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Selling MES
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:29
Lauren and Shay meet with the MES Product Manager from Sepasoft, Keith Adair, to discuss using MES to improve customers’ operations, increase production efficiency, and the best way to communicate all of the advantages of using MES to customers. Keith shares details on the modules that Sepasoft provides and how they work with Ignition. Keith also talks about using the modules enterprise-wide and Sepasoft’s Business Connector Suite. Learn about a flexible, all-in-one solution by combining Ignition and Sepasoft Modules, and best practices for presenting those MES solutions.
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00:09
Shay: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MES solutions. I'm Shay.
00:14
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. We're sitting down with Keith Adair, the MES Product Manager at Sepasoft. We'll be talking to him about using MES to improve customers’ operations, increase production efficiency, and how to best communicate to customers all the advantages of using MES.
00:29
Shay: Keith, thanks for being here today.
00:31
Keith: Thanks for having me.
00:32
Shay: Before we jump into talking about selling MES, I wanted to know how you got started with Sepasoft and your role there.
00:38
Keith: Sure, so I actually came at this from a customer service perspective. I played a support role at various places and I started at Sepasoft in support, in fact. I worked for a while in that role, and then I moved on to QA and then I picked up this role as product manager. So, as product manager, I help plan releases, new features, new products, and I help deliver webinars and product demonstrations and all kinds of stuff at Sepasoft.
01:04
Shay: Awesome.
01:05
Lauren: That sounds really exciting.
01:06
Keith: Yeah, it's fun.
01:07
Lauren: Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. What is MES?
01:11
Keith: MES, or Manufacturing Execution Software, is a software that sits between your control system and your higher-level ERP system, or Enterprise Resource Planning system like Oracle or SAP. So, it's that stuff in the kind of the “messy middle” there, like we like to say. So, things that you might do at the MES layer is like measure your production efficiency, sequence what happens on your machines next, take samples, manage machine set points, traceability and genealogy, facilitate communication between control and ERP layers, things like that. That's what you might do at the MES layer.
01:44
Shay: So now that we know a little bit about what MES is, are you able to tell us what modules Sepasoft offers for MES and kind of how they come into play?
01:51
Keith: Sure, there are kind of two buckets of modules that we make at Sepasoft. There's the MES side, and there's our new Business Connector suite. So if we start with MES, the first module we ever sold back in 2011, was the OEE and Downtime Module. It's still the one that we sell the most of, and it's all about measuring your manufacturing efficiency, quantifying downtime, causes and sources. What are your top five downtime reasons? What equipment caused this downtime? Where can we make improvements on our performance or our availability or our quality? And it has this really great detailed scheduling engine.
02:23
Keith: So if you do your scheduling at a higher level, like SAP, you can pull that in and make my new adjustments or whatever you need to do. So that's the OEE and Downtime Module. We have the Track and Trace Module, which is all about what it sounds like: traceability, genealogy. Where did this raw good come from? When we unload it off the truck, how do we use that raw good? I have this finished car here. What parts went into this car? And you can see this whole tree, we call it a trace graph, of what went into this finished good and how a raw good got used, which is extremely vital for anyone who's doing things like audits or recalls.
03:01
Keith: Imagine doing a recall without a traceability report. You really couldn't do it. And this module is engineered to help you do that. And it uses that same scheduling engine that the OEE Module uses. So if you have both modules installed, you have one place where you're doing your scheduling. It's pretty nice. We have the SPC Module, which is about taking samples. So, my favorite example that I cite is we have an automobile manufacturer who uses it to keep their door gaps in check. It can't be too wide, it can't be too close. That's what people use the SPC Module for: Taking measurements, maybe measuring a PH value in a solution and what have you. And if a sample is late or if it's not within their set control limits, they can trigger alarms and Ignition using the Ignition Alarm Monitoring (i.e. Alarm Notification) Module.
03:44
Keith: And then you can use it to measure bad parts, which we call non-conforming parts, or flaws within those parts, non-conformities. That's SPC. We have the Recipe Module, which is about the creation of recipes or groups of machine set points. So if you're entering a process and you wanna change the speed or the package count, you would adjust that recipe value. And then when you go to start that new production run, you might fire a different recipe down. Those all get rated at the same time in real time, and then you watch those values for change. So, if Joe who's manning the case packer turns up his speed, we can have an alarm go off and say, "Hey don't do that."
04:21
Lauren: So you mentioned how alarming can be triggered in Ignition with the SPC Module. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the MES modules and Ignition? How do they interact with each other?
04:33
Keith: Sure, so our MES modules install right into Ignition. So you just install them right on the platform, like any other module. So like you install the Vision Module with an MODL file, you just install it into Ignition. Our modules go in just like that. So that means that if we need to generate your report from OEE data, we can do so using the Reporting Module. We don't have to reinvent the wheel anywhere. Ignition talks to the machine, so we don't need to know how to talk to those machines.
05:00
Keith: That PLC connectivity comes natively in Ignition. Likewise, we depend on Ignition for database connectivity. So using that great Ignition platform is a benefit to our modules as well. By being a module installed in the Ignition platform, we can take advantage of all those things that the Ignition platform has to offer. Tags, database connectivity, PLC connectivity. All the other modules, like the Reporting Module, the Alarm Notification Module, we can use all those resources in our software and not have to reinvent the wheel there.
05:27
Shay: So is the functionality provided by those modules limited to a single site or if a customer has an entire enterprise can they use those enterprise-wide?
05:36
Keith: Well, funny you should ask. New for this year, going into 2020 here, we have this enterprise functionality. So all of these modules, if installed at Ignition Gateways throughout your global enterprise, can talk to each other. So if you have a sample definition that you've defined, it can be shared to all your different sites. And everyone's taking the same samples and the same processes at your different sites. You can compare site by site. What's everyone's OEE score? What's everyone's downtime? You can trace a good that started in Kentucky and finished in Florida, that's all built into the software and the functionality there. So that's new for this year, and users at headquarters can review data from that whole enterprise. They have that whole global picture of all that data, all at once.
06:20
Lauren: So you have talked about a lot of MES modules, but I know Sepasoft also has some modules around business connectivity. Could you talk about some of those as well?
06:29
Keith: Absolutely. So we have our new Business Connector suite, which consists of three different modules. First is the Business Connector. It's sort of, as it might sound, the business engine. It's where you build these really great sequential drag-and-drop charts that visually represent your communication with a higher level system, like an ERP system, that could be SAP, it could be Dynamics 365, it could be Oracle. You build these charts that visually lay out these communications and then you can use them to bring in data into Ignition, send data up to the ERP, save off material definitions into our MES software. It works with our MES stuff, but if you're not using those modules, it still works on its own. That suite contains not just the Business Connector module but also two other modules, there's the Interface for SAP ERP, which gives the Business Connector the ability to talk to SAP. It's an SAP-certified module, and it can be used to communicate with any on-prem SAP server, so if you have an S3 server, an SAP HANA server, we can talk to those. It's pretty cool.
07:35
Keith: And then we finally have the Web Services Module. And, we've been selling that for a few years and it works with or without Business Connector, but it gives you the power to communicate with REST or SOAP APIs. So many of these other ERPs like Dynamics 365 and Oracle can communicate over REST and SOAP, so we can talk to those two.
07:54
Shay: So what you're saying is that you can use these modules to connect to your SCADA and MES systems up to business-level applications like ERP systems?
08:03
Keith: That's right, and it really helps you eliminate those pain points, like shared database queries, you don't wanna open your database up to call some other systems, you wanna use the native supported ways of doing so. No more flat files, no more ungainly Python scripts that administer this stuff. We can support it with this kind of really flexible, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop solution, so the next guy who comes in and has to improve on what you made, just sees this beautifully laid-out chart that they can see and understand how it works without having to make lots of guess work or lots of reworking. And what's really cool is all these modules are just kind of like Ignition, they're modular, so you don't need to install all of them, you can just install the ones that you need. If you don't need to talk to SAP, don't buy the Interface for SAP Module. They all work together nicely and there are benefits to having them all on your system, but only buy the things you need. They all work together on their own or in tandem.
08:56
Lauren: Awesome, and I know you guys just received an exciting recognition recently. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
09:01
Keith: Sure, well, we were reviewed by Gartner in the last year, and they actually reached out to us which is pretty cool, and they placed us on their so-called Magic Quadrant and they rated us Top Five -Ability to Execute, which is very exciting. There are sort of brutally honest folks over there, and so we have all these reviews from them and from our customers that I think speak really well to our ability to execute and deliver great MES solutions.
09:25
Shay: Wow, congratulations.
09:27
Keith: It's very exciting.
09:27
Lauren: Yeah, congrats.
09:28
Shay: That is. So what is it about the combination of Ignition and the Sepasoft modules that puts this MES solution in the top five?
09:34
Keith: Well, I think it's a flexible all-in-one solution. Typically the manufacturing stack is three layers, right? It's ERP, it's MES, and it's controls. What we're saying is, "Hey, take your MES and combine it with your control system, Ignition", and it's just, we're flattening that stack down, we're helping those layers talk to each other, we're making it more of a combined all-in-one solution. Ignition is really a logical platform for us because all the data that we need is in the Ignition solution. We need equipment set points, we need quantities, we need state data. That's all in Ignition, we can just use it. It makes it a lot easier for us and it makes it so much easier to develop and execute on an MES solution as opposed to a separate software stack for MES. Our models are used all over the world. We have customers in Latin America, in Asia, in Europe and Australia, and of course, here in the States and we have 600-plus MES implementations worldwide, pretty proud of that. We have a strong support infrastructure, so we have 30-plus certified MES integrators and we have a really great internal support team, our technical support is great.
10:40
Keith: We also have this great team of design consultants that can help you get your project from working to excellence and we're always there to help you be successful. We have a really great competitive price point, we try to mimic Inductive Automation's pricing, in that we have unlimited screens, unlimited clients, in fact, we sell our modules by the line or by the site and in fact, we're trying to get more into that low-end price point with our OEE Lite Module, which is a version of our OEE Module with a few restrictions in the feature set that can help you get going faster at a lower price point. We stand up really well to the pricing of the other players in his area, I think.
11:15
Lauren: So I understand that an MES implementation can be a little more complicated than your average SCADA application.
11:22
Keith: Absolutely.
11:23
Lauren: So how should an integrator go about approaching MES when they're trying to sell that to their customers? What do they need to know?
11:30
Keith: We want you to always have us in mind, when you're trying to sell an MES solution. However we do have a certification process that we might suggest you go through or you could even sub-contract to one of our certified MES integrators that we already have in the market, but our training solutions are first-class. We have online training, we have video training, we have on-site training here in sunny Northern California that you can attend and gain that knowledge and become a certified MES integrator. What we want to avoid is folks who maybe don't have the training going off and maybe not having a successful implementation and that leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. So we really think that with the tools we provide and the training we can provide, we can get everyone to provide that successful MES implementation.
12:12
Lauren: So it's really important to know your stuff before you go in throwing around MES ideas?
12:17
Keith: Right. So maybe if you used a competitor's MES solution in the past, you'd probably be a good fit for using ours as well. We love training new folks and getting them going, but we don't want someone to kind of go off on their own and maybe not have a successful implementation. If you want to start an MES project, please take advantage of our resources that we have made available.
12:36
Shay: So how do we know when an MES solution is a good fit for a customer?
12:40
Keith: Sure, well, there's some questions we look out for. So we wanna understand what's causing all this downtime, maybe they want the OEE Module. We want to schedule our upcoming operations and figure out how we're gonna be spending our upcoming days and weeks. The OEE Module or the Track and Trace Module. We need to capture traceability data. How do we use this raw good, how do I perform a recall? Well, that's again the Track and Trace Module. We need to fetch data from SAP and send this result back up, Business Connector plus Interface for SAP Module. We need to set machine set points and monitor those values for changes, that's the Recipe Module. You can look out for these sorts of questions and they'll tip you off to know whether you should talk MES with a potential customer. We need to perform inspections and collect sample data, that could be an SPC Module question, so just look out for those kind of key questions that guide you towards our MES solutions.
13:35
Lauren: So let's say, we hear those magic words, we know that they are looking for an MES solution. What's the best way to go about presenting an MES solution from Sepasoft?
13:45
Keith: We strongly suggest you contact your Inductive rep or go to sepasoft.com/request-demo and request a demo, you'll get a demonstration from someone like me or my other colleagues in the design consultation department, where we can demonstrate how the MES software works, give examples of implementations, show some screens, some functionality, that's the best way to get folks to understand what's in the offering here. We have case studies on our website and videos where we actually go on customer sites and see their operation. Those are at sepasoft.com/videos and you can also demonstrate the product using our publicly available demo, that's at demo.sepasoft.com.
14:27
Shay: Well, Keith, thanks so much for sitting down with us today to talk about Sepasoft solutions for MES and business connectivity. It's been great and I think we've both learned a lot.
14:35
Lauren: We have.
14:36
Keith: Absolutely, thanks for your time.
Shay: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MES solutions. I'm Shay.
00:14
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. We're sitting down with Keith Adair, the MES Product Manager at Sepasoft. We'll be talking to him about using MES to improve customers’ operations, increase production efficiency, and how to best communicate to customers all the advantages of using MES.
00:29
Shay: Keith, thanks for being here today.
00:31
Keith: Thanks for having me.
00:32
Shay: Before we jump into talking about selling MES, I wanted to know how you got started with Sepasoft and your role there.
00:38
Keith: Sure, so I actually came at this from a customer service perspective. I played a support role at various places and I started at Sepasoft in support, in fact. I worked for a while in that role, and then I moved on to QA and then I picked up this role as product manager. So, as product manager, I help plan releases, new features, new products, and I help deliver webinars and product demonstrations and all kinds of stuff at Sepasoft.
01:04
Shay: Awesome.
01:05
Lauren: That sounds really exciting.
01:06
Keith: Yeah, it's fun.
01:07
Lauren: Yeah. So let's start at the beginning. What is MES?
01:11
Keith: MES, or Manufacturing Execution Software, is a software that sits between your control system and your higher-level ERP system, or Enterprise Resource Planning system like Oracle or SAP. So, it's that stuff in the kind of the “messy middle” there, like we like to say. So, things that you might do at the MES layer is like measure your production efficiency, sequence what happens on your machines next, take samples, manage machine set points, traceability and genealogy, facilitate communication between control and ERP layers, things like that. That's what you might do at the MES layer.
01:44
Shay: So now that we know a little bit about what MES is, are you able to tell us what modules Sepasoft offers for MES and kind of how they come into play?
01:51
Keith: Sure, there are kind of two buckets of modules that we make at Sepasoft. There's the MES side, and there's our new Business Connector suite. So if we start with MES, the first module we ever sold back in 2011, was the OEE and Downtime Module. It's still the one that we sell the most of, and it's all about measuring your manufacturing efficiency, quantifying downtime, causes and sources. What are your top five downtime reasons? What equipment caused this downtime? Where can we make improvements on our performance or our availability or our quality? And it has this really great detailed scheduling engine.
02:23
Keith: So if you do your scheduling at a higher level, like SAP, you can pull that in and make my new adjustments or whatever you need to do. So that's the OEE and Downtime Module. We have the Track and Trace Module, which is all about what it sounds like: traceability, genealogy. Where did this raw good come from? When we unload it off the truck, how do we use that raw good? I have this finished car here. What parts went into this car? And you can see this whole tree, we call it a trace graph, of what went into this finished good and how a raw good got used, which is extremely vital for anyone who's doing things like audits or recalls.
03:01
Keith: Imagine doing a recall without a traceability report. You really couldn't do it. And this module is engineered to help you do that. And it uses that same scheduling engine that the OEE Module uses. So if you have both modules installed, you have one place where you're doing your scheduling. It's pretty nice. We have the SPC Module, which is about taking samples. So, my favorite example that I cite is we have an automobile manufacturer who uses it to keep their door gaps in check. It can't be too wide, it can't be too close. That's what people use the SPC Module for: Taking measurements, maybe measuring a PH value in a solution and what have you. And if a sample is late or if it's not within their set control limits, they can trigger alarms and Ignition using the Ignition Alarm Monitoring (i.e. Alarm Notification) Module.
03:44
Keith: And then you can use it to measure bad parts, which we call non-conforming parts, or flaws within those parts, non-conformities. That's SPC. We have the Recipe Module, which is about the creation of recipes or groups of machine set points. So if you're entering a process and you wanna change the speed or the package count, you would adjust that recipe value. And then when you go to start that new production run, you might fire a different recipe down. Those all get rated at the same time in real time, and then you watch those values for change. So, if Joe who's manning the case packer turns up his speed, we can have an alarm go off and say, "Hey don't do that."
04:21
Lauren: So you mentioned how alarming can be triggered in Ignition with the SPC Module. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the MES modules and Ignition? How do they interact with each other?
04:33
Keith: Sure, so our MES modules install right into Ignition. So you just install them right on the platform, like any other module. So like you install the Vision Module with an MODL file, you just install it into Ignition. Our modules go in just like that. So that means that if we need to generate your report from OEE data, we can do so using the Reporting Module. We don't have to reinvent the wheel anywhere. Ignition talks to the machine, so we don't need to know how to talk to those machines.
05:00
Keith: That PLC connectivity comes natively in Ignition. Likewise, we depend on Ignition for database connectivity. So using that great Ignition platform is a benefit to our modules as well. By being a module installed in the Ignition platform, we can take advantage of all those things that the Ignition platform has to offer. Tags, database connectivity, PLC connectivity. All the other modules, like the Reporting Module, the Alarm Notification Module, we can use all those resources in our software and not have to reinvent the wheel there.
05:27
Shay: So is the functionality provided by those modules limited to a single site or if a customer has an entire enterprise can they use those enterprise-wide?
05:36
Keith: Well, funny you should ask. New for this year, going into 2020 here, we have this enterprise functionality. So all of these modules, if installed at Ignition Gateways throughout your global enterprise, can talk to each other. So if you have a sample definition that you've defined, it can be shared to all your different sites. And everyone's taking the same samples and the same processes at your different sites. You can compare site by site. What's everyone's OEE score? What's everyone's downtime? You can trace a good that started in Kentucky and finished in Florida, that's all built into the software and the functionality there. So that's new for this year, and users at headquarters can review data from that whole enterprise. They have that whole global picture of all that data, all at once.
06:20
Lauren: So you have talked about a lot of MES modules, but I know Sepasoft also has some modules around business connectivity. Could you talk about some of those as well?
