do?" And so then you can go that route. I think that's really the best method, 'cause the operators, the end customer, they're gonna be the ones who are gonna know what they want. So I would take that approach.

37:16
Audience Member 5: Thank you. My second question is, TJ, is there anywhere that I can find this Doom in Perspective?

37:26
TJ Holt: Not yet.

37:27
Audience Member 5: Okay, well, if that ever becomes public, I'll be interested.

37:39
Audience Member 6: What do you find is the best way to train the people in the factory? Do you prefer paper documents? In-person training? What have you found works the best?

37:51
Jen Conner: Yeah. So operator training is something I'm super passionate about. I love doing training. I love to talk. I'm a Chatty Cathy, and I've kinda developed a way that I do it, and I've shared it with my colleagues. Kind of just, start from the top. Assume nobody knows anything. You never know, depending on the site, if you're dealing with older people who may not know how to use computers very well, down to people who probably might be better at it than you are. So I like to approach it like they don't know anything. I go over the most basic functionality of our system all the way down to exactly where they can find pertinent information to the process. So I generally take that approach. Assume they know nothing. Try to pretend like you're trying to explain it to your kid, essentially. The other thing that we found works really well because one of the larger pushbacks we've had from operators is when you change colors. You blow minds when you change colors. People love their red and green. And when you change that to gray, like, if you reference that ISA 101 standard that I was talking about, they recommend grayscale. So going from essentially something that looks like a clown threw up on it to grayscale is very shocking for a lot of people. So we will embed like a legend into our SCADA system.

39:10
Jen Conner: So that, I'm gonna tell you, "White means it's running or the valve means it's open. But just in case you forget, here's where you can find the legend." And we have found that that helps a lot with operator acceptance as well. And maybe that legend will have what the different alarm priority colors mean or what the button looks like when it's clicked versus when it's not clicked. All kinds of just basics. And it helps when you go through that step two that I was talking about, the documentation step, where you get a good idea of what their SCADA looks like, will help you define what you want to put on that legend. But we have found a lot of positive feedback from the legend. It helps a lot with that operator just kind of getting their feet wet and using our SCADA system, that's been a really powerful tool for us.

39:55
TJ Holt: And I will say as much as we would hope that people would read documents that you put together, unless it's explicitly said, "No, we want a white paper of how this system functions," it's way easier just to put a PowerPoint together or sit down with the operations and walk through the steps. I think that's really the way we go towards it until someone says, "No, we want a binder that no one's gonna read and we're gonna put on a shelf."

40:22
Jen Conner: Yeah. Thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Ignition Cloud Edition! Awesome! But wait… How can I possibly connect my PLCs or I/O systems to the cloud? Won’t that jeopardize them? And require heavy IT involvement? What’s the payoff? In this session, we’ll discuss how to use Ignition Edge and Ignition Cloud Edition together to quickly create scalable, high-performance, cybersecure architectures for democratizing your OT system’s data. Whether in brownfield or greenfield environments, you’ll unlock the power of edge-to-cloud hybrid architectures that are cost-effective, easy to manage, cybersecure, and deliver more value to your organization. 

Transcript:

00:05
Bryson Prince: Awesome. Alright. Hey guys. I'm Bryson Prince. I'm a Software Support Engineer for the Inductive Automation Support Department, and welcome to "Elevate Your OT Data Securely to the Cloud." I'll be your moderator today. So basically I'm just here to introduce our lovely speaker, Benson, and then afterwards with the Q&A, I'll be helping out with the microphones. Just for the Q&A portion, please remember if you've got a question, you either need to come down to one of these mics on the stand or we'll have a mic runner run up to you. Okay? So to introduce Benson off, he is the Vice President of Product Strategy at Opto 22, with 30 years experience in information technology and industrial automation. Benson Huegland?

01:00
Benson Hougland: Hougland.

01:02
Bryson Prince: Hougland? Sorry.

01:02
Benson Hougland: No problem.

01:03
Bryson Prince: Hougland drives product strategy for Opto 22 automation and control systems, which connect and secure the real world of OT with the systems and networks of IT and cloud. Benson speaks at trade shows and conferences including IBM Think, Arc Forum, and ISA. His 2014 Ted Talk introduces non-technical people to the IoT. So please help me in welcoming Benson.

01:28
Benson Hougland: Thank you, Bryson. Okay, welcome everyone, and welcome to this, what will be an action-packed session. So fasten your seat belts, we're about to get started here. Special shout out to all you Livestream attendees as well. Thanks for joining this session, mom, dad...

01:53
Benson Hougland: Appreciate that. So let's jump in. The title of this session, of course, "Elevate Your OT Data Securely to the Cloud." My name is Benson and I'll be your host for this journey from the edge to the cloud. I decided to forego the obligatory about Opto 22 slides here, get straight into the session. But for those of you who don't know much about Opto, real quickly, we're a California-based manufacturer of industrial automation hardware and software. Been in business for 50 years. And we have applications all over the world in a myriad of industries. Here's a drone shot of our headquarters, based in lovely Temecula, California, about an hour north of San Diego. Here is where we design, manufacture, support everything we make, 100% made in the USA. So, there you go. Go USA, right?

