Inductive Automation Blog

Reliable Data Supports Cleaner Energy Initiative For 50 States

One of South Jersey Industries’ (SJI) key initiatives is to deliver on its commitment to provide cleaner energy. The generation of renewable natural gas facilities at dairy farms is a key production commitment for SJI. A modular production facility is required at each farm site, near the raw materials. The speed of deployment and number of sites involved demands the establishment of a universal architecture and platform for the integration of control and enterprise systems at the company. In addition, the distributed nature of the system and criticality to the energy infrastructure demand the highest level of security and reliability. Finally, SJI requires that all these sites be centrally monitored from an enterprise SCADA system that will also historize data for financial and regulatory reporting. The central importance of reliable data for continual operational financial justification proves the common Digital Transformation adage that “data is the new gas.” SJI Industries tasked Automated Control Concepts (ACC) to build a foundation for the application of key control and information technologies and systems that will allow the organization to realize world-class Digital Transformation and create a secure data pipeline. In doing so, SJI would be able to provide users at all levels of the organization with access to control system information. Through the strategic application of industrial information technologies, significant benefits are realized in the following areas: reliability, availability, visibility, and security. ACC successfully built and deployed this operational technology stack on Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform, which let ACC establish a scalable architecture to support plants/sites of varying sizes and complexity. The integration of data from the site’s control level, through various secure (DMZ) network layers to the corporate core network and cloud providers, has been addressed.

Numerous Custom Applications from One Platform for Provider of Gases, Materials, and Equipment

The customer suffered from a classic corporate administrative problem: too many of its critical processes were managed by a hodgepodge of spreadsheets and paper records. Off-the-shelf products solved some of these needs but were too inflexible to be adapted to the custom internal procedures. Ignition allowed custom applications to be built to satisfy these needs and gain wide community acceptance and shape corporate policy and culture.

Modern HMI/SCADA Improves Oil Pipeline for Global Agribusiness Cooperative

Streamline Control worked with CHS Pipelines and Terminals – a leading global agribusiness owned by farmers, ranchers, and cooperatives across the US – to replace a legacy SCADA with a new system built around open standards for communication (MQTT/SPVB) and utilizing Ignition at all levels of the Purdue Model. Streamline was tasked and successfully executed all project activities including designing the SCADA architecture, developing high-performance HMI displays in Vision, developing a robust and comprehensive tagging/asset structure for each asset location, building Perspective displays for enterprise users, integrating Ignition with leak detection systems, developing applications in Ignition used for batch tracking, pig tracking and compliance.