06:29
Keith: Absolutely. So we have our new Business Connector suite, which consists of three different modules. First is the Business Connector. It's sort of, as it might sound, the business engine. It's where you build these really great sequential drag-and-drop charts that visually represent your communication with a higher level system, like an ERP system, that could be SAP, it could be Dynamics 365, it could be Oracle. You build these charts that visually lay out these communications and then you can use them to bring in data into Ignition, send data up to the ERP, save off material definitions into our MES software. It works with our MES stuff, but if you're not using those modules, it still works on its own. That suite contains not just the Business Connector module but also two other modules, there's the Interface for SAP ERP, which gives the Business Connector the ability to talk to SAP. It's an SAP-certified module, and it can be used to communicate with any on-prem SAP server, so if you have an S3 server, an SAP HANA server, we can talk to those. It's pretty cool.
07:35
Keith: And then we finally have the Web Services Module. And, we've been selling that for a few years and it works with or without Business Connector, but it gives you the power to communicate with REST or SOAP APIs. So many of these other ERPs like Dynamics 365 and Oracle can communicate over REST and SOAP, so we can talk to those two.
07:54
Shay: So what you're saying is that you can use these modules to connect to your SCADA and MES systems up to business-level applications like ERP systems?
08:03
Keith: That's right, and it really helps you eliminate those pain points, like shared database queries, you don't wanna open your database up to call some other systems, you wanna use the native supported ways of doing so. No more flat files, no more ungainly Python scripts that administer this stuff. We can support it with this kind of really flexible, easy-to-use, drag-and-drop solution, so the next guy who comes in and has to improve on what you made, just sees this beautifully laid-out chart that they can see and understand how it works without having to make lots of guess work or lots of reworking. And what's really cool is all these modules are just kind of like Ignition, they're modular, so you don't need to install all of them, you can just install the ones that you need. If you don't need to talk to SAP, don't buy the Interface for SAP Module. They all work together nicely and there are benefits to having them all on your system, but only buy the things you need. They all work together on their own or in tandem.
08:56
Lauren: Awesome, and I know you guys just received an exciting recognition recently. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
09:01
Keith: Sure, well, we were reviewed by Gartner in the last year, and they actually reached out to us which is pretty cool, and they placed us on their so-called Magic Quadrant and they rated us Top Five -Ability to Execute, which is very exciting. There are sort of brutally honest folks over there, and so we have all these reviews from them and from our customers that I think speak really well to our ability to execute and deliver great MES solutions.
09:25
Shay: Wow, congratulations.
09:27
Keith: It's very exciting.
09:27
Lauren: Yeah, congrats.
09:28
Shay: That is. So what is it about the combination of Ignition and the Sepasoft modules that puts this MES solution in the top five?
09:34
Keith: Well, I think it's a flexible all-in-one solution. Typically the manufacturing stack is three layers, right? It's ERP, it's MES, and it's controls. What we're saying is, "Hey, take your MES and combine it with your control system, Ignition", and it's just, we're flattening that stack down, we're helping those layers talk to each other, we're making it more of a combined all-in-one solution. Ignition is really a logical platform for us because all the data that we need is in the Ignition solution. We need equipment set points, we need quantities, we need state data. That's all in Ignition, we can just use it. It makes it a lot easier for us and it makes it so much easier to develop and execute on an MES solution as opposed to a separate software stack for MES. Our models are used all over the world. We have customers in Latin America, in Asia, in Europe and Australia, and of course, here in the States and we have 600-plus MES implementations worldwide, pretty proud of that. We have a strong support infrastructure, so we have 30-plus certified MES integrators and we have a really great internal support team, our technical support is great.
10:40
Keith: We also have this great team of design consultants that can help you get your project from working to excellence and we're always there to help you be successful. We have a really great competitive price point, we try to mimic Inductive Automation's pricing, in that we have unlimited screens, unlimited clients, in fact, we sell our modules by the line or by the site and in fact, we're trying to get more into that low-end price point with our OEE Lite Module, which is a version of our OEE Module with a few restrictions in the feature set that can help you get going faster at a lower price point. We stand up really well to the pricing of the other players in his area, I think.
11:15
Lauren: So I understand that an MES implementation can be a little more complicated than your average SCADA application.
11:22
Keith: Absolutely.
11:23
Lauren: So how should an integrator go about approaching MES when they're trying to sell that to their customers? What do they need to know?
11:30
Keith: We want you to always have us in mind, when you're trying to sell an MES solution. However we do have a certification process that we might suggest you go through or you could even sub-contract to one of our certified MES integrators that we already have in the market, but our training solutions are first-class. We have online training, we have video training, we have on-site training here in sunny Northern California that you can attend and gain that knowledge and become a certified MES integrator. What we want to avoid is folks who maybe don't have the training going off and maybe not having a successful implementation and that leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. So we really think that with the tools we provide and the training we can provide, we can get everyone to provide that successful MES implementation.
12:12
Lauren: So it's really important to know your stuff before you go in throwing around MES ideas?
12:17
Keith: Right. So maybe if you used a competitor's MES solution in the past, you'd probably be a good fit for using ours as well. We love training new folks and getting them going, but we don't want someone to kind of go off on their own and maybe not have a successful implementation. If you want to start an MES project, please take advantage of our resources that we have made available.
12:36
Shay: So how do we know when an MES solution is a good fit for a customer?
12:40
Keith: Sure, well, there's some questions we look out for. So we wanna understand what's causing all this downtime, maybe they want the OEE Module. We want to schedule our upcoming operations and figure out how we're gonna be spending our upcoming days and weeks. The OEE Module or the Track and Trace Module. We need to capture traceability data. How do we use this raw good, how do I perform a recall? Well, that's again the Track and Trace Module. We need to fetch data from SAP and send this result back up, Business Connector plus Interface for SAP Module. We need to set machine set points and monitor those values for changes, that's the Recipe Module. You can look out for these sorts of questions and they'll tip you off to know whether you should talk MES with a potential customer. We need to perform inspections and collect sample data, that could be an SPC Module question, so just look out for those kind of key questions that guide you towards our MES solutions.
13:35
Lauren: So let's say, we hear those magic words, we know that they are looking for an MES solution. What's the best way to go about presenting an MES solution from Sepasoft?
13:45
Keith: We strongly suggest you contact your Inductive rep or go to sepasoft.com/request-demo and request a demo, you'll get a demonstration from someone like me or my other colleagues in the design consultation department, where we can demonstrate how the MES software works, give examples of implementations, show some screens, some functionality, that's the best way to get folks to understand what's in the offering here. We have case studies on our website and videos where we actually go on customer sites and see their operation. Those are at sepasoft.com/videos and you can also demonstrate the product using our publicly available demo, that's at demo.sepasoft.com.
14:27
Shay: Well, Keith, thanks so much for sitting down with us today to talk about Sepasoft solutions for MES and business connectivity. It's been great and I think we've both learned a lot.
14:35
Lauren: We have.
14:36
Keith: Absolutely, thanks for your time.
Series Order
17
Selling MQTT
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:26
Lauren and Shay sit down with the Co-Inventor of MQTT, and CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper to discuss selling MQTT. Arlen talks about how the addition of MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system and how that solves current system issues and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation. Arlen discusses the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link Solutions, the MQTT modules, the key selling points, the Sparkplug specification, and the guiding principles of utilizing Ignition and MQTT. And we get to see Arlen do a demo!
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00:09
Lauren: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MQTT. I'm Lauren.
00:14
Shay: And I'm Shay. We're sitting down with the co-inventor of MQTT, CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper.
00:21
Lauren: We'll be talking with him about how the addition of the MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system, and how that solves current system issues, and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation.
00:33
Shay: Arlen, thanks for being here today.
00:34
Arlen: Thank you.
00:35
Shay: We're really excited to talk a little bit about the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link. Can you kinda touch on what that relationship looks like?
00:44
Arlen: Literally, it was on a project with Plains Midstream pipeline, they were using MQTT, it was a legacy product, and we just didn't have any tools. We didn't have any way to... It was a black box. And so we went to a lot of IA's competition, and we say, "Hey we've got this idea of something we could do with MQTT." "No, Arlen, thanks, but we've got smart guys, they're gonna come out with our next IoT strategy." Then it was somebody in Calgary that said, "Hey have you ever heard of Inductive Automation?" I said no. And so I called and got a meeting, this was about four years ago, flew out, I met with Travis and the team for a day, I said, "You know, I've got this idea." and they go, "Great, We're open, we've got an open SDK, we're based on Java." And that was what myself and our developers at Cirrus Link knew.
01:43
Arlen: So literally, just from a prototype, I flew home Friday evening, and by Sunday morning we had a prototype working. I demoed it to Steve Hechtman, and he goes, "Oh, this is awesome." So in his keynote he mentioned that, "Oh, you should go see what Arlen's gonna present, this MQTT thing." So that was when I did the first demo of MQTT. We had only Engine, we had one module, MQTT Engine. And we demonstrated discovering 300 PLCs, and I think it was like 30000 tags in less than 10 seconds. And that's kind of where, right after that, during that show, I talked with Steve and Don. And so, Cirrus Link are still a independent... We're a privately owned company, but we are one of only two strategic partners to Inductive Automation. And really our product line are developing best-in-class modules that you can plug into Ignition to give it the MQTT capabilities.
02:45
Shay: So I had never heard that story. That's really awesome. I think it goes to show the power of MQTT. And now your module stack with us has kind of grown. So can you speak to what Cirrus Link modules you have available in Ignition and how they work?
03:01
Arlen: The first module is MQTT Transmission, and it's a MQTT client that knows two things. It knows about the internal structure of an Ignition tag. So if you think about when you go into Designer and you're designing your folder structure and you're bringing tags into Ignition, and then you're giving those tags properties, you're giving them a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, maybe a documentation, well that creates an internal tag in Ignition. Well, MQTT Transmission knows how to take that tag, convert it into Sparkplug B format and publish it using MQTT. Now, the next module that you would wanna look at is the MQTT Distributor Module. So, MQTT Distributor is an Ignition module, but literally, it just sits there to be an MQTT server, so really easy to download it and to install it and manage it.
03:56
Lauren: So when you say server, are you referring to the same thing as an MQTT broker?
04:01
Arlen: Yes, for 25 years, they were called data brokers and when we took MQTT through the OASIS-standards body, so that was IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, to get actual international certification for MQTT, it was funny in the meetings, there was like a half-a-day argument, "Is this an MQTT server? Is it a broker?" So, officially I try to stay with the term MQTT server, but everybody in the world knows it as MQTT broker, so those are interchangeable. And then finally, MQTT Engine is kind of the reverse of Transmission, in that it knows about Sparkplug B messages. And when they arrive, again, we're talking about post and subscribe. So, when they arrive, Engine is able to take that tag, and if it doesn't already exist, inside of the Ignition database, it can actually create tags on the fly. So with Transmission, Engine, and because of Sparkplug, we basically have self-discovery of tags.
05:05
Lauren: So you started to touch on some of the main selling points of this infrastructure, but we thought it would be fun to kind of put you in the hot seat and take you through some of the key selling points. Make sure you've got all your bases covered.
[chuckle]
05:18
Arlen: Okay.
05:18
Lauren: Are you ready?
05:18
Arlen: I'm ready.
05:19
Lauren: Okay. Is it bi-directional?
05:21
Arlen: Yes.
05:22
Shay: Is it Pub/Sub?
05:23
Arlen: Yes.
05:23
Lauren: Is it statefully aware?
05:25
Arlen: Yes.
05:26
Shay: Is it secure?
05:27
Arlen: Definitely.
05:27
Lauren: Is it fast and efficient?
05:29
Arlen: Very.
05:30 Shay: Can you do store-and-forward, with zero data loss?
05:33
Arlen: Yes.
05:33
Lauren: Oh, we're sold.
[laughter]
05:39
Shay: I know a lot of our customers are looking to use Ignition along with MQTT to do their own digital transformation. So what are the three tenets that you often speak to that are kind of guiding principles to help our customers through that process?
05:54
Arlen: The first year that we came out basically it was all about decoupling. My notion is that poll response protocols, or proprietary protocols are the biggest hindrances to digital transformation. So the first tenet is we should look at decoupling wherever possible. What I mean is we should be connecting devices to infrastructure, not to applications with protocols. So if you think today we take a perfectly good PLC and then we basically hard-code it to an application using a protocol. Now, we can expand that, but typically what will happen from an operational standpoint, is nobody will ever change that. It's gonna be the way that it is. The second thing is that we came out the year after, after we got Sparkplug specification out, is being able to provide a single source of truth. If you think about what we do today, everything is a register-based protocol.
06:51
Arlen: So we have a register, it's 40,012, it's got a value of 160. What is that, 160 degrees, 160 gallons? So what do we do? We manually click on that tag and we start to give it properties. We give it a tag name. We give it engineering units. We may have to scale it. We may have to give it engineering ranges, and those are all manually entered. And then if you wanted to use that same 40,012 again, you've gotta do it again and again and again. And editing tags, keeping them up to date, it becomes a pretty much a full-time care and feeding of a SCADA system over the entire life of the project. But providing a single source of truth using MQTT and Sparkplug, we can publish that information one time with all of the properties, and we basically created a SCADA object. So instead of just a register, we're publishing an object that then has state for the rest of its life as far as usefulness.
07:51
Arlen: And then the last thing that really comes out is that we're finding out that digital transformation really is not IT down to OT. We've got to give the operational departments, the SCADA departments, we've gotta give them the tools and the technologies to put together an infrastructure that is digital-transformation ready. So the third tenet is: Be able to show your customer a superior operational system, first and foremost. That empowers them to do what they're good at: That they have the paradigm expertise at the operational level. With Ignition there and with MQTT, now they will be Cloud-ready going forward.
08:35
Lauren: So what does a solution like that actually look like?
08:40
Arlen: The first solution was we were very oil-and-gas centric or very remote SCADA. So we were quite happy if we could get a PLC, and maybe a flow computer publishing information over MQTT very efficiently into Ignition as a SCADA host system, but it's gotten much larger than that. I remember, it was funny, we were happy when we could get 500 tags and then 5000 tags, and now we have customers that have systems, some of the larger ones, 6.5 million tags. So all of these solutions, you ask me, "Arlen, what did you think a typical solution would look like?" but the customers are taking Ignition and all these capabilities and they're doing stuff that we didn't even think about.
09:26
Shay: And that's incredible. So MQTT is really awesome. I think we all, in this room, know the power of MQTT, but where does Sparkplug B come into play? Where does the Sparkplug specification, I should say, come into play?
09:38
Arlen: In working with the customers with Inductive Automation, we found that the industry was very fragmented. So we had a lot of OEMs that were looking at MQTT, we had a lot of service providers looking at MQTT. The only problem was nobody was doing it the same way. And so, for all of the advantages of MQTT, we were losing any sort of interoperability. So here, about three years ago, myself and the development team at Cirrus Link sat down and said, "Look, we've been doing MQTT ever since it was developed. We've got some best practices, things that have worked well." So we sat down and we wrote a specification, we called it Sparkplug, and Sparkplug basically does three things: One, it defines a topic namespace that can be used in MQTT, that makes sense in industrial applications. The second thing that we did was we looked at the best way to represent process variables inside the payload.
10:38
Arlen: Now, up until this point, everybody's been using JSON, all the Cloud providers that use MQTT. And I don't wanna say there's anything wrong with JSON, but we live in a world where, yeah, we may have some customers that have high bandwidth, but we have other customers that are using VSAT, using spread-spectrum radios, using cellular, and my notion is that in our world, bandwidth is neither free nor is it unlimited. So we kind of took a middle-of-the-road approach, and we used a technology called Google Protocol Buffers that let us build a data model that makes sense for process variables. So really very similar to what an Ignition tag looks like, in that it lets you give it a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, description, maybe asset tags. And then we wrap that in this Google Protocol Buffers schema and that defines a payload that really anybody can implement.
11:38
Arlen: So we've got a known topic namespace, we've got a known payload, and then the last thing that you've got to have if you're doing mission-critical, real-time SCADA with MQTT, is you've gotta have state. Now, Andy and I built stateful awareness into MQTT. You know if an end device is connected and you know when it's disconnected. But nobody had defined what topic are you gonna use for your death certificate. So Sparkplug lays out all three things. It lays out a well-known topic namespace, lays out a payload representation that is process-variable centric, and it tells you how to deal with state of your connected devices. And with that, you really have everything that you need and we're hoping that Sparkplug now, it's in the Eclipse Foundation. We're hoping it becomes a very highly adopted standard.
12:29
Lauren: That's really exciting. But we've got all of these basics coming together. Now, where do we actually see these being used? Where can we see this applied?
12:39
Arlen: I would have said it started in what I would call wide area SCADA. So, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric utility, anywhere where you've got long distances and you're using expensive communication networks. And it did prove out. So, some of our first customers were oil and gas, water and wastewater. But I think that we're seeing it expand out. Now, I would say that from the conventional, one of our big use cases now is in solar, monitoring solar farms and things like that, and then going out into electric utilities. And a lot of our customers, even in logistics, in automotive, in pharmaceutical, in manufacturing, are looking at the tools on Ignition and going, "Well, wait a minute, if I could go and connect this to my PLCs on my plant floor and then give them tag names and give them properties and publish that into my operational system on the plant floor and then from there I could go on to all of my cloud service providers." So, we're going back to that actual single source of truth, where we're publishing it from the edge and then all of the data consumers, all the way up and down, get the same single source of truth.
13:54
Shay: This has kind of become a buzzword. In the last five years, we've heard a lot of folks talking about IIoT, about digital transformation, but we're not seeing a lot of folks do this successfully. So, why are people struggling so much with this?
14:09
Arlen: We should enable OT. And a lot of these approaches, again, industry says, there's gonna be OT or IT to OT convergence. But, let's face it, they each have their own specialty too. And so for operational, I don't care which industry you go in, there is tribal knowledge, there's experience, there's certain things that you know. For example, what is a 4-20 milliamp loop and how does a limit switch open on open and a limit switch close on close, open on close, work on a motor operative valve? Those are things that you've got to know in those sectors. So, again, for successful digital transformation, I think we have to attack it at the infrastructure level. One of the notions that I've got is that, currently, most of the existing OT infrastructure is not conducive to digital transformation. So, if we can provide OT with the tooling and the technology to create an infrastructure that's IT-ready to begin with, but then it actually makes a better SCADA system, then I think it's a win-win and you will see successful digital transformation projects. But it's gotta start from OT first.
15:25
Lauren: That's an exciting proposition. Who would you say MQTT is really for?