02:46
Benson Hougland: So this is the agenda in your programs. You've all already read this and hopefully that's why you're here. But in short, we're gonna cover how to use Ignition Edge at the edge to, along with Ignition's new Cloud Edition, to create a scalable high-performance and cyber-secure automation architecture to pull data from both greenfield applications and brownfield applications, democratize that OT data and of course deliver new value to your organization. Now's a good time to mention, as you probably know, this session will be recorded. We are gonna cover a lot of materials, so don't feel like you gotta remember everything I do up here. Getting to this session's agenda, we'll start off with, why? Why should we do this? Followed by some architecture diagrams. Then we're gonna roll up our sleeves, well, not gonna roll up my sleeves, they're already rolled up, and we're gonna actually build this thing literally out of the box to the cloud with OT data in 35 minutes.

03:43
Benson Hougland: So, wish me luck. We'll also cover the important question, of course, which is what if you lose the connection to the cloud, what happens next? Finally, we'll have some time at the end to answer some questions. Okay, so why? Well, our industry is still somewhat in the Industry 3.0-type world. And that simply means where you have devices like this that are tightly coupled to software applications, could be Ignition, could be other software applications, but generally they're very tightly coupled. And this rigid architecture does impose some limits on how our automation systems can grow. And it also limits our abilities to start taking some advantages of some of the massive resources that are available to us in the cloud. So these new cloud smart architectures leverage something called publish-subscribe data methods. Okay? So this runs counter to what you're probably very used to in terms of command-response models where the software asks the device for something and it responds.

04:44
Benson Hougland: But modern IIoT and Industry 4, or 4.0 architectures, they employ this notion of edge data producers pushing their data up into infrastructure for anybody to access. So a couple other things real quick, simple manageable access by any authorized user. Of course, the ability to scale your applications up in the cloud as those systems grow, whether it's compute or users. And there was just a great session put on by Brad Fischer about Ignition Cloud Edition. Check out that recording. He covers some more of the whys. System-wide resiliency, we'll talk about store and forward at the edge. And local control is always, always available. And one thing I wanna make a point of, this isn't a session about Ignition Edge or the edge device to the cloud, but note that this same exact architecture works on a standard gateway on-prem just exactly the same way. So, keep that in mind as we move forward.

05:45
Benson Hougland: So we've seen this graphic over the past year or so. We saw it again in the Keynote and of course, this was first presented last year when they introduced Ignition Cloud Edition. What we're gonna do is we're gonna actually do a little circuitous route around the gateway, not that the gateway's not important, the standard gateway, we're just showing you another architecture that could work. Again, this... What I'm gonna show you works well with the standard gateway, as well. So what do we got in front of us? Some hardware. Yeah, I'm a hardware vendor and I'm at a software show, but I love this stuff. I take it everywhere I go. So what do we got here? First, we're gonna start with the brownfield PLC AB CompactLogix. I think it's a pretty old one. Found it somewhere. Put a power supply on it, put a stack light on it.

06:30
Benson Hougland: I've got here a groov EPIC. An EPIC is a Edge Programmable Industrial Controller. So I've got that with some I/O. This will represent my greenfield application, in which case it's going to be simulating a convenience store. But I actually have real I/O, all that connected to it as well. Then I'll be using Ignition Edge running on that platform and Ignition Cloud Edition where I'm gonna push this data up to. Now, this session doesn't cover bringing up or tilting up Ignition Cloud Edition. There's a lot of sessions here that cover that. I'm just gonna cover the Edge portion and I will pop up into Ignition Cloud Edition to get this whole thing going. We're gonna talk about technologies like OPC, OPC UA. We're gonna talk about MQTT, Sparkplug B, and of course we're also gonna talk about VPN.

07:18
Benson Hougland: That's kind of a bonus. Alright, couple things on the network architecture. Anybody in here have a little idea about how IT networks work, IP addresses and so on? Maybe so. Here's my OT network. It's represented by this side of the table. So that's my OT network, traditionally a fixed IP network, non-routable IP address space. And here you can see the PLC has an IP address, a fixed IP address, 'cause that PLC doesn't have DHCP, it has no security, it has nothing. Well, it's a good PLC, but other than that, we're gonna connect that up to the EPIC on its own network segment. So we're gonna configure east zero to be on that OT network. And on the other network interface, which is on the EPIC, we'll use that to connect to northbound type of networks. That could be the IT network, it could be a cellular router, which indeed I have here.

08:12
Benson Hougland: So I've got a cellular router that represents my northbound network. It could be any network as long as it has a valid gateway to where? Ideally the Internet at some point, could go through your corporate network, through all its firewalls. But as long as I can get out to the cloud, I'm good to go. So that's kind of the architecture we'll be looking at. And then we're gonna work with all the software that's pre-installed, ready to go on the EPIC to get this going. Okay, here we go. Build time. Alright, so as I said, fasten your seat belts. We got a lot to unpack here. I'm gonna move fast. So, another reminder, it is recorded, so don't feel like you gotta remember everything. First step first. Let's configure the EPIC. We're gonna start at the edge. We've got a processor, we've got a power supply, we've got various I/O modules that represent signals we need within the convenience store.

