Inductive Automation Blog

Connecting you to ideas, tips, updates and thought-leadership
from Inductive Automation

case study Manufacturing

Building Product Manufacturer Implements Cutting-Edge MES Solution At 15 Plants And Counting

CertainTeed, a division of Saint-Gobain North America, has adopted Ignition along with many of the core Sepasoft modules to deploy ‘FaCTory+’ – a Vision-based MES solution. This system is currently being utilized by 15+ plants with many more on the roadmap. The key reasons behind its success are the close collaboration between the IT, operational, and business teams; its user-friendly and data-centric UI; and the sophisticated architecture that has allowed CertainTeed to scale easily from site to site.

10 min video

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case study Food and Beverage

Food Manufacturer Uses Ignition To Enhance Efficiency & Quality In Three Largest Bakeries

Goodman Fielder is a food manufacturer with a portfolio of well-known grocery and foodservice brands. Goodman Fielder’s markets span Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and the Islands, Papua New Guinea, and New Caledonia. This project includes the Goodman Fielder Baking division in Australia, starting with their three largest bakeries: Clayton in Melbourne, Victoria; Moorebank in Sydney, New South Wales; Burleigh Heads in Gold Coast, Queensland. Goodman Fielder envisaged streamlining the day-to-day production processes through Digital Transformation and implementing modern Industry 4.0 best practices and technology. To enhance production efficiency and product quality from the mixing equipment, Goodman Fielder identified the need for additional data automation, prompting the establishment of a SAP, Recipe, and Scheduling Initiative.

11 min video

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icc | 2024 Community Session

How To Harness Modern MES for AI and Innovation

Learn from MES-experts Sepasoft how MES fuels the success of AI and BI initiatives, driving organizations toward actionable insights and a competitive edge. In the Industry 4.0 era, the success of AI and BI technologies in manufacturing hinges on high-quality data. Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) play a crucial role integrating with the plant floor and enriching production data with essential metadata, plus adding valuable context for machine learning and advanced analytics. MES provides real-time visibility for informed decision-making and cuts the typical 80% time investment data scientists devote to becoming subject matter experts and preprocessing data.

52 min video

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icc | 2024 Community Session

Ignition to ERP: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Looking to leverage Ignition to seamlessly connect with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain (D365)? This session will cover best practices and lessons learned from two perspectives: an Ignition developer, and an enterprise solutions architect. Flexware Innovation’s Ignition Team and Enterprise Solutions Team work together to merge IT with OT for true digital transformation. From this collaboration emerged a set of best practices (and lessons learned) that will be shared with the Ignition community. Presentation examples will center on D365, but the foundational architecture principles can apply to your ERP system, too.

40 min video

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case study Pharmaceuticals

Ignition-Based UNS Provides Real-Time Orchestration For Pharmaceutical Company

The FMS (Factory Management System) is a real-time automation orchestrator for the entire plant, including production equipment, intra-plant logistics, warehouses, utilities and clean rooms. Through the integration with Level 2, 3 and 4 applications, the FMS delivers a layer of abstraction and a single-point-of-access that allows operations to monitor and control all processes in real time. FMS’ abstraction layer is based on the concept of the Unified Namespace where all applications can exchange the required information for process automation in a decoupled architecture and where Cinfa has set the information semantic model of its business.

10 min video

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webinar

Assembling The Puzzle Pieces Of Digital Transformation

In this webinar, you will see how to build a scalable system for SCADA, MES, IIoT, and Digital Transformation, step by step. Experts from Inductive Automation, Cirrus Link Solutions, Sepasoft, Opto 22, and 4IR Solutions will explain how their respective software and hardware components fit together to create a seamless automation ecosystem within an Ignition Hub and Spoke Architecture.

61 min video

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article Guide

What Is MES?

Simply put, a MES system is used to monitor and manage work-in-process on the factory floor, covering resource scheduling, production workflows, recipe management, traceability, inventory, quality assurance, document control, and more. A successful implementation of MES software will not only improve efficiency, but make manufacturers into better businesses.

4 min read

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article Guide

New to Ignition? Learn the Lingo With This Glossary.

When you're a newcomer to the world of Ignition, it’s exciting to learn about all of the things you can do with it, but there are also some challenges. One of the challenging things is learning the various terms and acronyms associated with Ignition and with industrial automation in general. To help with that, we've put together this glossary of some of the most common terms that you'll hear. Along with a short definition, each term includes a link to further information. We hope this helps jumpstart your Ignition journey.

5 min read

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webinar Food and Beverage

Breakthrough Batch Manufacturing Solutions

Batch manufacturing has not seen major innovation for decades – until now. Creating batch solutions that include process graphics, communications to business systems, traceability, e-signatures, and WIP inventory historically required purchasing and interfacing together several separate software packages, resulting in inconsistent production quality, difficulty making recipe/batch changes, and struggles to comply with regulatory requirements. Finding the right tools to conquer these challenges is key to unleashing your production’s full potential.

56 min video

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customer project Energy

Enterprise SCADA Streamlines Processes for Renewable Energy

SB Energy engaged Vertech to provide a world-class enterprise SCADA solution for their new remote operations center. They needed a single-platform SCADA system to oversee six solar locations across North America and report industry-standard KPIs and data analytics in real-time.

9 min video

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