15:32
Arlen: It's almost just assumed. Anywhere I go, IT are already using it. IT have known what pub/sub is. They've known message oriented middleware, and I would bet that all of the IT departments are already using MQTT. But you ask me who... We invented it for real time SCADA systems. So, you can say what you want about it, but it's got, uniquely, it's got all of the mechanisms built in, like the last will and testament and things like that, continuous session awareness that are uniquely for operational systems.
16:08
Arlen: If they are using, again, wide area SCADA, I think it is absolutely evident that MQTT would give them a faster infrastructure and they would be able to bring back more data. If you think about... We did a survey with Chevron here are several years ago and they were looking at a booster station or a tank farm location. How much data is actually available? If you look at smart transmitters like heart transmitters, if you look at PLCs, if you look at flow computers, gas chromatographs, and you know the figures are anywhere from 80 to 95% of valuable data we're leaving stranded in the field today.
16:53
Arlen: Now, that may be limited. But if an integrator can tell a customer that if they're using MQTT they can save 80 to 95% of their bandwidth that they were using, then the way you can look at that, that's 80 to 95% more stranded information that the integrator could be bringing back for that customer. Now, the other thing. Now, the integrator can show the customers that not only is that coming into your Ignition system for a better OT solution. Oh look, we've got injector modules for AWS and for Amazon and Google Cloud and IBM Watson and SAP Leonardo. So, now they've done more than just do a SCADA system, they've put together an infrastructure for their customer that can scale.
17:39
Lauren: So, I think that says it all. It's the easy option.
17:42
Arlen: It is. It's the easy button.
17:44
Shay: Yeah. [chuckle] So, we've gotten to look at the different modules that are available. We've talked through MQTT and Sparkplug. If I have a customer that's coming to me and asking me, "Shay, how can we apply digital transformation to our systems today or how can we get to industry X.0?" What are your recommendations for that? How do I do that?
18:05
Arlen: Download it. Do it today. Because everything that we've talked about, uniquely, Ignition, I can download a full Ignition Gateway, I can download Ignition Edge and I can run it in trial mode for as long as I want. So, the way I would suggest getting started is you could start download Ignition Edge, put it on a Raspberry Pi, put it on any Linux-based or Windows-based embedded computer, connect it to a PLC. And just see how easy it is to use the tools that Ignition Edge has to bring tags in at the edge and give them context, just give them tag names, engineering units, engineering ranges. Well, now, we've talked about Distributor, that MQTT server/broker, that I can install on my Ignition Gateway running in trial mode, so now my Edge can connect, my Edge MQTT can connect to my Distributor. Now, I'm connected. And now my Engine Module on my Ignition Gateway can subscribe to that data and all of those tags that I've got in Edge are now showing up in my Ignition Gateway.
19:05
Arlen: Now, from there, I can see that I've got a single source of truth, I can see that I've got self-discovery, all the tags are created automatically, but now I wanna take it to the next step. So I could get a Injector Module for AWS or Azure or IBM Watson or Google Cloud Platform and I can see those tags go there at the same way in real time. So when we do demonstrations, we show everything happening at once. So the demo now is 1,800 devices, 150,000 tags with over half updating faster than once a second, and all of that being discovered in less than 10 seconds going into Ignition, into AWS, into Microsoft, into IBM and into Google Cloud Platform.
19:52
Lauren: Well, now you've gotten us all fired up and excited. Can you show us a quick demo?
19:57
Arlen: Sure.
19:57
Lauren: Alright.
20:00
Arlen: Okay, Lauren and Shay. This is a very high-level demonstration of some of the capabilities of the MQTT modules for Ignition. Now, what I'm showing in my browser right now is Ignition Gateway, and probably all of the modules that everybody are already familiar with, but you'll noticed down here at the bottom that we have some of the Cirrus Link modules installed. And one of the ones that we're gonna be looking at here is MQTT Engine, and when we install that we get a tab that let's just go in and look at the configuration for MQTT Engine. Now, notice right now it's disabled, but once we enable it, we're able to define two available MQTT servers that MQTT Engine can connect to.
20:43
Arlen: Now, also as part of the demonstration, we have Ignition Edge running on an embedded computer. Now, that has fewer Ignition modules installed, but it's got the Cirrus Link in MQTT Transmission Module along with the EFM Emerson ROC Driver. So if we take a look at our dashboard, I basically built a topology drawing, if you will, of our infrastructure. So this is our Ignition Gateway connected to both Greengrass Core or Azure Edge from the MQTT Transmission Module. I'm showing the Cloud Injector modules that could go to any of our cloud services. And here, we're showing MQTT Engine Module that's not enabled yet, but will be and connecting to two available MQTT servers. Now, before I enable Engine, note that although we have a tag provider, MQTT Engine, let's go in here and look and notice that we don't have any UDTs, and we don't have any Edge nodes and therefore really no tags. So if we look at our total system tag count, we have 192 tags, but what we show down here, is all of these devices, both real devices, real PLCs, flow computers, smart transmitters are connected into the infrastructure representing over 2,000 devices and also representing over 170,000 tags.
22:16 Arlen: So what we're gonna see is once we plug in Engine, how long it will take to discover all the devices, all of tags and all of their metrics. So I'm going to enable MQTT Engine here, in this small web browser, I've embedded in the designer. Now, note, when I hit the change, we'll just wait and see how long it takes the system to discover what's out there.
[pause]
23:00 Arlen: Boom, a few seconds later, we have discovered over 2,000 devices and 179,000 tags. Now, notice that as Engine was discovering those tags, we were also able to provide those tags in real-time, to services like Greengrass, Azure Edge or any of the cloud services. So let's go over here and see what we discovered. Remember, the Engine folder was empty so we're gonna refresh our Edge nodes, and we can see here that we discovered our embedded computer running Ignition Edge connected to a flow computer out in the field. We'll see here that in our pipeline group, we discovered five groups with 20 stations each. Each one of those having a line with a unit PLC, and we can see here that we didn't know about this entire unit just a few seconds ago. Now we know it's here, and we can look at our case pressure and we can see that it has a zero to 50 kilopascals. So we discovered all of that in just a matter of seconds.
24:09 Arlen: Now, if we go back to our Edge, now this is the Designer for Ignition Edge running at the edge, connected to this FloBoss 107 flow computer. Now, notice that we also defined a UDT to make those process variables from that flow computer easier to work with from the standpoint of a human being, not needing to know all the enumerations and everything for a flow computer. So that we can come back to our Ignition dashboard, go to that same folder structure, the same folder structure got published and we can see here that we also got that UDT published. So literally through the power of Ignition, we could open a new design window, we could have created a template for that UDT. So that once any of these data types, any of these complex data types were discovered, we literally can go into our Meter-Config, Meter Run number 1, drag that UDT, drop it onto the screen, and we basically have created a live configuration screen that could be replicated over and over and over again.
25:27 Arlen: So again, not everything that... Not great detail on everything that we can do with the MQTT modules, but I think a very high-level demonstration and just demonstrating some of the power of what we can do with the MQTT modules.
Lauren: Welcome back to our sales and marketing series. Today's topic is selling MQTT. I'm Lauren.
00:14
Shay: And I'm Shay. We're sitting down with the co-inventor of MQTT, CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions, Arlen Nipper.
00:21
Lauren: We'll be talking with him about how the addition of the MQTT modules creates a more efficient SCADA system, and how that solves current system issues, and creates an infrastructure ready for digital transformation.
00:33
Shay: Arlen, thanks for being here today.
00:34
Arlen: Thank you.
00:35
Shay: We're really excited to talk a little bit about the partnership between Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link. Can you kinda touch on what that relationship looks like?
00:44
Arlen: Literally, it was on a project with Plains Midstream pipeline, they were using MQTT, it was a legacy product, and we just didn't have any tools. We didn't have any way to... It was a black box. And so we went to a lot of IA's competition, and we say, "Hey we've got this idea of something we could do with MQTT." "No, Arlen, thanks, but we've got smart guys, they're gonna come out with our next IoT strategy." Then it was somebody in Calgary that said, "Hey have you ever heard of Inductive Automation?" I said no. And so I called and got a meeting, this was about four years ago, flew out, I met with Travis and the team for a day, I said, "You know, I've got this idea." and they go, "Great, We're open, we've got an open SDK, we're based on Java." And that was what myself and our developers at Cirrus Link knew.
01:43
Arlen: So literally, just from a prototype, I flew home Friday evening, and by Sunday morning we had a prototype working. I demoed it to Steve Hechtman, and he goes, "Oh, this is awesome." So in his keynote he mentioned that, "Oh, you should go see what Arlen's gonna present, this MQTT thing." So that was when I did the first demo of MQTT. We had only Engine, we had one module, MQTT Engine. And we demonstrated discovering 300 PLCs, and I think it was like 30000 tags in less than 10 seconds. And that's kind of where, right after that, during that show, I talked with Steve and Don. And so, Cirrus Link are still a independent... We're a privately owned company, but we are one of only two strategic partners to Inductive Automation. And really our product line are developing best-in-class modules that you can plug into Ignition to give it the MQTT capabilities.
02:45
Shay: So I had never heard that story. That's really awesome. I think it goes to show the power of MQTT. And now your module stack with us has kind of grown. So can you speak to what Cirrus Link modules you have available in Ignition and how they work?
03:01
Arlen: The first module is MQTT Transmission, and it's a MQTT client that knows two things. It knows about the internal structure of an Ignition tag. So if you think about when you go into Designer and you're designing your folder structure and you're bringing tags into Ignition, and then you're giving those tags properties, you're giving them a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, maybe a documentation, well that creates an internal tag in Ignition. Well, MQTT Transmission knows how to take that tag, convert it into Sparkplug B format and publish it using MQTT. Now, the next module that you would wanna look at is the MQTT Distributor Module. So, MQTT Distributor is an Ignition module, but literally, it just sits there to be an MQTT server, so really easy to download it and to install it and manage it.
03:56
Lauren: So when you say server, are you referring to the same thing as an MQTT broker?
04:01
Arlen: Yes, for 25 years, they were called data brokers and when we took MQTT through the OASIS-standards body, so that was IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, to get actual international certification for MQTT, it was funny in the meetings, there was like a half-a-day argument, "Is this an MQTT server? Is it a broker?" So, officially I try to stay with the term MQTT server, but everybody in the world knows it as MQTT broker, so those are interchangeable. And then finally, MQTT Engine is kind of the reverse of Transmission, in that it knows about Sparkplug B messages. And when they arrive, again, we're talking about post and subscribe. So, when they arrive, Engine is able to take that tag, and if it doesn't already exist, inside of the Ignition database, it can actually create tags on the fly. So with Transmission, Engine, and because of Sparkplug, we basically have self-discovery of tags.
05:05
Lauren: So you started to touch on some of the main selling points of this infrastructure, but we thought it would be fun to kind of put you in the hot seat and take you through some of the key selling points. Make sure you've got all your bases covered.
[chuckle]
05:18
Arlen: Okay.
05:18
Lauren: Are you ready?
05:18
Arlen: I'm ready.
05:19
Lauren: Okay. Is it bi-directional?
05:21
Arlen: Yes.
05:22
Shay: Is it Pub/Sub?
05:23
Arlen: Yes.
05:23
Lauren: Is it statefully aware?
05:25
Arlen: Yes.
05:26
Shay: Is it secure?
05:27
Arlen: Definitely.
05:27
Lauren: Is it fast and efficient?
05:29
Arlen: Very.
05:30 Shay: Can you do store-and-forward, with zero data loss?
05:33
Arlen: Yes.
05:33
Lauren: Oh, we're sold.
[laughter]
05:39
Shay: I know a lot of our customers are looking to use Ignition along with MQTT to do their own digital transformation. So what are the three tenets that you often speak to that are kind of guiding principles to help our customers through that process?
05:54
Arlen: The first year that we came out basically it was all about decoupling. My notion is that poll response protocols, or proprietary protocols are the biggest hindrances to digital transformation. So the first tenet is we should look at decoupling wherever possible. What I mean is we should be connecting devices to infrastructure, not to applications with protocols. So if you think today we take a perfectly good PLC and then we basically hard-code it to an application using a protocol. Now, we can expand that, but typically what will happen from an operational standpoint, is nobody will ever change that. It's gonna be the way that it is. The second thing is that we came out the year after, after we got Sparkplug specification out, is being able to provide a single source of truth. If you think about what we do today, everything is a register-based protocol.
06:51
Arlen: So we have a register, it's 40,012, it's got a value of 160. What is that, 160 degrees, 160 gallons? So what do we do? We manually click on that tag and we start to give it properties. We give it a tag name. We give it engineering units. We may have to scale it. We may have to give it engineering ranges, and those are all manually entered. And then if you wanted to use that same 40,012 again, you've gotta do it again and again and again. And editing tags, keeping them up to date, it becomes a pretty much a full-time care and feeding of a SCADA system over the entire life of the project. But providing a single source of truth using MQTT and Sparkplug, we can publish that information one time with all of the properties, and we basically created a SCADA object. So instead of just a register, we're publishing an object that then has state for the rest of its life as far as usefulness.
07:51
Arlen: And then the last thing that really comes out is that we're finding out that digital transformation really is not IT down to OT. We've got to give the operational departments, the SCADA departments, we've gotta give them the tools and the technologies to put together an infrastructure that is digital-transformation ready. So the third tenet is: Be able to show your customer a superior operational system, first and foremost. That empowers them to do what they're good at: That they have the paradigm expertise at the operational level. With Ignition there and with MQTT, now they will be Cloud-ready going forward.
08:35
Lauren: So what does a solution like that actually look like?
08:40
Arlen: The first solution was we were very oil-and-gas centric or very remote SCADA. So we were quite happy if we could get a PLC, and maybe a flow computer publishing information over MQTT very efficiently into Ignition as a SCADA host system, but it's gotten much larger than that. I remember, it was funny, we were happy when we could get 500 tags and then 5000 tags, and now we have customers that have systems, some of the larger ones, 6.5 million tags. So all of these solutions, you ask me, "Arlen, what did you think a typical solution would look like?" but the customers are taking Ignition and all these capabilities and they're doing stuff that we didn't even think about.
09:26
Shay: And that's incredible. So MQTT is really awesome. I think we all, in this room, know the power of MQTT, but where does Sparkplug B come into play? Where does the Sparkplug specification, I should say, come into play?
09:38
Arlen: In working with the customers with Inductive Automation, we found that the industry was very fragmented. So we had a lot of OEMs that were looking at MQTT, we had a lot of service providers looking at MQTT. The only problem was nobody was doing it the same way. And so, for all of the advantages of MQTT, we were losing any sort of interoperability. So here, about three years ago, myself and the development team at Cirrus Link sat down and said, "Look, we've been doing MQTT ever since it was developed. We've got some best practices, things that have worked well." So we sat down and we wrote a specification, we called it Sparkplug, and Sparkplug basically does three things: One, it defines a topic namespace that can be used in MQTT, that makes sense in industrial applications. The second thing that we did was we looked at the best way to represent process variables inside the payload.
10:38
Arlen: Now, up until this point, everybody's been using JSON, all the Cloud providers that use MQTT. And I don't wanna say there's anything wrong with JSON, but we live in a world where, yeah, we may have some customers that have high bandwidth, but we have other customers that are using VSAT, using spread-spectrum radios, using cellular, and my notion is that in our world, bandwidth is neither free nor is it unlimited. So we kind of took a middle-of-the-road approach, and we used a technology called Google Protocol Buffers that let us build a data model that makes sense for process variables. So really very similar to what an Ignition tag looks like, in that it lets you give it a tag name, engineering units, engineering ranges, description, maybe asset tags. And then we wrap that in this Google Protocol Buffers schema and that defines a payload that really anybody can implement.
11:38
Arlen: So we've got a known topic namespace, we've got a known payload, and then the last thing that you've got to have if you're doing mission-critical, real-time SCADA with MQTT, is you've gotta have state. Now, Andy and I built stateful awareness into MQTT. You know if an end device is connected and you know when it's disconnected. But nobody had defined what topic are you gonna use for your death certificate. So Sparkplug lays out all three things. It lays out a well-known topic namespace, lays out a payload representation that is process-variable centric, and it tells you how to deal with state of your connected devices. And with that, you really have everything that you need and we're hoping that Sparkplug now, it's in the Eclipse Foundation. We're hoping it becomes a very highly adopted standard.
12:29
Lauren: That's really exciting. But we've got all of these basics coming together. Now, where do we actually see these being used? Where can we see this applied?
12:39
Arlen: I would have said it started in what I would call wide area SCADA. So, oil and gas, water and wastewater, electric utility, anywhere where you've got long distances and you're using expensive communication networks. And it did prove out. So, some of our first customers were oil and gas, water and wastewater. But I think that we're seeing it expand out. Now, I would say that from the conventional, one of our big use cases now is in solar, monitoring solar farms and things like that, and then going out into electric utilities. And a lot of our customers, even in logistics, in automotive, in pharmaceutical, in manufacturing, are looking at the tools on Ignition and going, "Well, wait a minute, if I could go and connect this to my PLCs on my plant floor and then give them tag names and give them properties and publish that into my operational system on the plant floor and then from there I could go on to all of my cloud service providers." So, we're going back to that actual single source of truth, where we're publishing it from the edge and then all of the data consumers, all the way up and down, get the same single source of truth.
13:54
Shay: This has kind of become a buzzword. In the last five years, we've heard a lot of folks talking about IIoT, about digital transformation, but we're not seeing a lot of folks do this successfully. So, why are people struggling so much with this?
14:09
Arlen: We should enable OT. And a lot of these approaches, again, industry says, there's gonna be OT or IT to OT convergence. But, let's face it, they each have their own specialty too. And so for operational, I don't care which industry you go in, there is tribal knowledge, there's experience, there's certain things that you know. For example, what is a 4-20 milliamp loop and how does a limit switch open on open and a limit switch close on close, open on close, work on a motor operative valve? Those are things that you've got to know in those sectors. So, again, for successful digital transformation, I think we have to attack it at the infrastructure level. One of the notions that I've got is that, currently, most of the existing OT infrastructure is not conducive to digital transformation. So, if we can provide OT with the tooling and the technology to create an infrastructure that's IT-ready to begin with, but then it actually makes a better SCADA system, then I think it's a win-win and you will see successful digital transformation projects. But it's gotta start from OT first.
15:25
Lauren: That's an exciting proposition. Who would you say MQTT is really for?
15:32
Arlen: It's almost just assumed. Anywhere I go, IT are already using it. IT have known what pub/sub is. They've known message oriented middleware, and I would bet that all of the IT departments are already using MQTT. But you ask me who... We invented it for real time SCADA systems. So, you can say what you want about it, but it's got, uniquely, it's got all of the mechanisms built in, like the last will and testament and things like that, continuous session awareness that are uniquely for operational systems.