09:01
Benson Hougland: We've got multiple network interfaces. The device is a web server, so all of my configurations, almost all of them, are done through a web browser and we will be configuring Ignition Edge IIoT. First thing first, let's assemble it. I just pulled it outta the box. This entire session is actually the steps I took for setting this up and all of the CStores that are in the Data Dash. So I've got my chassis power supply I/O modules. I put on the processor, I connect my two network connections, remember, the OT network to the PLC and the other network to my upstream valid gateway network. And I apply power. Once I've done so, I go to my favorite browser, I look there, I got my browser. I'm gonna open it up and I'm going to enter the default host name. The default host name is printed on the inside label of the EPIC. Terrific.

09:52
Benson Hougland: So I enter that in and the first thing it does is say, create administrator account. Let me be clear, there are no default accounts on this system. There are no back doors. If you lose your credentials, you have to reset to factory default. We can't help you. This device is meant to be secure, zero trust out of the box. Okay? So remember your credentials. Once I've done that, you'll come up with a screen that looks just like this says, great, you're ready to go. Let's start configuring things. So we're gonna jump into groov Manage, groov Manage is the application to manage the device. It is web-based, it is a web server. So I'm just using my browser. It is responsive. I could be doing this from my phone. It manages all of EPIC's features, of which I'm gonna go through four of those right there.

10:39
Benson Hougland: And it also manages all the pre-installed applications, which of course you can see, well I got a laser pointer, Ignition right there. So we're gonna get to that soon enough. But first we gotta get this thing going. So I'm gonna jump up to users. I'm gonna click on there and I can see there's my administrator account I created earlier. I can see what my permissions are, my API key if I want to use that, but I can also easily create new users on the device. So these new users, I just click add, I give it a name, I can give it some permissions. Maybe they just don't get to see the local operator interface, whatever. That's fine. But I've also got LDAP in here. How cool is that? So now I can connect to LDAP server and use Active Directory to manage the users on this edge device. It's meant to be enterprise-ready in that regard. So you just work with the IT group, put the LDAP settings in, you're good to go.

11:31
Benson Hougland: Okay, moving on to networking. I'll click on the network tab, I'll click on status. There I can see that I have my two Ethernet connections connected in, but they're not configured yet. I'm gonna go ahead and configure those coming up right now where I click on configure. I go into the dialogue box and of course the first thing I wanna do is change that default host name to something I can remember. I can't remember that. So I'm gonna call it EPIC-LC2-Showdemo. Then on Ethernet zero, remember that's the static network, so I need to give it a static IP address on the same network as that PLC. Okay? So I entered that in, I put in a subnet mask.

12:09
Benson Hougland: Now Ethernet one, the upstream network, I'm just using DHCP services so I'm not gonna change anything there. I'll just let myself get an IP address, DHCP and for... Because it's fun, I'm gonna go ahead and put in VPN. I go to my VPN administrator, they gimme an OVPN configuration file. I plug it in and I click save and boom. And just a few minutes here or a few seconds actually, I'll see that the network is restarting with all my new settings and that guy should go to connected in just a moment. There it goes. I've even got an IP address now on the tunneled interface. So now I have, if you're counting, I've got three interfaces now. I'm gonna go back and just look at the status and I'll see I'm connected on a static network, DHCP network, and VPN. Networking is done, dude, let's move on.

13:01
Benson Hougland: System time. This device does connect to NTP servers so we can keep the time updated. So it's easy to do. You go in there and you set your zone. Again, this is out of the box, so it's set to universal time zone. I'm gonna set it for my region and locality. So we're gonna go to Los Angeles here, there we go. And I click set zone, boom, I'm done. I can also change my time server. So I want to go to an on-prem time server, I can go, whatever you want. So in this case, I am using standard time servers. System time's done. Let's move on.

13:33
Benson Hougland: Certificates. This is a secure device and if you've ever worked with certificates before, you know they're a pain in the butt. But what we're gonna do is I've actually, did I go one ahead? I may have. There we go. I'll click on the web server certificate button. I'm gonna go into the certificate and I'll see that it's self-signed, in other words that's the certificate that shipped with the product, but it's tied to the old host name. So I wanna update that cert. So here I go, I click on it, I create a certificate, the certificate's being generated on the EPIC. And then once I've done, again, this is just standard forms you fill out to create a certificate, nothing too different than what you're used to except it's all form-based. There are no SSL tools you need to use, no command line, just click and go.

14:18
Benson Hougland: Now I will go actually to the next thing where I'm going to download all those certificates for safekeeping, but I can also download a CSR. What's a CSR? It's a Certificate Signing Request. Thank you. Certificate... Need to get you a Tootsie Roll or something. Certificate signing request. I take that file and I send it to my IT administrator. He signs the certificate, gives it back to me, I put it back in, upload it, and I'm good to go. Again, no open SSL tools, nothing like that. Just go ahead and put the new cert in, the new signed cert from your IT department and you're good to go. What's nice about that is once it's done, it will reload and then I will get this really nice little browser lock padlock. So if you're ever doing banking or anything like that on the Internet, you wanna see that to know that you have an encrypted authenticated connection. So there we go, we're all done. That is the commissioning process for the EPIC. We're ready to move on.

15:17
Benson Hougland: The next thing I'm gonna do is configure the controller that, you know, it is a PLC too, so it does all kinds of stuff. But first we're gonna do the controller. So I'm gonna confirm the control engine that I want to use. We give you choices, you can use CODESYS, you can use our own PAC Control. We're gonna actually go into PAC Control and you can see that I have a control engine running. However, there's no application in there yet. So we're gonna take care of that next. And to do that, remember I'm on the IT network when I did all this work, the upstream DHCP network. So if I try to go in here and download a control program, I won't be able to because the firewall port is blocked. So I'm gonna go in to PAC Controller and I'm gonna open the firewall port for Ethernet one, the network that my PC is on. And that's super simple to do. I click there, I have administrator access, so I can do this and I confirm that ETH1 is indeed open and now I can download my control program.

16:14
Benson Hougland: I'm only doing this on a temporary basis and I could have done this from the OT network. But anyway, I'm all set there. I'm gonna go into my PAC Control IDE, PAC Control program, and I'm simply gonna download the strategy into the device. And of course it says its memory's cleared. Yep, this is out of the box, we'll put it in there, click run, boom. I now have a control program running in there. This is not a programming class, so I'm not gonna explain the control program, but I have it done. It's in there now. So I come back to my groov Manage screen and I can see I have the six running charts, good to go.

16:51
Benson Hougland: Next, OPC. Well, we have all those controller tags, how do I expose them to other applications? OPC, I'll go ahead and add the OPC server. But what's unique here is I'm setting up the OPC UA server here for Ignition Edge to get to the data, 'cause I want Ignition Edge to get all these tags. So I'm just using anonymous access, allow reads/writes, boom. Done. Oh, one thing I do wanna mention on that one, we do wanna make sure we're taking note of that discovery endpoint. We'll use that in Ignition Edge. Next, what is the OPC server gonna serve up? Well, it's gonna serve up all my control strategy tags. It's also gonna serve up all of my I/O tags. So I just give it a name and I confirm that I have OPC UA server. You probably see MQTT there too. Ignore that. That's our native MQTT. We're gonna do MQTT in Ignition Edge.

17:42
Benson Hougland: So I do the same thing for the I/O system. I can get access just to the I/O and not to the control program if I want. I go ahead and put that in there. And finally, I'm running a PID loop. It's on this little guy right here and I wanna get that data as public access as well. So there we go. Last step, public access, read and writable. And we are done. Now we have a control program running in there. OPC server set up, EPIC is set up. Let's go in into what you probably all have been waiting for. Ignition Edge. Let's do it. Okay, so starting Ignition Edge, it's pretty difficult. You gotta click a button and you gotta choose the platform you want and then you enable it. Everybody got caught up there. Any problems?

18:28
Benson Hougland: Pretty simple. Once it gets going, same thing. We start, just like if you downloaded Ignition Edge to your computer, you're gonna actually go through the end user license agreement. You click next, you're gonna create a username and password, and you click next. And then it's gonna ask you if you want to start the gateway. Also, check your ports. We'll open up all those firewall ports for you when you spin up Ignition. The gateway is starting. Boom, we're ready to roll.

18:57
Benson Hougland: We are now in Ignition Edge, that's how easy it is. So, now that we're in Ignition Edge, we've got the gateway started, the next thing is to install the MQTT module. But wait a minute, Benson, you said everything was pre-installed. Aha, it is, however, the Ignition Edge MQTT Transmission Module, which I need is developed by Cirrus Link Solutions, and that means it's simply quarantined. So I go down to the quarantine area and I click install, accept the certificate or actually the end user license agreement for that. I come down, I accept the terms, I accept the certificate, get the module installed and I'm done. Still haven't downloaded a single thing from anywhere, it's all built in. Okay, now that I've made that step, we're gonna take a quick look at the status page on Ignition Edge. There it is. You can see my host name up there in the top square, and look, Ignition Edge automatically has visibility on all those configured NICs that I configured back on the networking page, which is a good thing because I need to get to that PLC on that 172 network. So let's do it now. We're gonna go to Device Connections, same stuff we see in Ignition, create a new device, we're gonna click the proper driver. We'll go ahead and do that, click next, again, pretty difficult part here. Gotta give it a name. AB-PLC, that's gonna come up later.

20:20
Benson Hougland: The IP address of the PLC, next, create a new device, done, that's it. The Allen-Bradley Driver in Ignition is pretty slick in that regard. So that's all set. Next, I'm gonna create the OPC connection between Ignition Edge and the OPC UA server running on EPIC where all my control strategy tags are. Go in here, put in that endpoint I mentioned earlier, it's all local host 'cause everything is on the same device. So I put that in and I just start going through the motions. Click next, click next, accept the certificate, yes, check my settings, looking good, click finish. Give it a name because I'm gonna reference this name later in a UDT, more on that in a moment. We're just gonna call it the CStore OPC UA Server because it represents a convenience store and I'm connected. Everybody still caught up? We're good?