16:08
Arlen: If they are using, again, wide area SCADA, I think it is absolutely evident that MQTT would give them a faster infrastructure and they would be able to bring back more data. If you think about... We did a survey with Chevron here are several years ago and they were looking at a booster station or a tank farm location. How much data is actually available? If you look at smart transmitters like heart transmitters, if you look at PLCs, if you look at flow computers, gas chromatographs, and you know the figures are anywhere from 80 to 95% of valuable data we're leaving stranded in the field today.
16:53
Arlen: Now, that may be limited. But if an integrator can tell a customer that if they're using MQTT they can save 80 to 95% of their bandwidth that they were using, then the way you can look at that, that's 80 to 95% more stranded information that the integrator could be bringing back for that customer. Now, the other thing. Now, the integrator can show the customers that not only is that coming into your Ignition system for a better OT solution. Oh look, we've got injector modules for AWS and for Amazon and Google Cloud and IBM Watson and SAP Leonardo. So, now they've done more than just do a SCADA system, they've put together an infrastructure for their customer that can scale.
17:39
Lauren: So, I think that says it all. It's the easy option.
17:42
Arlen: It is. It's the easy button.
17:44
Shay: Yeah. [chuckle] So, we've gotten to look at the different modules that are available. We've talked through MQTT and Sparkplug. If I have a customer that's coming to me and asking me, "Shay, how can we apply digital transformation to our systems today or how can we get to industry X.0?" What are your recommendations for that? How do I do that?
18:05
Arlen: Download it. Do it today. Because everything that we've talked about, uniquely, Ignition, I can download a full Ignition Gateway, I can download Ignition Edge and I can run it in trial mode for as long as I want. So, the way I would suggest getting started is you could start download Ignition Edge, put it on a Raspberry Pi, put it on any Linux-based or Windows-based embedded computer, connect it to a PLC. And just see how easy it is to use the tools that Ignition Edge has to bring tags in at the edge and give them context, just give them tag names, engineering units, engineering ranges. Well, now, we've talked about Distributor, that MQTT server/broker, that I can install on my Ignition Gateway running in trial mode, so now my Edge can connect, my Edge MQTT can connect to my Distributor. Now, I'm connected. And now my Engine Module on my Ignition Gateway can subscribe to that data and all of those tags that I've got in Edge are now showing up in my Ignition Gateway.
19:05
Arlen: Now, from there, I can see that I've got a single source of truth, I can see that I've got self-discovery, all the tags are created automatically, but now I wanna take it to the next step. So I could get a Injector Module for AWS or Azure or IBM Watson or Google Cloud Platform and I can see those tags go there at the same way in real time. So when we do demonstrations, we show everything happening at once. So the demo now is 1,800 devices, 150,000 tags with over half updating faster than once a second, and all of that being discovered in less than 10 seconds going into Ignition, into AWS, into Microsoft, into IBM and into Google Cloud Platform.
19:52
Lauren: Well, now you've gotten us all fired up and excited. Can you show us a quick demo?
19:57
Arlen: Sure.
19:57
Lauren: Alright.
20:00
Arlen: Okay, Lauren and Shay. This is a very high-level demonstration of some of the capabilities of the MQTT modules for Ignition. Now, what I'm showing in my browser right now is Ignition Gateway, and probably all of the modules that everybody are already familiar with, but you'll noticed down here at the bottom that we have some of the Cirrus Link modules installed. And one of the ones that we're gonna be looking at here is MQTT Engine, and when we install that we get a tab that let's just go in and look at the configuration for MQTT Engine. Now, notice right now it's disabled, but once we enable it, we're able to define two available MQTT servers that MQTT Engine can connect to.
20:43
Arlen: Now, also as part of the demonstration, we have Ignition Edge running on an embedded computer. Now, that has fewer Ignition modules installed, but it's got the Cirrus Link in MQTT Transmission Module along with the EFM Emerson ROC Driver. So if we take a look at our dashboard, I basically built a topology drawing, if you will, of our infrastructure. So this is our Ignition Gateway connected to both Greengrass Core or Azure Edge from the MQTT Transmission Module. I'm showing the Cloud Injector modules that could go to any of our cloud services. And here, we're showing MQTT Engine Module that's not enabled yet, but will be and connecting to two available MQTT servers. Now, before I enable Engine, note that although we have a tag provider, MQTT Engine, let's go in here and look and notice that we don't have any UDTs, and we don't have any Edge nodes and therefore really no tags. So if we look at our total system tag count, we have 192 tags, but what we show down here, is all of these devices, both real devices, real PLCs, flow computers, smart transmitters are connected into the infrastructure representing over 2,000 devices and also representing over 170,000 tags.
22:16 Arlen: So what we're gonna see is once we plug in Engine, how long it will take to discover all the devices, all of tags and all of their metrics. So I'm going to enable MQTT Engine here, in this small web browser, I've embedded in the designer. Now, note, when I hit the change, we'll just wait and see how long it takes the system to discover what's out there.
[pause]
23:00 Arlen: Boom, a few seconds later, we have discovered over 2,000 devices and 179,000 tags. Now, notice that as Engine was discovering those tags, we were also able to provide those tags in real-time, to services like Greengrass, Azure Edge or any of the cloud services. So let's go over here and see what we discovered. Remember, the Engine folder was empty so we're gonna refresh our Edge nodes, and we can see here that we discovered our embedded computer running Ignition Edge connected to a flow computer out in the field. We'll see here that in our pipeline group, we discovered five groups with 20 stations each. Each one of those having a line with a unit PLC, and we can see here that we didn't know about this entire unit just a few seconds ago. Now we know it's here, and we can look at our case pressure and we can see that it has a zero to 50 kilopascals. So we discovered all of that in just a matter of seconds.
24:09 Arlen: Now, if we go back to our Edge, now this is the Designer for Ignition Edge running at the edge, connected to this FloBoss 107 flow computer. Now, notice that we also defined a UDT to make those process variables from that flow computer easier to work with from the standpoint of a human being, not needing to know all the enumerations and everything for a flow computer. So that we can come back to our Ignition dashboard, go to that same folder structure, the same folder structure got published and we can see here that we also got that UDT published. So literally through the power of Ignition, we could open a new design window, we could have created a template for that UDT. So that once any of these data types, any of these complex data types were discovered, we literally can go into our Meter-Config, Meter Run number 1, drag that UDT, drop it onto the screen, and we basically have created a live configuration screen that could be replicated over and over and over again.
25:27 Arlen: So again, not everything that... Not great detail on everything that we can do with the MQTT modules, but I think a very high-level demonstration and just demonstrating some of the power of what we can do with the MQTT modules.
Series Order
16
Identifying Required Modules
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:20
Lauren and Shay are talking with Training Content Manager Paul Scott about how to identify the correct modules for specific customer needs and leveraging those modules for successful projects. Paul covers the correct time during a sales process to bring up these modules to educate a customer, not overwhelm them. Paul covers the level of knowledge you should have on the modules, what to understand about the customer’s project, and ultimately determining the best module by breaking up the solutions into categories: device connectivity, data logging, visualization, reporting, alarming, and enterprise solutions. Paul gives some examples of what modules might be the best solutions under certain circumstances.
Video Transcription:
00:08
Lauren: Welcome back to our Sales and Marketing Training Videos. I'm Lauren.
00:12
Shay: And I'm Shay. Today, we're talking about identifying the required modules for customer projects.
00:16
Lauren: We're sitting down with Paul Scott to talk about how to leverage the Ignition modules for success. Paul, thanks for being here.
00:23
Paul: Thanks for having me.
00:25
Lauren: So today we're talking about identifying the best modules for your customers and projects. When do you really start talking about that in the sales call process or in the sales process in general?
00:37
Paul: So it's kind of tricky because you don't wanna lead with it. So if you've been following along with this video series, you know that understanding the solution, understanding the end goal, understanding the customer's needs is really the most important part. When you start talking about the modules, they're just naturally more complex, and they start leading towards a very technical area, where each module does what. So I generally find it's not too helpful to lead with them. I mean, you don't have to hide that modules exist. Ignition's the platform, and that's fine, but really maybe a little bit later down in the process, after you've already kind of figured out what the solution should be, or what your potential options are. Another way to think about it is that the modules are really the tools you're gonna use to build a solution, and you don't really need to get too focused on what the tools are initially. And it's something you really kind of examine later once you understand what the problem is. So really to answer your question, I guess, you can lead a little, but I would definitely maybe kinda push it back towards ... maybe the middle or towards the end of that whole discussion or the series of discussions.
01:39
Shay: Definitely. So it sounds like you kind of get a sense of discovery, figure out what problem they're trying to solve, and then once we kind of have an understanding of how Ignition works, then we can look at ‘How do we actually solve that? What tools are we going to use to do that?’ So with that, how do we avoid that complexity in the initial conversation or conversations with customers?
02:00
Paul: Again, try to focus on the solutions or the big picture that you're here kinda heading towards. And again, you really need to understand what the modules do before you can really identify them. So you're gonna need to have at least some solid understanding of at least how they work, you're gonna wanna be familiar enough. Those details about how they work and stuff don't necessarily have to come up in the initial talks, but you really wanna have them in the back of your head, just to be able to piece this whole project, or what that whole project or series of projects will ultimately end up becoming.
02:31
Lauren: So once we've had those initial conversations, how do you determine the best module for someone's needs? Are you looking to solve a specific problem? How do you consider that?
02:40
Paul: Sure, so yeah, it's definitely best to maybe abstract away the individual modules and kinda focus more on general categories of solutions. Common ones would be device connectivity, data logging, visualization, reporting, alarming, and then enterprise solutions.
02:57
Lauren: Quite a few. Well, why don't we start with device connectivity?
03:00
Paul: Sure. Now, fortunately this one is relatively simple. You need to understand basically: What hardware does the customer have? What are they trying to connect to? Also, what do they have currently? A lot of the times, either we're replacing a system, or they're just adding on to an existing system, so they might wanna try to keep all their hardware in a particular family of devices or vendors. So first of all, do they have an OPC server or some sort of MQTT solution already that exists? So if they already have those, and they wanna keep those, we can connect to those easily, and you don't really need any modules except for the MQTT side, you might need some. If you're going to be using our OPC server, then you'll need our drivers, right? So it kind of depends at that point. You may need to look at incorporating our OPC-UA module as well as our device drivers, or maybe you can skip them entirely and just use what's already there. It really kind of depends what the customer's comfortable with using. So you don't necessarily have to throw away everything they have, they might wanna keep it around.
04:03
Shay: For example, if someone has some Allen-Bradley devices that they're wanting to connect up to, they can use our OPC server and then our Allen-Bradley driver suite. And then they're not gonna need any third-party driver or anything like that. Whereas if they were using something like Kepware, then maybe they would wanna take advantage of a third-party drivers suite with other devices.
04:21
Paul: Correct, yeah.
04:23
Shay: So we've connected up to our devices with our drivers, and now we wanna log the data. What options do we have for that?
04:29
Paul: So for data logging, you really do have two main options here, and this is definitely where it gets a bit trickier. So we'll talk about both options, so the Tag Historian Module, this is basically the ‘set it and forget it’ sort of solution. The whole module is really designed to kind of take care of the whole database maintenance aspect of it, which is fantastic, because you can just install the module, you can go to your tags, you can turn on history, and then you can just start trending. And that's really it. You don't really have to do a lot of other things. You can start building, you can start putting charts down on screens, and you're good to go, and really, indefinitely. And again, it'll manage all the tables in the database for you. It's fantastic if you're doing any sort of time-based or time series charting solutions. It also does a lot with the actual charting approach, so the actual retrieval of the data in addition to sort of handling the retrieval portion itself. It does a lot of interpolation of the data.
05:26
Paul: So, if you technically have like millions of records, and you're trying to like push those out to a chart on something, client or something like that elsewhere, you don't have to worry about performance because we're go ahead and we're basically giving you accurate representations of what those datas are without the millions of data points. It does a lot for you so you don't have to. It is definitely the most, again, simplistic approach. Conversely, it's not a very friendly format if you wanna try to modify or make changes later. So what I mean by that is, is that whole module will try to manage the database tables itself. It has very specific expectations on what it wants, and if you're looking to modify those, you can, but then you go in this territory of what I tell most folks that you really need to understand what those tables do, and that's not something we really expect most folks to know. You can learn it's there, you can see what they're doing, but it kinda goes above and beyond what most folks probably want to do at that point. So it's definitely the easier solution and it's great for trending.
06:26
Paul: So to kind of transition, and then talk about SQL Bridge. So this is a little bit more complicated to set up, but when I say complicated, I mean it's in between getting out of the bed in the morning and going to the grocery store to shop. It's not like super complicated, there's just a couple of extra steps you need to do, it's a little more transparent. The transaction groups you create from this module, they can record based on intervals of time, just like the Tag History system can do, but it doesn't do a whole lot of magic in the database. It doesn't have a bunch of tables, it's putting stuff up, it keeps everything centralized in one. It's also nice because it's actually living as a project resource. A lot of folks kinda like that, they like to have a dedicated history and data collection project, which the Tag History system kinda just does silently in the background. So there's something nice about having that kind of visual element, you can kinda monitor and do things with. But where these really shine, these transaction groups, is event-based logging, so Tag History is doing this time-based recording every number of seconds or whatever, generally speaking.
07:31
Paul: But transaction groups can go into event-based logging, so if you have some bit you're monitoring, and every time that goes high, and it goes at high at odd intervals or under certain cases, the transaction groups can natively record that. The Tag Historian system, if you wanted to do that, you need a script. Which is a little bit trickier to do, obviously. So it's kind of nice because it takes care of all that, it has a built-in interface. It's a lot more elegant with the whole representation of what's going on with a recording system, and then you can kinda customize it too. This is also ideal if you did want to have some database interactions. So you're not just like recording stuff. The idea with the transaction groups is, yeah, you can record stuff with them, but then you can also very easily pull them back under, those records, back under certain conditions, and so on. That was a lot. So, how do we boil this down to some key points? Just to kind of like help solidify this.
08:28
Paul: So if you're talking to the customer, and you're talking about these data logging solutions here, if you hear things like "time series," or "trending," "ad hoc charting," Tag Historian is much easier to use, it's definitely more the ideal module to use in those cases. You can use SQL Bridge for it, but there's a lot of extra work you gotta put in, so that's why I prefer that in that case. For SQL Bridge things you wanna listen for, "event-based," "triggers," anything that kind of invokes an idea of a particular action or event occurring, not necessarily on a set schedule, but then you're gonna wanna do something. So if you're recording for particular events, I wouldn't say alarms because that goes into another topic. Also, what's great about the transaction groups, there's a lot of folks that like to create their own like recipe management system for a lot of things. Transaction groups are really easy to do that. That's actually really common use for a lot of our customers.
09:22
Shay: We actually do have two posts on our blog about 12 different ways to use this SQL Bridge Module. So if people wanna check out even more ways they can leverage it, they can look there as well.
09:31
Paul: Absolutely.
09:32
Shay: Yeah. And then moving on, we've got our data, we're logging it, we might wanna build some screens next, what do we have in terms of visualization?
09:40
Paul: So you really have two main options, again. So you have Vision and you have Perspective. Vision has all of these kind of common HMI aspects and features and functionality that you would expect to have. And any sort of visualization product Perspective. It's the newer one. It's got a lot of the same toys. It's definitely a more modern approach, it's using a lot more modern tech, even just looking at it, it's more of a sleeker, web-based kinda look and presentation. And it's a fantastic solution for trying to build any sort of project that requires any sort of responsive design. So you're gonna be looking out on a big screen, you're gonna be looking on your phone or smaller screen, something like that. We also have dedicated apps for Perspective, which a lot of folks have always been kind of clamoring for. Let's talk about the keywords real quick. Because again, there's definitely a lot of overlap. When talking, if you hear things like "desktop" or "HMI," maybe "Vision."
10:38 Paul: HMI's a little vague because, technically, that could still be a Perspective application. A big part of that, is whether or not, at this point in time, if the customer's interested in, or at least okay with having a browser on these workstations. 'Cause right now, the main way on a desktop to view a Perspective session is in the browser. And then of course if you're trying to view something on your phone, on a tablet, something, maybe a little smaller device, Perspective is fantastic. I mean it was really built for that whole solution. Now, something that a lot of folks maybe won't realize right away, is that you can't have both, you really can't. So it's possible to create that sort of desktop solution in Vision, but aside from Vision, you're creating tags, you're creating alarms, you're creating a lot of these other resources in the project that aren't really owned by Vision. Perspective can also use those. So, when you're building for one, technically you already have a good foundation to kinda add something into Perspective.
11:34
Shay: Definitely. And one really awesome feature with Ignition is the ability to do on-screen reporting. And with on-screen reporting, we can be using our awesome charting features, taking advantage of the modules that we spoke about for logging data and history. But what are their options if they would like a PDF report, or something that they're emailing out to someone?
11:56
Paul: So it's funny, you hit a really kind of funny aspect of reporting. 'Cause the term reporting is incredibly overloaded. Lots of things are a report, right? So yeah, even something you made with one of our visualization modules, that could be a report. That could be a real-time report or however you wanna call it. So, yeah, the Reporting Module as you kinda said, it's really ideal if you need to make a document. If your end goal is, "I need a PDF," or something like that, "I need an email," "I need something that doesn't necessarily live in one of your visualization applications," it's something that could be sent out or saved elsewhere entirely. It also has some built-in scheduling capability. Which is great because if you're trying to shoe-horn that functionality into the visualization modules, that gets tricky, you're doing a lot of scripting, it's not always gonna be ideal. Whereas the Reporting has this really nice interface, and it's super simple to kinda get started with. So yeah, definitely again, key terms, things to look for, to kinda decide if you should be using a Reporting Module here, "schedule," "printing," "print the report," "write," something like that, or we're creating a document, PDF, like I said, "email," stuff like that. But if you wanna listen to those terms, that gives you a good idea of maybe Reporting is useful to you.
13:20
Lauren: Awesome. And then moving on to alarming, what do we have to offer?
13:24
Paul: Sure. Now, this one trips up a lot of folks. You gotta remember, alarming is part of the core platform that is Ignition. So if you just wanna alarm some things, you don't need to talk modules. If you're trying to record events that happen to your alarms, we have the alarm journal which is also part of the platform. None of that requires any module at that point. So when we start thinking about modules and identifying modules, we're starting to also discuss alarms notification. That you wanna focus on the Notification. Our alarming solutions modules are all designed to send out some message or something, some signal outside of the products that people can respond to it. So the main modules in this case would be ... they're a little bit easier because they're all based off of different delivery mechanisms. So you can send emails, we can actually call someone, so we can have a robot to do a little text-to-speech thing, tell someone what's going on and actually call them, we can send text messages with the SMS module, and then we have the Twilio module which also sends texts, but with the Twilio service here.
14:31
Paul: So big thing to keep in mind when you're talking to customers about these modules, these also require some sort of delivery mechanism, some hardware like a modem, or an SMTP server, or we need to sign up with Twilio or something, depending on which one of those you're using. So, key terms for these, "alarms," yeah, maybe. Really, again, if you just want something on screen, that's the visualization option. You already have the alarms available, and we have components. So "notifications," you wanna listen for notifications. Oh, maybe we should consider some of these modules. "Acknowledgements," "remote acknowledgements," if someone's trying to do mobile acknowledgement, or "alarm checking," or something like that. Then maybe the Alarm Notification Module would be appropriate.
15:19
Shay: So we've gotten to work with a lot of really large customers, and to help out with these big, really big installations, we have what's called the Enterprise Administration Module. Can you speak a little bit about its capabilities and when we should be offering that to customers?
15:34
Paul: Yeah, so you have multiple Ignition installations. Maybe some of them have similar resources and that's intentional. You have some sort of maybe corporate standard, or your customer has some corporate standard of screens and visualization options that they want, and you're trying to make sure all of those different installations have them. That can be kind of a nightmare. If you're trying to make sure everything's up-to-date, that's a lot of work that you have to put into it. So the Enterprise Administration Module, we just call it EAM. So EAM helps you by getting the gateways to do some of the work for you. So the general idea behind this is that, when you're using EAM, there are two types of gateways. There's a controller, and there's only ever one, and then there's any number of agents. So the controller can basically ask agents to run tasks to do very specific things, which then the agents will do.
16:26
Paul: You can set these on a schedule, you can do it on demand, and those tasks help you in a lot of different cases. You can run upgrades, you can apply licenses, you can share those resources, I was talking about there. You can collect backups, you can even restore an agent. So if you had some hardware failure on a server somewhere, well, the controller keeps a copy of all the configuration items, so once you get a new server in place, you just tell the controller, "Hey, new agent's over here." And you basically go, and activating your backup and running again.
16:54
Lauren: So was that module required if I have multiple gateways within my installation or set up?
17:00
Shay: Well, no, actually. So it's helpful for these maintenance tasks. It's definitely useful there. And when you start using it really depends on how comfortable you are with how many gateways you have at that point in time. You could start using it when you have just two, but maybe two is pretty manageable. So it might make sense for you to maybe look at this a little bit later, maybe five, maybe 10. It depends on how active you're developing on this, how many people are working on it, is it a good communication between folks? 'Cause at some point, you might have some breaking point, where it makes sense to have this module or multiple instances on each gateway. Now, it's important to know that you don't necessarily need this if you're doing any sort of data connectivity or sharing between these different gateways. We have remote tag providers part of the platform. So you don't necessarily need EAM to share data like that. There's a little bit of myth about that that folks run into, and you don't need it. Again, those maintenance tasks, that's what EAM is for.
18:04
Lauren: So when talking to customers, what are the key terms they should look for?
18:07
Paul: So, yeah, key terms, "enterprise," usually comes up a lot when we start heading in the direction of needing or being interested in this module. "Multiple installations," "managing installs," "maintenance," "change of management," actually. If you're interested in having a development server, and then you wanna take the changes on the development server, and then push them over to production, this is also another kind of key term or key scenario you wanna be aware of.
18:34
Shay: And you can do that manually. So you don't necessarily require this module to be moving things from a dev server to a production server?
18:41
Paul: Correct. Yeah, you don't need it, but it does help a lot when you get to the point where when that whole dev server, production server ... When you start having a whole bunch of dev servers, it's nice. But yeah, you definitely don't need it. You can still do that manually.
18:55
Lauren: But when we're having a discussion with a customer, how do we explain how these modules plug into the platform and how they actually work?
19:02
Paul: Sure. So fortunately, that's a really easy topic to discuss. The key or the core modules that most folks are actually interested in, come with the installation of Ignition. So there's not really any extra work you need. In the few rare cases where there are modules that you do need to add in, it's very easy to just add them onto any existing installations. You don't have to restart your entire gateway, or server, or anything like that. They're easy to plug in and start using, and they all work on a trial, as I'm sure we're all familiar with at this point here. So it's really easy to get a new module, start playing around with it, even without a license or anything with it. Put together a proof of concept showing what it does and how that particular module's functionality or core feature set can help us reach the goal of the solution we're trying to reach.
19:50
Lauren: So with this, at what point do we start talking about expansion beyond the modules that they initially requested or were looking for for a part of their first solution that they built with Ignition?
20:00
Paul: So really, it's an ongoing process. As you're talking to your customer, you've better understanding what solutions may work for them, you may find out that different modules may actually be appropriate even if you didn't hear the key terms. So again, that's just continuing to discover and talk to the customer, and understand what it is they're actually trying to do.
20:21
Lauren: So Paul, we went through a lot of different topics today, and I know our integrators and viewers will want to continue their education on this topic. Do we have any resources available?
20:31
Shay: Absolutely. Paired with this video, you'll find a document containing all the terms you can use as a cheat sheet in your conversations with customers.
20:39
Lauren: Awesome.
20:40
Shay: Well, Paul, thanks so much for sitting down with us today. It was great getting to learn so much about the offerings that we have, and when we should be presenting them to customers.
20:48
Paul: My pleasure. It was great to be here.
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14
Live Installation Part 2: The Demo
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:04
Lauren and Shay welcome back Sales Engineering Manager Kent Melville to show us the power of launching the Ignition Designer, creating a new project, and showcasing the functionality of a unified design environment live to a customer during a sales presentation. Kent highlights templates, configuring a Perspective screen, the ease and speed of adding and editing tags, adding components, modifying screens, charting, alarming, the mobile-responsiveness, and provides tips for giving a flawless presentation.
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00:08
Shay: Welcome to the final installment of our series on the Ignition sales presentation. I'm Shay.
00:12
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we will be showing you the power of installing Ignition live.
00:18
Shay: To do that, with us today, is Kent Millville, Sales Engineering Manager. Thanks for being here today, Kent.
00:23
Kent: Thank you, glad to be here. I'm gonna go ahead and click this launch button there to launch the Designer. And while this is launching, I'll talk about, again, this is a unified development environment. If I wanna configure my tags, I do it here. If I wanna configure alarms, I do it here. If I wanna configure Perspective screens, here. Reports, here. Vision screens, here. It's a powerful message that I don't have to install all these different pieces of software just to work on one system. But once again, I'm going to log in with the same credentials that I picked during my commissioning phase, and you can make a note here about security. I often like to say, if you didn't want the same users to be able to access the Designer, you can certainly go and apply those settings inside the Gateway web page.
01:16
Kent: But when this comes up, you can see that there are no projects installed. So we're gonna go ahead and create a new project. And I am just gonna call my project “Demo.” You can name it whatever you want it. You can give it a specific title, like maybe I say, "This is my demo application." And I'm gonna leave User Sources default, but Database, I'm gonna choose my Postgres database we connected to, gonna leave the same default tag provider. I don't have any parent projects to inherit for this, but I do have some templates I can choose from for this project. And so you can just start from scratch and not select a template and then you'll have no screens or anything configured. But I like for a demo to have it quick and easy to show as much as possible. And so choosing a template gives you a jumpstart.
02:06
Kent: And I personally like choosing this Perspective Menu Nav. And so I'm gonna go ahead and select that and click Create New Project. This is creating that project, it's creating the templates, building out those views and then starting up. And so I like to talk about that during this time of like ... Right now that's what it's doing. It's creating a project on a Gateway. Maybe even mention, you can have as many projects on a Gateway as you want, that's another good selling point of Ignition, and in just highlighting that that template is getting built out.
02:39
Kent: Now, this is the design environment and I like to highlight a couple of things about the Designer before I actually start configuring anything. First thing I do is I point them to this project browser in the top left. And this is another time to emphasize a unified design environment, where if I want to configure Perspective screens, there's a Perspective workspace for that. If I wanna configure Vision screens, there's a workspace and so on. And so, it's all here and that's how you navigate between what type of resource you're developing.
03:15
Kent: Underneath the project browser, we have our tag browser. And right now, the only thing in our tags folder is a empty data types folder. So we're gonna wanna add some tags so that when we create a project live for them, we can actually see the live values changing and actually make it a little more dynamic. So what I'm gonna do is, in the icons and my tag browser here, I have a Browse OPC Servers. And I'm gonna click on that, that's gonna browse Ignition’s internal OPC server, gonna go into the devices folder and I can see that MicroLogix simulator that I configured in a Gateway web page. And I can start coming in and browsing that, seeing all the tags that are involved. I can drag folders of tags, individual tags or even entire devices directly into my tags folder, as you see there. And if I open up these folders, you can see that I have all these values live coming in and I can see them changing. And so I always highlight that. I always tell people, "See, I'm getting live values from a PLC right there. How long did that take me? No time at all."
04:22
Kent: And so once you've got the tags, then it's time to start showing them how you visualize those. And so inside my template that I chose, my menu nav template, under Perspective and my views folder I can see that it added some folders with some pages for me. The first one we're gonna go to is, home. And so, to show you how this is all gonna fit together, I like to go ahead and hit the save button before I actually start modifying the screen and I go back to the web browser, to the Gateway web page and click on the home icon again, and show them that right here on the right there's this Perspective session launcher. I can click View Projects and now see my demo application I just created, and say launch project. And from here, I can see what was built out automatically for me, just by choosing the project template. And so, it's got this home screen with just a little text on it. It's got this chart on it with how much there. It's not any live data, just showing a sample chart. And then also showing that you could view alarms, but once again there's no alarms configured in the system yet, so that's just empty. But that gives us plenty to work with. So I jumped back into the Designer and say, “Well, let's add something.”
05:46
Kent: The first thing you'll wanna know about Ignition, make sure you double-click into this container here. It's called deep selection in Ignition. That way, when we start dragging stuff on, it'll actually put it inside that box. That's an important thing not to miss. But now that I'm deep selected into that, I can take my N70 tag and I can drag that in and say I wanna view that as a tank or drag it in and say, "I want to view that as an LED display." Or drag it in and say, "I wanna view that as a simple gauge." All these different components that you can just pull out and are eye candy, essentially, to just (show) people that, "Oh wow, that's so easy to start creating dynamic screens in Ignition." And then I like to say, "But how do I push that out to my server? Do I have to then take it backup and go launch it on my Gateway, whatever?" An answer is, no. I just hit save, go back to my browser here. And you can see, those changes already done. Sometimes, I'll even make them side-by-side, as far as the windows on the computer so that I can show them clicking save and then have it automatically change, just to show them how fast it is. But it's really up to you guys.
06:57
Kent: And I'd like to highlight what we've shown right now is real-time status. The next thing to show is control. And so I'll grab a tag that I know I can write to and I will come in, and rather than choosing one of these built-out components for status, I will actually go and grab a component from our component palette over on the right. And the one that I like to show for control is I will go and grab the multi-state button. And there's a lot of components that you can pick from. If you're having trouble finding it, sometimes in the heat of the moment, I can't see it, I don't know where it is. There's this little search button as well, so I could just type in “multi-state button,” or whatever and find it that way. But all of these components, I like to point out that they all have properties. And those properties could be as simple as changing the liquid color of my tank here. Maybe, I have some green liquid. Don't read into that too much. Don't know what that is. But other components, like this multi-state button, it's gonna have values that we're gonna want to bind our tags to.
08:13 Kent: So like a control value, an indicator value. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my N79 tag, drag it directly onto control value, grab my N79 tag, drag it onto indicator value. In some applications those will be separate tags, but for us we're just gonna use a single tag. If I click on this little binding icon, I can see what the effect was of dragging the tag on. And I can see that, "Oh, so it bound to my N79 tag." That's where it's getting its value. And one thing we're gonna wanna do, since this is for control, I actually wanna write back to it. I go ahead and check the bi-directional box. And so I'll go ahead and say, "Okay now." And hit save once again. And I could now go back to the browser and show them that from there, I can click on these buttons and actually have it change my N79 value, but I like to, at this point, highlight that inside the development environment we have this little play button.
09:08
Kent: You can click the play button and that allows you to interact with what you're building as if it was a launch client. And so now I can go ahead and click on hand there. It wrote a 2 to my tag. I can click on auto. I can see it writes a 1. Go to off. So it writes a 0, I can go back into the client and show that I can click on those as well. It works there, as I've said. But if you wanna get fancy with it you can go above and beyond this. You can look at the components that we have inside Symbol Factory, all these graphics that you can just pull in and use. These are all SVGs. And so sometimes I like to grab a pump or a motor. And I'll show you that real quick. I could pull a motor on screen. Get out of preview mode. That's a little gotcha. Sometimes you'll go into preview mode and then you'll try to click on your resources and they won't click. But yeah, you go ahead and just click the get out of preview mode.
10:11
Shay: So we got to see a lot of stuff very quickly, and we've gotten to see what real-time status and control would look like in a demo, but now can you show us some history?
10:19
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. So back in the Designer here, we've got our tags. And I'm gonna go ahead and just select a bunch of these. I clicked on the top one, I held shift on my keyboard and clicked on the bottom one, just to select a bunch at once. I find it saves me time in my demo just to start storing history on a bunch all at once. But you could also do them individually if you wanted. But now I can just right-click and say, "Edit tag." And I will talk about how every tag has a bunch of properties associated with it. For right now we can go ahead and ignore all those other than at the very end we have this history section. And it's as simple as a little drop-down that I changed from false to true. True, I want history enabled. And it can be confusing, because when you select true, you think you're still scrolled down to the very bottom, but it added a bunch of properties and people will often miss that now I can keep scrolling.
11:16
Kent: And so now you keep scrolling down and we've got all these properties to configure history. And so the first one is the storage provider. Where am I writing this? When we say storage provider, we really mean database. And so in my drop-down I select my Postgres database, and then I could set my sample mode which by default it's only gonna log on change and then it's gonna be checking every second to see if the value changed. I could define a deadband, all these kind of things. And I'll mention those, but I tend to just leave it as the defaults and say, "So there we go." We just connected it, pointed to Postgres and we're good to go. And then you say okay, and you'll see over here in the tag browser we have a value column overseeing the tag values, but there's also this traits column.
12:07 Kent: And it can be hard to see on a small screen, but right there I can now see that all these tags I started storing history on, they all have this little circular trait, which means the history is there. So I like to point that out. But now we need a component to show this history on. And rather than adding it to the same screen, you can show that this is a multi-screen application. A multi-view application or page application. And so we're gonna go ahead and navigate away from home and we're gonna go to charts, here inside the project browser. And this is that blank chart that came by default. And I could start configuring that chart, but I actually like to just delete it to show them there's no smoke and mirrors here. I'm gonna delete that and start from scratch, 'cause once again, this is a live install. High stakes, we got this. But I go ahead and click Perspective Components. I'm gonna go ahead and scroll down until I find my ...
13:06
Kent: It's right up here at the top. Don't scroll down. The time series chart and I drag that in. You'll notice before, it scrolled all the way to the bottom. But in this case, I actually want it to ... It's not doing that by default, so I need to come click on it and go to the Position Properties and set this to Grow. That is gonna make it take up the full screen Just gonna grow to fill whatever space it's in. That is by nature of our Flex container. So you can highlight that if you want. Talk about there's different container types in Ignition. I tend to just glaze over that, because that'll lead you on a whole rabbit hole of trying to explain containers to somebody. And if you're doing a short version of your demo, you only have 10 minutes, that's not gonna happen.
13:53
Kent: But this Chart Container, this time series chart, it has its own properties as well. And so we've got this series here and inside my series, I've got data. That's where I'm gonna wanna bind my tags to. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on My Binding and you can talk about how bindings could be to a tag or to a property of something else on screen. It could be an expression, it could be a query to a database, it could be to an REST API. But it could also just be to your tag history. You don't have to write a SQL query to pull back the history, you just do a binding and configure it here and it's quick and easy. So because I'm doing a live demo, I don't have a bunch of stored buffer data. I only have a couple of minutes. And so I like to change my time range here to just the last minute and I set it to pull every second. So every second it's gonna grab its latest values. And then down here for selecting my tags.
14:53
Kent: I go ahead and click the Browse Tags icon, navigate to some of those tags that I stored history on. And I like to select two or three. However many you want though, you can just grab those and you could write in aliases, but I'm just gonna go ahead, leave it everything default. I say, Okay. So now you can see, I'm getting those values. I can see it updating live. If I go ahead and hit save, then I can jump back into the browser and in the navigation on the side, I can click on Charts and I can see that graph. I can see it updating. I can do a little X-trace over that, all that kinda stuff. So History is really easy to demo and in that same vein, if you want to show alarming really quickly, you do it in almost the exact same way.
15:39
Kent: So I'm gonna go ahead and right-click on my tags again. Go to Edit and instead of working in this history section, right above that we have this alarming section. I'm gonna go ahead and click that little pencil icon, that's the edit icon next to alarms. And with that, it brings me into this whole alarm editor. And I like to talk about, here that you can have as many alarms on a single tag as you want. That's another differentiating factor for Ignition. And I go ahead and hit this little plus to add one. And once again, just like I started storing history on a bunch of tags all at once, I'm storing ... I'm creating an alarm on a bunch of tags, all at once. And so later I could go configure them all individually, but this is gonna create some bulk alarms. And I'm gonna call this my high alarm and I'm gonna set my priority to be high and I could set a label that is ... This is from Site A ... Well, let's say my label is “Fault” and my display path will be “Site A.” And then I could choose any notes in there about it. I could choose whether operators are required to add notes, if they're gonna acknowledge the alarm, all that kinda stuff.
16:52
Kent: But what I really care about here is my alarm mode settings. And so right now it's set to be triggered when it goes equal to a given setpoint, but you could also choose above a setpoint, out of range, on condition. Now, there's a lot of options here. The one I like to demo is above a set point. So I could manually type in a set point here. I could choose like 60. Anytime the value goes about 60, that's an alarm. But I like to highlight that you can also have this be dynamic. You could bind this to another tag, maybe your setpoint tag in the PLC or to an expression checking the time of day, time of year, whatever, adding multiple tags together, aggregating, that kinda stuff. But I just navigate here. Maybe show them that I could select tags or add expressions. But then I go ahead and click No Binding again and say, "But for today's demo, we're just gonna go ahead and say if it goes above 50, that's an alarm."