21:15
Benson Hougland: Okay, let's go on. Now we're gonna start doing MQTT. First thing, we gotta set up the memory store and this is important, I come in here, I'm just gonna edit the existing memory store, I give it a name, I give everything a name, drives my colleagues crazy. Accept the defaults, done, dude. All set, I've got my memory store and this is important, because if my connection to Ignition Cloud Edition, or any upstream broker, fails I will start storing that data in that memory store and on the resumption of that connection, I'll start forwarding that data up. We're gonna actually check that out later. Next is the server sets, super simple configuration here, again, give it a name, and I'll just go ahead and edit the default server set. Again, give it a name, description if I like, and finally the primary host ID. This is important in MQTT, but it's not important to this session. If you wanna know more about primary host, I'm happy to tell you but I'm gonna put that in, but that host is my Ignition Cloud Edition, okay? So that's Engine, MQTT Engine, running up on the cloud. Boom, done. Move on. Next, the transmitter, this is where the heavy lifting occurs, okay? So here I'm gonna go in, give it a name, getting tired of saying that.

22:32
Benson Hougland: The tag provider, always Edge on Edge, the tag path, where do I wanna send my... Where do I want all my tags to live? The server set I just created and I'm going to use UDTs, so I check that. The memory store I just configured, click that, and then this is where the rubber meets the road, this is your MQTT namespace. So I put in group ID, ICC session, remember that, it's gonna come up again later. The Edge Node is Opto 22-Harris Center and the store name is EPIC-CStore-520. That is my MQTT namespace already set up. That's pretty much it, but I haven't connected to the server yet and if I need to connect to the server, guess what I need? Because I said I'm gonna send data up there securely, I need some credentials, I need a way to connect to that server. So I'm gonna switch over to Ignition Cloud Edition in the designer gateway, you'll see that up at the top, it's Ignition Cloud Edition. I'm gonna go into config and the beauty of Ignition Cloud Edition, it includes all the modules you need, including MQTT Distributor, there it is. What is Distributor? It's an MQTT broker built right in. So I go in there, I'm gonna create a new user. Now I'm calling it ICC Session, on second thought I probably shouldn't have, but we're just gonna call the user ICC Session, give it a password, and give it the rights that I can read and write to that broker in the cloud sitting in my Ignition Cloud Edition and I'm done.

24:05
Benson Hougland: So now I'm gonna go back to Ignition Edge and enter that data in. So let's go back to Ignition Edge, go to my servers tab and here is where we actually make the connection. I'm gonna delete the existing sample broker in there, server, and create a new one. Give it a name, give it a URL, that is the URL for my Ignition Cloud instance :8883, a secure and encrypted port. I put in the server set that I've already configured and I put in the brand new credentials that I just created. We good? Create new server, once I do so, now Ignition Edge is reaching out through this cellular modem up to the cloud and establishing a connection of which I see I'm indeed connected. We're good. Now what tags do we wanna set up in there? That comes next, that's of course designer. So the beauty of designer, it's already built into the device. I just click, it downloads it from the EPIC onto your PC so you can install designer. First, you install the launcher, you put in your manual configurations, point to the host name of my EPIC, accept the now valid certificate that I have in there, click add designer, open the designer, and log in. Remember, we created a username and password for Ignition, I put that in. Voila, I'm now an Ignition designer, which I'm sure most of you who use Ignition are very familiar with this interface.

25:39
Benson Hougland: So there it is. Now you see I changed the panes because all the work I'm gonna do in Ignition Edge for this session is all in the tag browser. Yes, you can build Perspective screens, yes, you can do all kinds of other stuff, but we're just gonna focus on getting the data to the cloud. First thing I'm gonna do is delete the default folder, get rid of that, it's gone. Remember ICE tags, I put in the transmitter settings, that folder's there. First things first, let's import UDTs. Now I could have done all this just with tags, but I thought it'd be kind of fun to have a UDT for my AllenBradley PLC and a UDT for all my CStore strategy tags. So I simply import those UDTs I already created. The good news? Those UDTs and all that work I did, I've already put up on the [Ignition] Exchange 'cause it was required for the Data Dash and I got the socks to prove it.

26:31
Benson Hougland: So there you go. All my UDT definitions are now in here, all folderized, everything is ready to go. Now I need to instantiate those, instantiate into the tags folder, ICE tags. Go here, new tag, new tag from instance, there it is, AB PLC. Come in and fill out my parameters, give it a name. Two parameters, we'll click on there, that device connection name, AB-PLC, I configured earlier. Put that in there, click okay, and let's see if we have live data. Well, of course we do, right? There it is, AB ControlLogix, which I named it, there's my parameters, there's my AllenBradley data in my designer. Let's do the EPIC CStore, that's about the same, we just go in, we're gonna click new tag from instance, choose the UDT, pull it in, give it a name, go to parameters. My parameters for this UDT are a little bit more, I've got different... My OPC server name, my MMP name, all the stuff that I need to make that connection work is all built in there, so you can use this UDT anywhere you like. So I plug all that in, click apply, take a look at my tags, boom, there they are, all in nice folders. So I've got my car wash, my freezer system, my fuel system, everything is in there, all ready to go. Okay, all my tags are in my designer. Now what? We need to get them up to the cloud. Well, that's gonna be a lot of work, so let's stand by.