17:43
Kent: And so with that, I usually ignore all the other settings in here just for the sake of time. Go ahead and say commit and okay. And with that, remember we had the traits column over here by our tags and we could see the history icon, well, now there's an additional trait that shows up and that is our little bell icon for alarms. And what's neat is, because our project already had the alarm status component copied out to it, I don't even have to do any development now for the visualization. I can go ahead, just say “save” and then go into my browser again, and this time navigate to the alarm screen and you can see I have a bunch of alarms that have just populated there. And so it's quick and easy to get this going. And at this point, I like to highlight that Ignition is responsive. The Perspective Module runs native apps on the phones, it can be pulled up in any browser. So you can see here that as I resize my screen, my navigation will hide my alarms. I'll still show up if I wanted to navigate to charts, that kinda stuff. Everything just adjusts for me automatically. So it's a nice thing to show people when you're presenting Perspective.
19:01
Lauren: So okay, you've showed us some really cool stuff in Perspective. But what about a client or customer who's more interested in seeing a Vision project?
19:10
Kent: Yeah. That's a great point. And it actually can be really valuable to show both Perspective and Vision. And so let's go ahead and do that. We've shown them that you can do real-time status and control, alarming and history all really quickly with the Perspective Module. But now what if I wanted it for more of a desktop environment? You can just come back into the Designer like this and go ahead and in your project browser, close up the Perspective workspace and instead click on Vision. And Vision, you can highlight there's some difference in terminology, like instead of creating views you create windows. And I'm gonna create a new window now, go in as deep as you want on that, but I like to keep it pretty surface level. And you can go ahead and give that view a name. I'm gonna call mine home. And you can see I accidentally clicked it twice, I get anxious here. But I got my home view and I like to show them as close as possible how it's almost exactly the same experience for developing for both. So I will just come and take a tag and drag it on and I will show a tank. And then I'll come on and show an LED display, and come on and show maybe a progress bar, something like that.
20:36
Kent: So something that's gonna reflect similarly to what you just did inside the Perspective Module. I also like to show, coming and grabbing a tag for control. And in here it's nice, I can just select it from this display. I've got this multi-state button. And I can still show that it's got a control value and an indicator value. And I can see that the control value is bi-directional. And once again, I can still hit that same play button and interact with it. But you can see here, one difference is, by default, in Vision it's gonna block me from writing to tags inadvertently. And so when this pops up, I use that as an opportunity to say, "Hey, and to make your design environment bi-directional, I can just click on this little button here, which makes it so that full read/write Gateway communication is allowed. And then I can come in and click around and see that it's actually writing to my N79 tag again."
21:37
Kent: And so I'll show that much. Sometimes that's enough, but then you can also come in and say, "I also want to show you that I'm tying into the same history." I'm using the same tag, so I don't need to go and figure my tags again, set them up to store history. I can just pull an easy chart on screen and take some of these tags that I'm storing history on, drag them directly onto my chart. And I'll be able to see that historical trend right there. And if you wanna get really fancy with it, something I like to do is with this easy chart, you can even add in a tag browse tree right next to it. And often, you'll do this on a separate screen just to give yourself a little more real estate to work with. But I am going to go ahead and switch my tree mode to historical, so I just see the historical tags. And what's cool about this is I can now browse my database, see all those tags that I'm storing history on, and I could select one of them from inside the client, and just drag this over.
22:51
Kent: And so, I'll go ahead and hit Save there. If they wanted to actually launch this, then what I'll do is go under tools, Launch Project and say, "I just wanna launch that windowed." And the advantage of launching it this way, from inside the Designer, is normally with Vision, you have to go and install a Vision Client Launcher similar to the Designer launcher, but it can piggyback on the Designer launcher. So if you're inside a design environment, you can just launch it here. It's one less thing to mess with, but it still might be worth mentioning that there's a Vision Client Launcher for launching the application, you can install that.
23:31
Kent: And you guys saw that process when Matt did his demo of walking through the online demo project. But so now I can see that there. This is a launch client, and I can show that I can turn things on and off, I could remove pens if I wanted to, I could add these back in. I've created a small sample demo project there for Vision. Same idea, I could add in the alarm status table, it'll automatically detect the alarms, all that kinda stuff. But yeah, when I have somebody who wants to see the Vision Module as well, then that's the kind of thing I would tag on on the end.
24:09
Lauren: Awesome.
24:09
Kent: So with that, that really represents a demo in Ignition. It shows real-time status and control, it shows history, it shows alarming, and it shows Vision versus Perspective. There's a lot of content there. If you needed it to be longer, at this point, you could jump in and show transaction groups, or maybe you wanted to go in and show the Reporting Module, or you could jump in and create a UDT based on your tags. All of those things would be good additions if you need a longer presentation, but this is usually enough to get people excited.
24:46
Lauren: So, Kent, you made it all look very easy, but how did you get to this point? What are your tips for setting up a really flawless presentation?
24:54
Kent: It really comes down to practice. Practice, practice, practice, because Ignition is easy to use. But if you are stumbling over what to click on and things like that, people are gonna imagine complexity that's not really there. And so do yourself a favor, and what I did, to get to the point I'm at now is I actually just created myself a walk-through guide that literally was like dragging N70 onto screen, select this value, and I gave myself a step-by-step guide of one I'd wanna show. And then I just did that over and over and over. And now I don't need to look at that guide anymore, I can just do it. And so, that's my recommendation is Ignition's easy, make it look easy by practicing. And you can deviate from your plans a little bit, but there's some real value in having some structure to your demo.
25:49
Lauren: Thanks so much for sitting down with us today, Kent, it was a real pleasure to have you show us the ropes.
25:55
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. It was my pleasure as well, so thank you so much.
Shay: Welcome to the final installment of our series on the Ignition sales presentation. I'm Shay.
00:12
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we will be showing you the power of installing Ignition live.
00:18
Shay: To do that, with us today, is Kent Millville, Sales Engineering Manager. Thanks for being here today, Kent.
00:23
Kent: Thank you, glad to be here. I'm gonna go ahead and click this launch button there to launch the Designer. And while this is launching, I'll talk about, again, this is a unified development environment. If I wanna configure my tags, I do it here. If I wanna configure alarms, I do it here. If I wanna configure Perspective screens, here. Reports, here. Vision screens, here. It's a powerful message that I don't have to install all these different pieces of software just to work on one system. But once again, I'm going to log in with the same credentials that I picked during my commissioning phase, and you can make a note here about security. I often like to say, if you didn't want the same users to be able to access the Designer, you can certainly go and apply those settings inside the Gateway web page.
01:16
Kent: But when this comes up, you can see that there are no projects installed. So we're gonna go ahead and create a new project. And I am just gonna call my project “Demo.” You can name it whatever you want it. You can give it a specific title, like maybe I say, "This is my demo application." And I'm gonna leave User Sources default, but Database, I'm gonna choose my Postgres database we connected to, gonna leave the same default tag provider. I don't have any parent projects to inherit for this, but I do have some templates I can choose from for this project. And so you can just start from scratch and not select a template and then you'll have no screens or anything configured. But I like for a demo to have it quick and easy to show as much as possible. And so choosing a template gives you a jumpstart.
02:06
Kent: And I personally like choosing this Perspective Menu Nav. And so I'm gonna go ahead and select that and click Create New Project. This is creating that project, it's creating the templates, building out those views and then starting up. And so I like to talk about that during this time of like ... Right now that's what it's doing. It's creating a project on a Gateway. Maybe even mention, you can have as many projects on a Gateway as you want, that's another good selling point of Ignition, and in just highlighting that that template is getting built out.
02:39
Kent: Now, this is the design environment and I like to highlight a couple of things about the Designer before I actually start configuring anything. First thing I do is I point them to this project browser in the top left. And this is another time to emphasize a unified design environment, where if I want to configure Perspective screens, there's a Perspective workspace for that. If I wanna configure Vision screens, there's a workspace and so on. And so, it's all here and that's how you navigate between what type of resource you're developing.
03:15
Kent: Underneath the project browser, we have our tag browser. And right now, the only thing in our tags folder is a empty data types folder. So we're gonna wanna add some tags so that when we create a project live for them, we can actually see the live values changing and actually make it a little more dynamic. So what I'm gonna do is, in the icons and my tag browser here, I have a Browse OPC Servers. And I'm gonna click on that, that's gonna browse Ignition’s internal OPC server, gonna go into the devices folder and I can see that MicroLogix simulator that I configured in a Gateway web page. And I can start coming in and browsing that, seeing all the tags that are involved. I can drag folders of tags, individual tags or even entire devices directly into my tags folder, as you see there. And if I open up these folders, you can see that I have all these values live coming in and I can see them changing. And so I always highlight that. I always tell people, "See, I'm getting live values from a PLC right there. How long did that take me? No time at all."
04:22
Kent: And so once you've got the tags, then it's time to start showing them how you visualize those. And so inside my template that I chose, my menu nav template, under Perspective and my views folder I can see that it added some folders with some pages for me. The first one we're gonna go to is, home. And so, to show you how this is all gonna fit together, I like to go ahead and hit the save button before I actually start modifying the screen and I go back to the web browser, to the Gateway web page and click on the home icon again, and show them that right here on the right there's this Perspective session launcher. I can click View Projects and now see my demo application I just created, and say launch project. And from here, I can see what was built out automatically for me, just by choosing the project template. And so, it's got this home screen with just a little text on it. It's got this chart on it with how much there. It's not any live data, just showing a sample chart. And then also showing that you could view alarms, but once again there's no alarms configured in the system yet, so that's just empty. But that gives us plenty to work with. So I jumped back into the Designer and say, “Well, let's add something.”
05:46
Kent: The first thing you'll wanna know about Ignition, make sure you double-click into this container here. It's called deep selection in Ignition. That way, when we start dragging stuff on, it'll actually put it inside that box. That's an important thing not to miss. But now that I'm deep selected into that, I can take my N70 tag and I can drag that in and say I wanna view that as a tank or drag it in and say, "I want to view that as an LED display." Or drag it in and say, "I wanna view that as a simple gauge." All these different components that you can just pull out and are eye candy, essentially, to just (show) people that, "Oh wow, that's so easy to start creating dynamic screens in Ignition." And then I like to say, "But how do I push that out to my server? Do I have to then take it backup and go launch it on my Gateway, whatever?" An answer is, no. I just hit save, go back to my browser here. And you can see, those changes already done. Sometimes, I'll even make them side-by-side, as far as the windows on the computer so that I can show them clicking save and then have it automatically change, just to show them how fast it is. But it's really up to you guys.
06:57
Kent: And I'd like to highlight what we've shown right now is real-time status. The next thing to show is control. And so I'll grab a tag that I know I can write to and I will come in, and rather than choosing one of these built-out components for status, I will actually go and grab a component from our component palette over on the right. And the one that I like to show for control is I will go and grab the multi-state button. And there's a lot of components that you can pick from. If you're having trouble finding it, sometimes in the heat of the moment, I can't see it, I don't know where it is. There's this little search button as well, so I could just type in “multi-state button,” or whatever and find it that way. But all of these components, I like to point out that they all have properties. And those properties could be as simple as changing the liquid color of my tank here. Maybe, I have some green liquid. Don't read into that too much. Don't know what that is. But other components, like this multi-state button, it's gonna have values that we're gonna want to bind our tags to.
08:13 Kent: So like a control value, an indicator value. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab my N79 tag, drag it directly onto control value, grab my N79 tag, drag it onto indicator value. In some applications those will be separate tags, but for us we're just gonna use a single tag. If I click on this little binding icon, I can see what the effect was of dragging the tag on. And I can see that, "Oh, so it bound to my N79 tag." That's where it's getting its value. And one thing we're gonna wanna do, since this is for control, I actually wanna write back to it. I go ahead and check the bi-directional box. And so I'll go ahead and say, "Okay now." And hit save once again. And I could now go back to the browser and show them that from there, I can click on these buttons and actually have it change my N79 value, but I like to, at this point, highlight that inside the development environment we have this little play button.
09:08
Kent: You can click the play button and that allows you to interact with what you're building as if it was a launch client. And so now I can go ahead and click on hand there. It wrote a 2 to my tag. I can click on auto. I can see it writes a 1. Go to off. So it writes a 0, I can go back into the client and show that I can click on those as well. It works there, as I've said. But if you wanna get fancy with it you can go above and beyond this. You can look at the components that we have inside Symbol Factory, all these graphics that you can just pull in and use. These are all SVGs. And so sometimes I like to grab a pump or a motor. And I'll show you that real quick. I could pull a motor on screen. Get out of preview mode. That's a little gotcha. Sometimes you'll go into preview mode and then you'll try to click on your resources and they won't click. But yeah, you go ahead and just click the get out of preview mode.
10:11
Shay: So we got to see a lot of stuff very quickly, and we've gotten to see what real-time status and control would look like in a demo, but now can you show us some history?
10:19
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. So back in the Designer here, we've got our tags. And I'm gonna go ahead and just select a bunch of these. I clicked on the top one, I held shift on my keyboard and clicked on the bottom one, just to select a bunch at once. I find it saves me time in my demo just to start storing history on a bunch all at once. But you could also do them individually if you wanted. But now I can just right-click and say, "Edit tag." And I will talk about how every tag has a bunch of properties associated with it. For right now we can go ahead and ignore all those other than at the very end we have this history section. And it's as simple as a little drop-down that I changed from false to true. True, I want history enabled. And it can be confusing, because when you select true, you think you're still scrolled down to the very bottom, but it added a bunch of properties and people will often miss that now I can keep scrolling.
11:16
Kent: And so now you keep scrolling down and we've got all these properties to configure history. And so the first one is the storage provider. Where am I writing this? When we say storage provider, we really mean database. And so in my drop-down I select my Postgres database, and then I could set my sample mode which by default it's only gonna log on change and then it's gonna be checking every second to see if the value changed. I could define a deadband, all these kind of things. And I'll mention those, but I tend to just leave it as the defaults and say, "So there we go." We just connected it, pointed to Postgres and we're good to go. And then you say okay, and you'll see over here in the tag browser we have a value column overseeing the tag values, but there's also this traits column.
12:07 Kent: And it can be hard to see on a small screen, but right there I can now see that all these tags I started storing history on, they all have this little circular trait, which means the history is there. So I like to point that out. But now we need a component to show this history on. And rather than adding it to the same screen, you can show that this is a multi-screen application. A multi-view application or page application. And so we're gonna go ahead and navigate away from home and we're gonna go to charts, here inside the project browser. And this is that blank chart that came by default. And I could start configuring that chart, but I actually like to just delete it to show them there's no smoke and mirrors here. I'm gonna delete that and start from scratch, 'cause once again, this is a live install. High stakes, we got this. But I go ahead and click Perspective Components. I'm gonna go ahead and scroll down until I find my ...
13:06
Kent: It's right up here at the top. Don't scroll down. The time series chart and I drag that in. You'll notice before, it scrolled all the way to the bottom. But in this case, I actually want it to ... It's not doing that by default, so I need to come click on it and go to the Position Properties and set this to Grow. That is gonna make it take up the full screen Just gonna grow to fill whatever space it's in. That is by nature of our Flex container. So you can highlight that if you want. Talk about there's different container types in Ignition. I tend to just glaze over that, because that'll lead you on a whole rabbit hole of trying to explain containers to somebody. And if you're doing a short version of your demo, you only have 10 minutes, that's not gonna happen.
13:53
Kent: But this Chart Container, this time series chart, it has its own properties as well. And so we've got this series here and inside my series, I've got data. That's where I'm gonna wanna bind my tags to. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on My Binding and you can talk about how bindings could be to a tag or to a property of something else on screen. It could be an expression, it could be a query to a database, it could be to an REST API. But it could also just be to your tag history. You don't have to write a SQL query to pull back the history, you just do a binding and configure it here and it's quick and easy. So because I'm doing a live demo, I don't have a bunch of stored buffer data. I only have a couple of minutes. And so I like to change my time range here to just the last minute and I set it to pull every second. So every second it's gonna grab its latest values. And then down here for selecting my tags.
14:53
Kent: I go ahead and click the Browse Tags icon, navigate to some of those tags that I stored history on. And I like to select two or three. However many you want though, you can just grab those and you could write in aliases, but I'm just gonna go ahead, leave it everything default. I say, Okay. So now you can see, I'm getting those values. I can see it updating live. If I go ahead and hit save, then I can jump back into the browser and in the navigation on the side, I can click on Charts and I can see that graph. I can see it updating. I can do a little X-trace over that, all that kinda stuff. So History is really easy to demo and in that same vein, if you want to show alarming really quickly, you do it in almost the exact same way.
15:39
Kent: So I'm gonna go ahead and right-click on my tags again. Go to Edit and instead of working in this history section, right above that we have this alarming section. I'm gonna go ahead and click that little pencil icon, that's the edit icon next to alarms. And with that, it brings me into this whole alarm editor. And I like to talk about, here that you can have as many alarms on a single tag as you want. That's another differentiating factor for Ignition. And I go ahead and hit this little plus to add one. And once again, just like I started storing history on a bunch of tags all at once, I'm storing ... I'm creating an alarm on a bunch of tags, all at once. And so later I could go configure them all individually, but this is gonna create some bulk alarms. And I'm gonna call this my high alarm and I'm gonna set my priority to be high and I could set a label that is ... This is from Site A ... Well, let's say my label is “Fault” and my display path will be “Site A.” And then I could choose any notes in there about it. I could choose whether operators are required to add notes, if they're gonna acknowledge the alarm, all that kinda stuff.
16:52
Kent: But what I really care about here is my alarm mode settings. And so right now it's set to be triggered when it goes equal to a given setpoint, but you could also choose above a setpoint, out of range, on condition. Now, there's a lot of options here. The one I like to demo is above a set point. So I could manually type in a set point here. I could choose like 60. Anytime the value goes about 60, that's an alarm. But I like to highlight that you can also have this be dynamic. You could bind this to another tag, maybe your setpoint tag in the PLC or to an expression checking the time of day, time of year, whatever, adding multiple tags together, aggregating, that kinda stuff. But I just navigate here. Maybe show them that I could select tags or add expressions. But then I go ahead and click No Binding again and say, "But for today's demo, we're just gonna go ahead and say if it goes above 50, that's an alarm."