28:07
Benson Hougland: We're gonna take this slowly. First, I'm gonna open up Ignition designer up on the cloud, but that's just to show you the data tags coming in. I don't have ICC Session in my Edge nodes yet, I've got some other projects in there. So I open up Edge designer, overlaid it over Cloud Edition designer, and I'm gonna go back up to read/write, go to my MQTT Transmission folder, there it is. Come to Transmission control, and it's just one checkbox, click, refresh, hold on, there it is. ICC Session, all my tags are now in the cloud.

28:47
Benson Hougland: Thank you, thank you. That is pretty damn cool, right? I didn't do anything else up in Cloud Edition except get it spun up and set up some credentials in that primary host. Now all my data's up there. Woohoo, we got data in the cloud, how cool is that? Well, let's do something with that. So I'm still in designer up on the cloud. I'm gonna go up into my standard template here, I'm just using the standard Flex Container template. I'm gonna make two containers, I'm gonna first in the top container do this the old-fashioned way. I'm gonna drag tags from my PLC folder, and I'm gonna drop it into the container. First one I'll do is a PLC waveform. Pretty simple, just kinda cool little gadget there, put that in. Second one is a stack light, that stack light, drop that in, I'm gonna give it a name, red stack light. Now that was the old-fashioned way. The new way is this way. For my CStore, I've got a Perspective template tied to that UDT, I drag the UDT on the canvas and boom, all my data's there. The entire template, all of the different tabs for all the car wash system, it's all in there, I'll switch over and just like that, I have a complete application for this particular EPIC, all built in with the tools that are available in Ignition, very, very cool. So when you start looking at a dozen CStores or hundreds of CStores, all the steps are the same.

30:19
Benson Hougland: Okay, so I can actually... It looks like I can actually control this thing. Who wants to see this live?

30:25
Audience Member 1: Yeah.

30:25
Benson Hougland: Live? Live? Okay.

30:26
Audience Member 1: Live.

30:27
Benson Hougland: Good, you guys are a great audience.

30:31
Benson Hougland: So I'm gonna actually click over first. That is the... That's what it looks like, all I did is go to dark mode, I added some other CStores in Germany, I've got Spain, I've got Australia, I've got them all over the world. But this is the one we're working with, Epic CStore 520. And it's just a standard template, fully mobile-responsive. Let's take a look at it, I've already opened it up here. This is... Anybody want to guess the word I'm gonna use? Live. This is live. My PC is connected to the ICC WiFi network, it's not connected to this, this system is all going through my router. So what I'm gonna do, guys, is I'm... And gals, I'm gonna actually click on that browser right up there at the top. Oh, somebody's gotten ahead of me, somebody just turned on the stack light, I'm gonna go up and click on that red stack light, that means from this PC through the ICC WiFi network up to the cloud, I'm gonna send a command. This guy is connected to the cloud on a persistent, secure, authenticated connection, when I send that command, it's gonna send it back down to this guy, 'cause it's bi-directional. But let's hang on a second, you're going through the cloud and all that, it's gonna take forever. So I hope that I still have time, 'cause it'll take a while for this to work.

31:47
Benson Hougland: But that's okay, we're good. Okay, ready? Three, two, one. Huh? Did you see it? Let's do it again, let's turn it on. Three... I didn't even count that time. That's how fast it is because if you put these systems together and they don't operate at high performance, what's the point, right? It's gotta be secure, it's gotta be easy, but it has to be high performance and that's pretty... And I'm not suggesting you're gonna operate your AB PLC stack light from the cloud, that's totally your call, I just wanna show you that it can happen. Okay, so real quickly about the app, I've got HVAC here, this is my store temperature, this is my PID loop. You got a disturbance on my PID loop and we'll see the process variable go down, all this is being published up. And we'll start to see that come in, there it goes, I'm... I should have a shirt that says, no SIM tags, I love working with real data. So there you go, we've got all my tags coming in, I've got a bunch of other stuff, this is all available to you guys to see as well. My fuel system, my freezer. And while I'm on the freezer, I can actually trigger anomalies that go where? Snowflake. This system is connected to what you guys have been hearing about this conference, the Snowflake system. So that's pretty cool as well.

33:05
Benson Hougland: And you can see in Germany, there we are, weather in Germany right now. Oh, somebody else just started the car wash.

33:15
Benson Hougland: There's Las Vegas, there's San Diego, there's Boynton Beach, Florida, there's Madrid, Spain, there's Melbourne. All of this data was built exactly the way I just showed you. So pretty cool there. Alright, so I am getting close on time. Thanks for playing.

33:32
Benson Hougland: I do appreciate it. Alright, so we do have a URL for this and if you wanna play from your own phone, some of you already got started. There's the QR code, have a ball. And I love hearing the beeps, I don't think you're bothering me. Alright, a couple closing slides.

33:53
Benson Hougland: A couple of closing sides. I've got my OT network, I've got my IT network, I'm moving all the data and I've got my workstation. What's cool is because I set up VPN, I can access this system from anywhere in the world with a valid set of credentials, multi-factor authentication and I can tunnel right in. What's more, is I can use that to tunnel right to the Allen-Bradley PLC, more on that in another session. And finally, when I talk about the VPN on my... This week, one of our good friends, Corso Systems, Alex Marcy, posted on LinkedIn that he was on an airplane, a 737 MAX 8, and he was indeed connected from airplane WiFi to his EPIC and to Ignition. I thought that was pretty cool, so I just threw that in this morning. Finally, if you're like, "Oh, cloud, this makes my head explode." I highly recommend the guys over at 4IR Solutions, these guys know cloud, they know it better than anybody. But what's more, they know these, part of their business is to put these in a plant floor, collect the data and get it up to PharmaStack or up to FactoryStack. So, huge shout out to these guys, see their session tomorrow at 2:45 in one of these stages. Finally, the question, what happens when it goes offline? When we lose a connection up to the cloud, no problem, we'll start storing data.

35:17
Benson Hougland: But more importantly, I still have local control, there's a built-in HMI in here, or you could put Perspective on here, I have complete control over the system while it's disconnected. When it reconnects, I'll then take all that stored data up to a week buffer or several million tags, can't remember how many.

35:35
Audience Member 2: 10 million.

35:36
Benson Hougland: Thank you, thank you. 10 million tags, and we'll send that back up too. So you're not gonna lose data by connecting the cloud, in fact, it's an arguably more secure way and a better buffering system than anything you could do before. How'd I do?

35:53
Benson Hougland: Alright.

35:55
Benson Hougland: Thanks.

35:57
Benson Hougland: Thank you.

35:58
Benson Hougland: Thank you very much, I appreciate that. So I'd like to open it up to some questions. Anybody have any, any at all? I'd love to hear them.

36:08
Bryson Prince: Up top there. Oh, sorry, there first.

36:10
Benson Hougland: Oh, it's the press, I feel like I'm in Ted Lasso.

36:14
Audience Member 3: Independent.

36:16
Benson Hougland: Yeah, The Independent, thank you.

36:18
Audience Member 4: Can you do this from like multiple devices or fleets of devices, if you do this, does it... You have to do this for each device or can you populate to multiple devices?

36:31
Benson Hougland: Yeah, each Edge device gets configured very similarly to this. This is just a simple example that we're using to illustrate this, but we have other customers some who just got Firebrand Awards that are using the same concept of an EPIC being deployed and based on the application, they connect to other devices, however many devices you need pulled in through here, modeled, and securely pumped to the cloud. If you're asking if we're doing like cloud deployments out to edge devices, no, we're not doing that yet. Stay tuned. Good question, though.

37:04
Bryson Prince: Up here.

37:05
Audience Member 5: Just... Excuse me. Just curious, if you wanted to use the native MQTT right from the groov EPIC to Ignition Cloud, is the MQTT payload configured in a way that if you were using the Distributor Module and MQTT Engine Module in cloud, would it recognize the tag structures, the folder structures, similarly to how MQTT Transmission Module allows for?

37:33
Benson Hougland: The answer is almost yes.

37:37
Benson Hougland: This is an Ignition conference, naturally, I'm gonna use Ignition Edge, but yes, the MQTT native client that's built into EPIC will publish all the data, will do store and forward. Everything I described except one thing: that is the UDTs, so we already have pre-templatized the native client to send the data up. Then you just use, put the UDTs in the cloud, easy enough to do, but in this case, I wanted to use UDTs at the Edge. So Ignition Edge with its UDT capabilities and, and the ability with Ignition Edge to communicate to other systems with those built-in drivers made Ignition Edge perfect for this type of application. But to answer your question, MQTT native in EPIC and in RIO supports everything I just showed with the exception of creating UDTs.

38:26
Audience Member 6: Yeah. Not Ignition related, but...

38:30
Benson Hougland: Okay.

38:30
Audience Member 6: Does the groov EPIC have IO-Link drivers?

38:35
Benson Hougland: We don't have IO-Link drivers today, we've been discussing that quite a bit, but that would be an IO-Link, essentially an IO-Link master. Our customers have been doing this, they're simply using an IO-Link gateway. In fact, we have a pretty large OEM that's doing just that. So good question, though, thanks. Most of our drivers are gonna be your standard stuff, Ethernet-based, Ethernet-based. Great, that's a good question, too. After this session, over on stage one, my good friend, dear friend Arlen and Pugal and Travis are gonna talk about Snowflake. And when they do, they're gonna talk about an accelerator kit and that accelerator kit, guess what it includes? That guy. So stay tuned for that, definitely attend that session, they're gonna talk about Snowflake, about all this stuff, but the same concept that I just went through here. Another question?