17:43
Kent: And so with that, I usually ignore all the other settings in here just for the sake of time. Go ahead and say commit and okay. And with that, remember we had the traits column over here by our tags and we could see the history icon, well, now there's an additional trait that shows up and that is our little bell icon for alarms. And what's neat is, because our project already had the alarm status component copied out to it, I don't even have to do any development now for the visualization. I can go ahead, just say “save” and then go into my browser again, and this time navigate to the alarm screen and you can see I have a bunch of alarms that have just populated there. And so it's quick and easy to get this going. And at this point, I like to highlight that Ignition is responsive. The Perspective Module runs native apps on the phones, it can be pulled up in any browser. So you can see here that as I resize my screen, my navigation will hide my alarms. I'll still show up if I wanted to navigate to charts, that kinda stuff. Everything just adjusts for me automatically. So it's a nice thing to show people when you're presenting Perspective.
19:01
Lauren: So okay, you've showed us some really cool stuff in Perspective. But what about a client or customer who's more interested in seeing a Vision project?
19:10
Kent: Yeah. That's a great point. And it actually can be really valuable to show both Perspective and Vision. And so let's go ahead and do that. We've shown them that you can do real-time status and control, alarming and history all really quickly with the Perspective Module. But now what if I wanted it for more of a desktop environment? You can just come back into the Designer like this and go ahead and in your project browser, close up the Perspective workspace and instead click on Vision. And Vision, you can highlight there's some difference in terminology, like instead of creating views you create windows. And I'm gonna create a new window now, go in as deep as you want on that, but I like to keep it pretty surface level. And you can go ahead and give that view a name. I'm gonna call mine home. And you can see I accidentally clicked it twice, I get anxious here. But I got my home view and I like to show them as close as possible how it's almost exactly the same experience for developing for both. So I will just come and take a tag and drag it on and I will show a tank. And then I'll come on and show an LED display, and come on and show maybe a progress bar, something like that.
20:36
Kent: So something that's gonna reflect similarly to what you just did inside the Perspective Module. I also like to show, coming and grabbing a tag for control. And in here it's nice, I can just select it from this display. I've got this multi-state button. And I can still show that it's got a control value and an indicator value. And I can see that the control value is bi-directional. And once again, I can still hit that same play button and interact with it. But you can see here, one difference is, by default, in Vision it's gonna block me from writing to tags inadvertently. And so when this pops up, I use that as an opportunity to say, "Hey, and to make your design environment bi-directional, I can just click on this little button here, which makes it so that full read/write Gateway communication is allowed. And then I can come in and click around and see that it's actually writing to my N79 tag again."
21:37
Kent: And so I'll show that much. Sometimes that's enough, but then you can also come in and say, "I also want to show you that I'm tying into the same history." I'm using the same tag, so I don't need to go and figure my tags again, set them up to store history. I can just pull an easy chart on screen and take some of these tags that I'm storing history on, drag them directly onto my chart. And I'll be able to see that historical trend right there. And if you wanna get really fancy with it, something I like to do is with this easy chart, you can even add in a tag browse tree right next to it. And often, you'll do this on a separate screen just to give yourself a little more real estate to work with. But I am going to go ahead and switch my tree mode to historical, so I just see the historical tags. And what's cool about this is I can now browse my database, see all those tags that I'm storing history on, and I could select one of them from inside the client, and just drag this over.
22:51
Kent: And so, I'll go ahead and hit Save there. If they wanted to actually launch this, then what I'll do is go under tools, Launch Project and say, "I just wanna launch that windowed." And the advantage of launching it this way, from inside the Designer, is normally with Vision, you have to go and install a Vision Client Launcher similar to the Designer launcher, but it can piggyback on the Designer launcher. So if you're inside a design environment, you can just launch it here. It's one less thing to mess with, but it still might be worth mentioning that there's a Vision Client Launcher for launching the application, you can install that.
23:31
Kent: And you guys saw that process when Matt did his demo of walking through the online demo project. But so now I can see that there. This is a launch client, and I can show that I can turn things on and off, I could remove pens if I wanted to, I could add these back in. I've created a small sample demo project there for Vision. Same idea, I could add in the alarm status table, it'll automatically detect the alarms, all that kinda stuff. But yeah, when I have somebody who wants to see the Vision Module as well, then that's the kind of thing I would tag on on the end.
24:09
Lauren: Awesome.
24:09
Kent: So with that, that really represents a demo in Ignition. It shows real-time status and control, it shows history, it shows alarming, and it shows Vision versus Perspective. There's a lot of content there. If you needed it to be longer, at this point, you could jump in and show transaction groups, or maybe you wanted to go in and show the Reporting Module, or you could jump in and create a UDT based on your tags. All of those things would be good additions if you need a longer presentation, but this is usually enough to get people excited.
24:46
Lauren: So, Kent, you made it all look very easy, but how did you get to this point? What are your tips for setting up a really flawless presentation?
24:54
Kent: It really comes down to practice. Practice, practice, practice, because Ignition is easy to use. But if you are stumbling over what to click on and things like that, people are gonna imagine complexity that's not really there. And so do yourself a favor, and what I did, to get to the point I'm at now is I actually just created myself a walk-through guide that literally was like dragging N70 onto screen, select this value, and I gave myself a step-by-step guide of one I'd wanna show. And then I just did that over and over and over. And now I don't need to look at that guide anymore, I can just do it. And so, that's my recommendation is Ignition's easy, make it look easy by practicing. And you can deviate from your plans a little bit, but there's some real value in having some structure to your demo.
25:49
Lauren: Thanks so much for sitting down with us today, Kent, it was a real pleasure to have you show us the ropes.
25:55
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. It was my pleasure as well, so thank you so much.
Series Order
9
Live Installation Part 1
Joanna Cortez
Fri, 05/22/2020 - 11:01
Lauren and Shay welcome Sales Engineering Manager Kent Melville to show us the power of installing Ignition live to a customer during a sales presentation. Kent shares why doing a live install is so valuable, who we do them for, when it’s appropriate, and how long it should typically take. Kent demos database and device connections in the Ignition Gateway while providing best practices for overcoming problems during the install, important points to bring up during the demo, and launching the Ignition Designer.
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Integrator Program Level
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Wistia ID
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Topic
Learning Series
Transcription
00:08
Shay: Welcome to the final installment of our series on the Ignition sales presentation. I'm Shay.
00:13
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we will be showing you the power of installing Ignition live.
00:18
Shay: To do that, with us today is Kent Melville, Sales Engineering Manager. Thanks for being here today, Kent.
00:23
Kent: Thank you, glad to be here.
00:24
Lauren: We have to start by asking you about your musical talents. In particular, recently at ICC 2019, that's our conference, you wowed the audience with your performance as part of Kent and the Ignition 8, the Inductive Automation Band.
00:42
Kent: Yeah, we do rock pretty hard, but yeah, it's funny. So at the end of ICC every year now, we have a final session called the Build-a-Thon, and it's an opportunity for us to let our hair down, so to speak, to have a little fun and interact with the community. And as part of that, the company made maybe their fatal flaw of letting me have free rein to do whatever I wanted. And so, starting in 2018, I did a song on stage. We scaled it up this year, and got a whole band involved, all fueled by members of our company. And when you start something like that, it doesn't just die. No, it lives on.
01:24
Lauren: Is the band still together?
01:26
Kent: The band is still together. We still practice on occasion. And who knows, you may see us again, 2020, come to ICC.
01:34
Lauren: Fame hasn't gone to your heads yet, then.
01:37
Kent: We say no. We'll see what happens. Yeah.
01:40
Lauren: Well, we're looking forward to seeing what's next for the Ignition 8 and you, the frontman.
01:45
Kent: It's Kent and the Ignition 8. Yes, of course.
01:46
Lauren: Yes. It's very important.
01:47
Shay: Kent and the Ignition 8. That's an important point. Yeah.
01:49
Kent: Oh, absolutely.
01:50
Shay: So we're actually here today though to discuss a live install and how that can be a really powerful piece of someone's sales presentation. So Kent, can you speak to a little bit of why doing a live install is so powerful?
02:06
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people, they fear the live install because there's a little bit of risk involved, that you have to actually go install it on some computer, you have to connect up to devices or databases, all these things. There are lots of moving parts, and something can go wrong. And so they might ask, why would I even attempt that if I can just show a demo project? And it may be that that risk isn't worth it sometimes. But, we have found that there's a different target of people that find value in the demo project, versus in a live install.
02:43
Kent: And so some people, all they care about is they want to see what the potential of Ignition is. And that's enough. And so, we show them the demo project, they're like, "Oh my gosh, it can do all these great things. Perfect, I'm sold." But other people say, "Anybody with any platform can build something great," but they wanna know how much complexity, how much time and effort went into actually building that. Because if it takes you weeks, months, years, to build that, it's not a valuable solution. But if you can do that really quickly, and how much training is involved to do that, then they start to see real value. So, the simple answer to your question is, why do it? It's because some people wanna know about the complexity.
03:24
Shay: So what does it say about you when you do a live install?
03:27
Kent: Yeah, great question. And so, when you show a live install, it's not just showing the ease of Ignition, how easy it is, and making it feel real to them. But in addition to showing Ignition's credibility, it shows your credibility, that you're able to take this platform and do something meaningful with it in just a few minutes. And so, they see Ignition as the platform they want, and they see you as the solutions provider that they want.
03:54
Lauren: Well, you've kind of established for us that not every situation is a fresh install, a live install situation. When are the right times to use a live install?
04:05
Kent: Yeah. So you gotta gauge to your audience. It's gonna depend on who's in the room with you, who you're talking to. If you're talking to a technical person, an engineer, they're almost always gonna wanna see a live install, because that's their bread and butter. They're gonna be the ones who build these screens, and so they want that level of depth. But, it gets a little bit harder to gauge when you get to say, like an operator, 'cause some operators, they just wanna know, "What's my day-to-day gonna look like? I just wanna see, what are my screens gonna look like? What am I gonna click on?" that kind of stuff. And so maybe the demo project's enough for them. Other ones will also be involved in the development process, they will wanna know the level of complexity of the thing for things. So, you might show it to them too.
04:52
Kent: And so in those cases, just ask. Say, "Today, I can do X, Y and Z; Z being I could do a live install for you. Would you guys be interested in seeing the development, environment, the install, all that?" And if they say yes, go for it. And the last category of people that really fit in there would be business people or management, because they could go either way, as well. Sometimes, they just wanna say, "Show me what's possible, that's enough." But other times, they want to know when they're assigning people to go to work on this in the future, or they hire you as an integrator or whatever to come in and do a project. They wanna know approximately, how long is that gonna take? How hard is this task that I'm providing? And so, they like seeing a live install so that they've got that to gauge it in the future. And so, it can vary based on who's in the room. But when is the right time? The right time is when you have the right people, and when in doubt, ask.
05:51
Shay: If this is a part of an entire sales presentation, then how long should someone be spending going through that live installation process?
06:00
Kent: Yeah, a fair question. Once again, it depends. And so, traditionally, for me, if I'm going through a sales presentation and I've got an hour, then I try to spend 30 minutes on going through just the sales presentation, things like what you talked about with Vanessa. And then I'll spend just five to 10 minutes going through the demo projects, like what you did do with Matt. And then I spend the remainder of the time, so maybe 20 minutes, on a live fresh install. But as I'm watching the clock, I know it's gonna take me at least 10 minutes to show something of value from a fresh install. And so if it gets past the 10-minute mark, and I've only got nine minutes left, I don't even try, I don't even go into it.
06:45
Kent: But I have a short version that I do in 10 minutes, and then at the same time I have a long version that could take 30 minutes or an hour. And so I just have all these supplemental pieces that I know I could show. Maybe I'm gonna throw in UDTs, maybe I'm gonna throw in transaction groups, something like that. How long should you spend? Well, gauge your audience, if it's gonna be part of a big presentation, 20 minutes or so. But if it's gonna be in a subsequent call, where you're gonna have more engineers on the line, you need to be prepared to do a 30-60 minute presentation.
07:17
Lauren: So, what functionalities overall do you usually show during the live install?
07:22
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question, and I can probably answer that best by just showing you.
07:27
Lauren: Well, awesome.
07:27
Kent: Let's actually jump into it.
07:28
Lauren: Let's do it.
07:29
Kent: So here is a fresh laptop. All I have done so far is I went to the Downloads page of our website, and I downloaded Ignition, and so you can see that shortcut here. That's 8.0.6, which is our latest version as of us filming this video. The only other thing I've done to prep this is I've installed Postgres as a database, and so I'll be connecting it to that later. What we're gonna do now, is I'm gonna go ahead and just run this installer, and you could, if you're doing a demo, actually download it from our website live on the fly. But that's one more variable I don't like to deal with, 'cause the network connectivity might be slow or something like that, so I like to have it pre-downloaded. When you're going to the downloads page, you'll see that you can download the latest version or you could grab a nightly or an RC version or something like that. I like to stay on the official releases, just once again to eliminate variables, a little less risk.
08:26
Shay: Good tip.
08:27
Kent: So as you can see I've clicked on it, it brought up this window. As you're going through this, I just leave everything as the defaults except on this page where I have the installation mode. I'm gonna end up choosing this typical install, but I actually select custom first and go to next, just so I can show that there are all these modules that are being installed with this. So that they don't have to think, "Oh, what if I wanna install this module or this module? " It's all in one installer, it all happens all at once, and it's part of the magic of Ignition. So I just show that, but then I click back, click typical, and go ahead and move on. And so with that, you can see now, it's installing and it goes pretty quick, this is only a couple of minutes. But just be aware that in a demo that can feel like an eternity.
09:16
Lauren: So what do you usually do to fill the time?
09:18
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question. I've done all kinds of things to try to fill this space. Sometimes I'll talk about how you can install Ignition on any operating system. It's cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, or Mac. Sometimes I'll talk about, right here, once again, that this is installing the whole Ignition application. This is as if I wasn't installing it on a server, and as you can see, it actually finished installing now, and I'm gonna go ahead and let that start up. But as that's going ... But you can see that it has brought up what we call our commissioning phase. So once it's installed the Ignition, it lets you go through and do some of the initial configuration directly in a browser. And so, to show that, I go ahead and agree to the terms and conditions. I'm gonna create a default username and password for Ignition. You'll notice that we have a password strength tester, there for you. Please pick something more secure than what I just did.
10:22
Kent: But after that, you go ahead and choose your ports. And so, I'm just gonna leave the default ports. But you could set it to be whatever you want, make sure it doesn't conflict with any other applications running on your system. And with that, we'll go ahead and start the Gateway. So this is taking ... It's building a Windows service because we're installing it on a Windows and then it will start that service now.
10:45
Shay: And so far, this has gone really smoothly, but I've done quite a few of these presentations. So, what is your advice if something doesn't go as well?
10:53
Kent: Yeah, sometimes things go wrong. Maybe there's a conflicting port or you have other things running on your computer, your memory goes high or it already had Ignition installed, there's some weird cache thing, all that kind of stuff can happen. It happens with any software, and you never wanna make Ignition look bad if it's what you're trying to highlight. And so, sometimes you say, "Apparently, the demo gods aren't with me today, and so we're gonna go back to the demo project." You can always break, but the big thing is not just to start going, "Oh, Ignition must be broken, and... " Causing them to start doubting the software. But with that, Ignition is now fully installed. And it's worth noting here that I could go in and click one of those links to jump into some configuration, but I like clicking, just open the Gateway, the whole Gateway, so they can see this screen. This is our Gateway webpage, and it is kind of the homepage of Ignition, so to speak. And the first thing that I highlight on this page is right on the top, it says trial mode and it has this count down timer. And I even take my mouse just like I just did and I highlight that timer to show them Ignition, just when you first install it, is in a two-hour trial mode.
12:09
Kent: And I talk about how that trial is fully featured, that it still can let you build all your screens, you can still store history to a database, you can still do everything that you would normally do in standard Ignition. It's just that when that two hours expires, it'll stop writing to the database and your clients will stop running. But you'll get this little button over here, next to activate Ignition. And if you click on that, it'll give you another two hours and then you can reset that as many times as you want, infinitely reset-able, and you can keep evaluating Ignition for as long as you want.
12:45
Kent: So, that's a nice feature inside Ignition, and so that's why I like to highlight that first. The next thing I highlight is the, over on the side, there are three icons. There's Home, Status, and Config. And I tell them that let's go ahead and go to Config, 'cause we're configuring a new Gateway and it'll prompt you to log in. And I'm gonna go ahead and put in my same user name and password that I put in when I was doing my commissioning phase of the install. And we're now into that configuration screen. And this is outlined with, you can choose these little short cuts in the middle, but I like to choose just everything from my side navigation there on the left. And there's lots of things that you can configure inside the Gateway. Things like adding additional modules, if you hadn't checked one of those boxes during the install and you want to add a module now, you can click in there and do that. You can set up redundancy. You could manage users and roles. You could set up alarm journals or alarm history there.
13:46
Kent: But what I wanna show you today was first connecting up to my Postgres database that I told you I had pre-installed on this server. And so, I went ahead and went to databases, said I'd add a new database connection. And you can see we have some built-in drivers added to Ignition, and one of those is Postgres. So I'm gonna go ahead and connect to that.
14:10
Lauren: Would you always use a Postgres database, when you're doing a demo?
14:14
Kent: That's a great question. I like Postgres, 'cause it's pretty lightweight and it's open source. I don't have to pay for it on my demo machine. And also the editor for it runs directly in the browser, so that's really convenient, as well. But you're certainly not limited to just using Postgres. You could use Microsoft SQL Server. That one's a really common one that your customers would be using, and so that can be a great choice. Another good choice is MySQL, and that's what we used to always demo with, but we actually no longer distribute the MySQL driver file as part of Ignition, and so there's a file you have to go download from their website and add it. And that's just an extra step I don't like to show during the demo. And so because of that, that's why I switched from using MySQL to Postgres just for demo purposes. But Ignition can talk to all kinds of SQL databases. So it's really up to you.
15:07
Kent: I'm gonna go ahead and give my database connection a name there. I'm just gonna call it Postgres. And it is connecting up to a database. When you install Postgres it has a built-in database just called Postgres. So, that's what I'm connecting to. You could certainly go create another database called Ignition or demo or whatever you wanted, but mine is just Postgres. And you go ahead and give it a username and password. And so, I'll go ahead and put these in there as well. And then you can leave all these other settings just default. You don't need to add extra connection properties or failover data sources or anything like that. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say, "Create new database connection." And with that, it says, "Status valid." If that doesn't say valid, if it says faulted, then you should go back in to edit, and the first thing I always try is go in and type in my password again. And nine times out of 10, it's 'cause I fat-fingered it, and it was my fault.