39:26
Audience Member 7: Yes. So for the... In your example, you had one UDT that had all of your tags. Is there, I guess, more basic UDTs you could have that...

39:37
Benson Hougland: Oh, yeah.

39:38
Audience Member 7: I guess if you built as a new function block or what have you, it could just add that in rather than one giant UDT.

39:45
Benson Hougland: Yep, yeah, you're... Good catch. I thought, you know I got all these tags, and it's all based on different things in a CStore, the car wash, the freezer, the fuel system. I was like, yep, I could... I actually started doing that with separate UDTs. I was like, well, hang on a second, I wanna be able to drag that UDT up in Cloud Edition right on the canvas and not build a bunch of pages and then figure out how it works. So I put it all in one UDT so that when I created the template, I could drop that on, and everything was all tabbed, everything was done. That's why I did it that way. But yes, you can do a multiple, whatever you like on UDTs, for sure. Let's cool that guy down again. Whoa.

40:29
Audience Member 8: I was wondering about the number of device connections you can have to the Opto 22. So if I'm not mistaken, Edge comes with two device connections right now, but you can add more?

40:39
Benson Hougland: Yes, you can.

40:40
Audience Member 8: What is the limitation, from a performance perspective, of adding 100 more CompactLogix to your Opto 22?

40:50
Benson Hougland: Yeah, you're gonna run into a point to where CPU and RAM start to play a role, just as it happens in Ignition server sizing, right? You wanna figure out how many tags you got, you're gonna how many can you... So this guy is a Linux computer, it is a PLC, but it's a gateway, it's an HMI... It's everything, it's the smartphone of PLCs. And it is running a four-core ARM processor with four gigs of RAM, one and a half of gigs of that RAM is allocated to Ignition Edge.

41:21
Audience Member 8: Will that starts to affect the scan time on the PLC side?

41:25
Benson Hougland: Nope, that's got its own real-time thread.

41:27
Audience Member 8: Okay.

41:27
Benson Hougland: Yep, that guy is, he's guaranteed to do what he's supposed to do, and then Ignition Edge, Node-RED, groov View, your C application, your Python, whatever, takes the rest of the threads. It is a multi-threaded application, so we can use all four cores.

41:42
Audience Member 8: Thank you.

41:42
Benson Hougland: You're welcome. Keep them coming, keep them coming.

41:47
Audience Member 9: So as a Internet-connected device, I assume there's semi-frequent security updates.

41:53
Benson Hougland: Thank you.

41:53
Audience Member 9: What's that process like, and what's downtime and PLC impacts?

41:58
Benson Hougland: Yes, indeed, and that's super important. We do frequent updates for our firmware to address anything that might have happened in Linux security things, updating any of the other software on that. It is a monolithic firmware update, so you're not having to figure out, well, this piece of software has this firmware, none of that. One big firmware download addresses all the security updates and they're all in there. And since you brought up security, one thing to know, I think I can do this. I'll pay anybody in this room a million bucks if you can crack that PLC right now. Huh, a million bucks, it's all...

42:37
Benson Hougland: I don't have it on me, so, yeah.

42:41
Benson Hougland: No, and the point being is this, is that we designed these systems, all this connection to the cloud is 100% outbound. There are no firewall ports that need to be opened either at the corporate level, at this device level, level two, level three, or DMZ, it doesn't matter. It's all outbound communications, persisted, encrypted, authenticated, and we keep that persisted so we can receive traffic back if we need to, but everything is meant to make this thing secure. This guy is not secure, if I get on that 172 network, I get to go crazy, but when it's behind that guy, there's no chance to get to this guy unless I explicitly configure that, and again, that's a session for another day, we've done some really cool stuff with being able to do remote access to unsecure PLCs on the other side. I can't wait for next year to do that one.

43:34
Bryson Prince: This will be the last one, sorry everyone.

43:36
Audience Member 10: What version of Ignition do you put on the groovs and as I buy them throughout the year, are they gonna come in with different versions?

43:44
Benson Hougland: Exactly.

43:44
Audience Member 10: Or do you maintain that?

43:45
Benson Hougland: And that's a good point, because we actually take the Ignition Edge that is available on the website. So all we do is take that one, put it into our firmware wrapper, so as those new Ignition Edge editions come out, we update the firmware, then you get the new edition. What we have had some people going through shell access, this does allow you to do that as an option to update their Ignition instance. And we don't necessarily recommend that, but it's possible, but otherwise, the reason we do that is so we can test it, we can put it through our whole QA suite and test everything is working properly and then we release it. So we will tend to lag a bit, but yeah, that's exactly how we do it.

44:28
Bryson Prince: Can we thank Benson one more time?

44:29
Benson Hougland: Oh, thank you guys.

44:31
Benson Hougland: Thank you guys. Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

44:35
Benson Hougland: We do have a booth, thank you. We do have a booth outside, right at the entrance of stage one, we've got a bunch of engineers here to answer more of your questions. Thank you so much, have a great conference.