16:06
Kent: If that does continue to say faulted, then maybe there's something wrong with your database or whatever, and you can decide at this point if you wanna take the time to try to troubleshoot that, or if you just say, "You know what if I had a valid database connection, I could store history, but there's plenty I can show you without a database," and you could just keep moving on.
16:23
Kent: So with that, we've got a database connection now. And I am going to just do one other thing here in the Gateway web page, which is connect to some devices. And so, come in here under OPC UA, we have device connections, and I'm gonna go ahead and say, "Create new device." And you can see we have a bunch of different drivers to talk to all different kinds of PLCs out there. And I'm gonna go ahead and connect up to an Allen Bradley micrologix. It can be valuable for you to take a PLC with you to go do a demo, so that you can connect to it live, and just do a little ethernet connection to it. And that can be really powerful for people. And so with this, I'm just gonna call my device name MLX. And for the host name, I'm just putting in the IP address to this device, and I'll go ahead and leave everything else default. Say create and you can see that it shows disconnected and now connected. And so, I'm connected up to a live PLC. But in the event that you can't take a PLC, or you can't successfully connect to a PLC, we do have some simulators built in down here that you can take advantage of.
17:35
Kent: And so, I personally like this dairy demo simulator, since most of my customers are not necessarily dairy specific. When I type in my name, I just call it SIM, but it's gonna give me some named tags, which will contrast my MicroLogix, which is all address-based. So now we've got two devices connected and we've connected to a database, and so with that, that's everything I need to do for the demo inside the Gateway webpage. And so I'm gonna come back up to the Home icon, and from here, I start talking about this Designer launcher. And so I can go ahead and click download there and this Designer launcher will install right here on my computer. And from there, I will be able to launch the design environment to start developing my screens, my tags, all that kind of stuff.
18:29
Lauren: Can you only install the launcher on the server where you've installed Ignition?
18:34
Kent: No, that's a great question. You can actually install it anywhere on the network and so that you can be having multiple people all on their own computers, launching the Designer, and doing concurrent development on your Ignition system. So, it's pretty powerful. But I'm gonna come in and tell it to create, and I'm even gonna let it create a little desktop shortcut for me. And while this is installing, one thing I like to talk about is ... And you don't get to talk about it much 'cause as you can see it's done there, but with the Designer launcher, I like to talk about how, there's so many things to talk about.
19:09
Kent: It already showed up that my Gateway was found, my local Gateway. And that comes up here. You can see that IT named this loaner laptop, so you can see it right there. They loaned this to me for this demo. How nice of them. But I like to talk about how from here this same Designer launcher can be connected up to multiple Ignition Gateways. So you could have one development machine or one demo machine, and you could show, I'm gonna connect to my local install, plus my cloud server, and in somebody else’s site or whatever. So, one Designer Launcher for many Gateways.
19:39
Lauren: Thanks so much for sitting down with us today, Ken. It was a real pleasure to have you show us the ropes.
19:45
Kent: Yeah, absolutely, it was my pleasure as well, so thank you so much.
Shay: Welcome to the final installment of our series on the Ignition sales presentation. I'm Shay.
00:13
Lauren: And I'm Lauren. Today, we will be showing you the power of installing Ignition live.
00:18
Shay: To do that, with us today is Kent Melville, Sales Engineering Manager. Thanks for being here today, Kent.
00:23
Kent: Thank you, glad to be here.
00:24
Lauren: We have to start by asking you about your musical talents. In particular, recently at ICC 2019, that's our conference, you wowed the audience with your performance as part of Kent and the Ignition 8, the Inductive Automation Band.
00:42
Kent: Yeah, we do rock pretty hard, but yeah, it's funny. So at the end of ICC every year now, we have a final session called the Build-a-Thon, and it's an opportunity for us to let our hair down, so to speak, to have a little fun and interact with the community. And as part of that, the company made maybe their fatal flaw of letting me have free rein to do whatever I wanted. And so, starting in 2018, I did a song on stage. We scaled it up this year, and got a whole band involved, all fueled by members of our company. And when you start something like that, it doesn't just die. No, it lives on.
01:24
Lauren: Is the band still together?
01:26
Kent: The band is still together. We still practice on occasion. And who knows, you may see us again, 2020, come to ICC.
01:34
Lauren: Fame hasn't gone to your heads yet, then.
01:37
Kent: We say no. We'll see what happens. Yeah.
01:40
Lauren: Well, we're looking forward to seeing what's next for the Ignition 8 and you, the frontman.
01:45
Kent: It's Kent and the Ignition 8. Yes, of course.
01:46
Lauren: Yes. It's very important.
01:47
Shay: Kent and the Ignition 8. That's an important point. Yeah.
01:49
Kent: Oh, absolutely.
01:50
Shay: So we're actually here today though to discuss a live install and how that can be a really powerful piece of someone's sales presentation. So Kent, can you speak to a little bit of why doing a live install is so powerful?
02:06
Kent: Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of people, they fear the live install because there's a little bit of risk involved, that you have to actually go install it on some computer, you have to connect up to devices or databases, all these things. There are lots of moving parts, and something can go wrong. And so they might ask, why would I even attempt that if I can just show a demo project? And it may be that that risk isn't worth it sometimes. But, we have found that there's a different target of people that find value in the demo project, versus in a live install.
02:43
Kent: And so some people, all they care about is they want to see what the potential of Ignition is. And that's enough. And so, we show them the demo project, they're like, "Oh my gosh, it can do all these great things. Perfect, I'm sold." But other people say, "Anybody with any platform can build something great," but they wanna know how much complexity, how much time and effort went into actually building that. Because if it takes you weeks, months, years, to build that, it's not a valuable solution. But if you can do that really quickly, and how much training is involved to do that, then they start to see real value. So, the simple answer to your question is, why do it? It's because some people wanna know about the complexity.
03:24
Shay: So what does it say about you when you do a live install?
03:27
Kent: Yeah, great question. And so, when you show a live install, it's not just showing the ease of Ignition, how easy it is, and making it feel real to them. But in addition to showing Ignition's credibility, it shows your credibility, that you're able to take this platform and do something meaningful with it in just a few minutes. And so, they see Ignition as the platform they want, and they see you as the solutions provider that they want.
03:54
Lauren: Well, you've kind of established for us that not every situation is a fresh install, a live install situation. When are the right times to use a live install?
04:05
Kent: Yeah. So you gotta gauge to your audience. It's gonna depend on who's in the room with you, who you're talking to. If you're talking to a technical person, an engineer, they're almost always gonna wanna see a live install, because that's their bread and butter. They're gonna be the ones who build these screens, and so they want that level of depth. But, it gets a little bit harder to gauge when you get to say, like an operator, 'cause some operators, they just wanna know, "What's my day-to-day gonna look like? I just wanna see, what are my screens gonna look like? What am I gonna click on?" that kind of stuff. And so maybe the demo project's enough for them. Other ones will also be involved in the development process, they will wanna know the level of complexity of the thing for things. So, you might show it to them too.
04:52
Kent: And so in those cases, just ask. Say, "Today, I can do X, Y and Z; Z being I could do a live install for you. Would you guys be interested in seeing the development, environment, the install, all that?" And if they say yes, go for it. And the last category of people that really fit in there would be business people or management, because they could go either way, as well. Sometimes, they just wanna say, "Show me what's possible, that's enough." But other times, they want to know when they're assigning people to go to work on this in the future, or they hire you as an integrator or whatever to come in and do a project. They wanna know approximately, how long is that gonna take? How hard is this task that I'm providing? And so, they like seeing a live install so that they've got that to gauge it in the future. And so, it can vary based on who's in the room. But when is the right time? The right time is when you have the right people, and when in doubt, ask.
05:51
Shay: If this is a part of an entire sales presentation, then how long should someone be spending going through that live installation process?
06:00
Kent: Yeah, a fair question. Once again, it depends. And so, traditionally, for me, if I'm going through a sales presentation and I've got an hour, then I try to spend 30 minutes on going through just the sales presentation, things like what you talked about with Vanessa. And then I'll spend just five to 10 minutes going through the demo projects, like what you did do with Matt. And then I spend the remainder of the time, so maybe 20 minutes, on a live fresh install. But as I'm watching the clock, I know it's gonna take me at least 10 minutes to show something of value from a fresh install. And so if it gets past the 10-minute mark, and I've only got nine minutes left, I don't even try, I don't even go into it.
06:45
Kent: But I have a short version that I do in 10 minutes, and then at the same time I have a long version that could take 30 minutes or an hour. And so I just have all these supplemental pieces that I know I could show. Maybe I'm gonna throw in UDTs, maybe I'm gonna throw in transaction groups, something like that. How long should you spend? Well, gauge your audience, if it's gonna be part of a big presentation, 20 minutes or so. But if it's gonna be in a subsequent call, where you're gonna have more engineers on the line, you need to be prepared to do a 30-60 minute presentation.
07:17
Lauren: So, what functionalities overall do you usually show during the live install?
07:22
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question, and I can probably answer that best by just showing you.
07:27
Lauren: Well, awesome.
07:27
Kent: Let's actually jump into it.
07:28
Lauren: Let's do it.
07:29
Kent: So here is a fresh laptop. All I have done so far is I went to the Downloads page of our website, and I downloaded Ignition, and so you can see that shortcut here. That's 8.0.6, which is our latest version as of us filming this video. The only other thing I've done to prep this is I've installed Postgres as a database, and so I'll be connecting it to that later. What we're gonna do now, is I'm gonna go ahead and just run this installer, and you could, if you're doing a demo, actually download it from our website live on the fly. But that's one more variable I don't like to deal with, 'cause the network connectivity might be slow or something like that, so I like to have it pre-downloaded. When you're going to the downloads page, you'll see that you can download the latest version or you could grab a nightly or an RC version or something like that. I like to stay on the official releases, just once again to eliminate variables, a little less risk.
08:26
Shay: Good tip.
08:27
Kent: So as you can see I've clicked on it, it brought up this window. As you're going through this, I just leave everything as the defaults except on this page where I have the installation mode. I'm gonna end up choosing this typical install, but I actually select custom first and go to next, just so I can show that there are all these modules that are being installed with this. So that they don't have to think, "Oh, what if I wanna install this module or this module? " It's all in one installer, it all happens all at once, and it's part of the magic of Ignition. So I just show that, but then I click back, click typical, and go ahead and move on. And so with that, you can see now, it's installing and it goes pretty quick, this is only a couple of minutes. But just be aware that in a demo that can feel like an eternity.
09:16
Lauren: So what do you usually do to fill the time?
09:18
Kent: Yeah, that's a great question. I've done all kinds of things to try to fill this space. Sometimes I'll talk about how you can install Ignition on any operating system. It's cross-platform, so Windows, Linux, or Mac. Sometimes I'll talk about, right here, once again, that this is installing the whole Ignition application. This is as if I wasn't installing it on a server, and as you can see, it actually finished installing now, and I'm gonna go ahead and let that start up. But as that's going ... But you can see that it has brought up what we call our commissioning phase. So once it's installed the Ignition, it lets you go through and do some of the initial configuration directly in a browser. And so, to show that, I go ahead and agree to the terms and conditions. I'm gonna create a default username and password for Ignition. You'll notice that we have a password strength tester, there for you. Please pick something more secure than what I just did.
10:22
Kent: But after that, you go ahead and choose your ports. And so, I'm just gonna leave the default ports. But you could set it to be whatever you want, make sure it doesn't conflict with any other applications running on your system. And with that, we'll go ahead and start the Gateway. So this is taking ... It's building a Windows service because we're installing it on a Windows and then it will start that service now.
10:45
Shay: And so far, this has gone really smoothly, but I've done quite a few of these presentations. So, what is your advice if something doesn't go as well?
10:53
Kent: Yeah, sometimes things go wrong. Maybe there's a conflicting port or you have other things running on your computer, your memory goes high or it already had Ignition installed, there's some weird cache thing, all that kind of stuff can happen. It happens with any software, and you never wanna make Ignition look bad if it's what you're trying to highlight. And so, sometimes you say, "Apparently, the demo gods aren't with me today, and so we're gonna go back to the demo project." You can always break, but the big thing is not just to start going, "Oh, Ignition must be broken, and... " Causing them to start doubting the software. But with that, Ignition is now fully installed. And it's worth noting here that I could go in and click one of those links to jump into some configuration, but I like clicking, just open the Gateway, the whole Gateway, so they can see this screen. This is our Gateway webpage, and it is kind of the homepage of Ignition, so to speak. And the first thing that I highlight on this page is right on the top, it says trial mode and it has this count down timer. And I even take my mouse just like I just did and I highlight that timer to show them Ignition, just when you first install it, is in a two-hour trial mode.
12:09
Kent: And I talk about how that trial is fully featured, that it still can let you build all your screens, you can still store history to a database, you can still do everything that you would normally do in standard Ignition. It's just that when that two hours expires, it'll stop writing to the database and your clients will stop running. But you'll get this little button over here, next to activate Ignition. And if you click on that, it'll give you another two hours and then you can reset that as many times as you want, infinitely reset-able, and you can keep evaluating Ignition for as long as you want.
12:45
Kent: So, that's a nice feature inside Ignition, and so that's why I like to highlight that first. The next thing I highlight is the, over on the side, there are three icons. There's Home, Status, and Config. And I tell them that let's go ahead and go to Config, 'cause we're configuring a new Gateway and it'll prompt you to log in. And I'm gonna go ahead and put in my same user name and password that I put in when I was doing my commissioning phase of the install. And we're now into that configuration screen. And this is outlined with, you can choose these little short cuts in the middle, but I like to choose just everything from my side navigation there on the left. And there's lots of things that you can configure inside the Gateway. Things like adding additional modules, if you hadn't checked one of those boxes during the install and you want to add a module now, you can click in there and do that. You can set up redundancy. You could manage users and roles. You could set up alarm journals or alarm history there.
13:46
Kent: But what I wanna show you today was first connecting up to my Postgres database that I told you I had pre-installed on this server. And so, I went ahead and went to databases, said I'd add a new database connection. And you can see we have some built-in drivers added to Ignition, and one of those is Postgres. So I'm gonna go ahead and connect to that.
14:10
Lauren: Would you always use a Postgres database, when you're doing a demo?
14:14
Kent: That's a great question. I like Postgres, 'cause it's pretty lightweight and it's open source. I don't have to pay for it on my demo machine. And also the editor for it runs directly in the browser, so that's really convenient, as well. But you're certainly not limited to just using Postgres. You could use Microsoft SQL Server. That one's a really common one that your customers would be using, and so that can be a great choice. Another good choice is MySQL, and that's what we used to always demo with, but we actually no longer distribute the MySQL driver file as part of Ignition, and so there's a file you have to go download from their website and add it. And that's just an extra step I don't like to show during the demo. And so because of that, that's why I switched from using MySQL to Postgres just for demo purposes. But Ignition can talk to all kinds of SQL databases. So it's really up to you.
15:07
Kent: I'm gonna go ahead and give my database connection a name there. I'm just gonna call it Postgres. And it is connecting up to a database. When you install Postgres it has a built-in database just called Postgres. So, that's what I'm connecting to. You could certainly go create another database called Ignition or demo or whatever you wanted, but mine is just Postgres. And you go ahead and give it a username and password. And so, I'll go ahead and put these in there as well. And then you can leave all these other settings just default. You don't need to add extra connection properties or failover data sources or anything like that. So I'm just gonna go ahead and say, "Create new database connection." And with that, it says, "Status valid." If that doesn't say valid, if it says faulted, then you should go back in to edit, and the first thing I always try is go in and type in my password again. And nine times out of 10, it's 'cause I fat-fingered it, and it was my fault.
16:06
Kent: If that does continue to say faulted, then maybe there's something wrong with your database or whatever, and you can decide at this point if you wanna take the time to try to troubleshoot that, or if you just say, "You know what if I had a valid database connection, I could store history, but there's plenty I can show you without a database," and you could just keep moving on.
16:23
Kent: So with that, we've got a database connection now. And I am going to just do one other thing here in the Gateway web page, which is connect to some devices. And so, come in here under OPC UA, we have device connections, and I'm gonna go ahead and say, "Create new device." And you can see we have a bunch of different drivers to talk to all different kinds of PLCs out there. And I'm gonna go ahead and connect up to an Allen Bradley micrologix. It can be valuable for you to take a PLC with you to go do a demo, so that you can connect to it live, and just do a little ethernet connection to it. And that can be really powerful for people. And so with this, I'm just gonna call my device name MLX. And for the host name, I'm just putting in the IP address to this device, and I'll go ahead and leave everything else default. Say create and you can see that it shows disconnected and now connected. And so, I'm connected up to a live PLC. But in the event that you can't take a PLC, or you can't successfully connect to a PLC, we do have some simulators built in down here that you can take advantage of.
17:35
Kent: And so, I personally like this dairy demo simulator, since most of my customers are not necessarily dairy specific. When I type in my name, I just call it SIM, but it's gonna give me some named tags, which will contrast my MicroLogix, which is all address-based. So now we've got two devices connected and we've connected to a database, and so with that, that's everything I need to do for the demo inside the Gateway webpage. And so I'm gonna come back up to the Home icon, and from here, I start talking about this Designer launcher. And so I can go ahead and click download there and this Designer launcher will install right here on my computer. And from there, I will be able to launch the design environment to start developing my screens, my tags, all that kind of stuff.
18:29
Lauren: Can you only install the launcher on the server where you've installed Ignition?
18:34
Kent: No, that's a great question. You can actually install it anywhere on the network and so that you can be having multiple people all on their own computers, launching the Designer, and doing concurrent development on your Ignition system. So, it's pretty powerful. But I'm gonna come in and tell it to create, and I'm even gonna let it create a little desktop shortcut for me. And while this is installing, one thing I like to talk about is ... And you don't get to talk about it much 'cause as you can see it's done there, but with the Designer launcher, I like to talk about how, there's so many things to talk about.
19:09
Kent: It already showed up that my Gateway was found, my local Gateway. And that comes up here. You can see that IT named this loaner laptop, so you can see it right there. They loaned this to me for this demo. How nice of them. But I like to talk about how from here this same Designer launcher can be connected up to multiple Ignition Gateways. So you could have one development machine or one demo machine, and you could show, I'm gonna connect to my local install, plus my cloud server, and in somebody else’s site or whatever. So, one Designer Launcher for many Gateways.
19:39
Lauren: Thanks so much for sitting down with us today, Ken. It was a real pleasure to have you show us the ropes.
19:45
Kent: Yeah, absolutely, it was my pleasure as well, so thank you so much.
Series Order
8