21 CFR Part 11 and Pharmaceutical Best Practices with Ignition

This guide addresses Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 21 CFR Part 11, Data Integrity and Good Automated Manufacturing Practices (GAMP). It provides best practices and guidelines supporting regulated Ignition applications in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital Transformation is not just a buzzword or a passing fad businesses can afford to ignore. It’s the evolution of business.

Must-Have SCADA Features for the Modern Era

In today’s environment, there is no doubt that SCADA is essential. However, before adopting or upgrading SCADA, there are certain features that must be considered to guarantee that a new system is powerful and flexible enough to excel in the modern era.

Ignition Server Sizing and Architecture Guide

This guide is intended to provide some tips to help you determine the correct architecture depending on your requirements. It is important to note that any architecture that you come up with needs to be fully tested and verified. Throughout that process you can observe the performance characteristics of the server in order to make any necessary adjustments to the architecture. There is no guarantee on performance since it is based on your design choices.

Ignition 8 Deployment Best Practices

Inductive Automation provides this helpful guide for deploying Ignition applications. The guide offers Ignition 8 best practices for setting up development and testing workflow.

What is a PLC?

Learn Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) basics: what it is, what its functions are, how it operates, and its importance in the world of automation.

3 Major Reasons Why Water Utilities Choose Ignition

Inductive Automation serves 600-plus water/wastewater facilities around the world and the number keeps growing. As more and more water utilities face the need to upgrade their current aging SCADA systems or install brand-new ones, we teamed up with Water & Wastes Digest to take a closer look at three of the biggest reasons why our customers choose Ignition for their projects.

Let's Encrypt Guide for Ignition

Ignition 8.0.3 introduces support for hot-reloading the Gateway’s SSL keystore. This capability enables Ignition to play well with services such as Let’s Encrypt which provide for automatic SSL certificate management. This article walks through one example for integrating Ignition with Let’s Encrypt.

Design Like a Pro: Best Practices for IIoT

The industrial automation industry is benefiting from the incredible opportunities made possible by the Internet of Things (IoT). While the IoT has shown promise within the corporate and consumer environment, there is a great opportunity to unlock the data in the industrial space.

IIoT: Combining the Best of OT and IT

Two worlds are converging as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) takes the controls industry by storm. This white paper examines how professionals from Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT) can find common ground to establish the IIoT. Through IIoT solutions such as MQTT, a lightweight communications protocol, industrial organizations can gain the ability to easily collect data from large remote systems and share it with the enterprise level.

How the Integrators at Automation Group Leverage Ignition to Support Culinary Oil Producers

Automation Group used Ignition to help two culinary oil companies solve critical problems and achieve positive results in their Digital Transformations.

Building a Sustainable and Secure SCADA System

This article offers guidelines for designing a SCADA system for water utilities, with five steps for sustainable SCADA and three security recommendations.

Ignition Security Hardening Guide

Included in this document are guidelines specifically for the Ignition software, as well as general suggestions regarding the hardware and network where Ignition is installed. The steps provided are recommendations rather than requirements and should be reviewed for relevance in each implementation.

How 3 Food & Beverage Companies are Tackling Problems with Ignition

When looking for an answer to their security and automation needs, three American companies — Chobani, MadTree Brewing, and SugarCreek — adopted Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform.

4 Water Districts Revitalized With Ignition

Four water districts in the U.S. switched their water district SCADA system to Ignition and reap the benefits of state-of-the-art technology.

Checklist: Avoid Visualization, Alarming & Security Mistakes

No matter how much experience we have, we all make mistakes sometimes. Fortunately, Ignition gives you the tools to not only fix those mistakes, but turn them into strengths when you’re developing projects in the future. Below, we’ve compiled a checklist of common mistakes and corresponding solutions to review before you start building so you can get your projects developed quickly and running as efficiently and securely as possible.

7 SCADA Security ‘Do’s’ & 4 SCADA Training ‘Don’ts’

At Inductive Automation, we’ve always tried to assist integrators and end users by sharing valuable information. As with all things in life and automation, that means spreading awareness about what you should do as well as what you shouldn’t. In that spirit, we’ve collated two recent articles from Water & Wastes Digest that examine best practices to help keep your system safe along with training misconceptions to avoid so that nothing holds your organization back.

How Sierra Nevada Brewing Company Uses Ignition to Manage All Aspects of its Business

In evolving from a small regional brewery to become the nation’s third largest craft brewing company, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company has worked with Inductive Automation and used Ignition to help itself scale, operate more efficiently, increase visibility, and make more informed, data-driven decisions.

Checklist: Avoid Common Project Mistakes in Data Collection, HMI Design & Scripting

It’s easy to make mistakes. We’ve all done it! Sometimes we complete a task in an inefficient or overly complex way. Other times we only discover a mistake after the fateful copy/paste that breaks an entire screen. Luckily, with Ignition it’s just as easy to fix mistakes and in the process create reusable assets that save development time. Below, we’ve compiled a checklist to help you avoid common mistakes and make your project as efficient as possible.

How Four Roses Bourbon Used Ignition-Based Solutions to Modernize its Production Processes

Four Roses Bourbon, distilled in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, is one of the leading bourbon brands in the world, known for award-winning handcrafted bourbon. But in its production processes, the company was relying on Excel spreadsheets, handwritten notes, and manual processes.

Ignition Historian

Ignition’s data historian functionality is a robust set of features that are built into Ignition modules, providing data acquisition, storage, retrieval, and visualization. As with everything else in Ignition, historian functionality is modular. Several modules are often used together to provide a complete system. Often, users combine Ignition’s historian functionality with SCADA, HMI, IIoT, or MES functionality. Although many people think of Ignition’s Tag Historian Module as the “Ignition Historian,” a full data historian often is described by not only storing tag data, but also storing event-based data and providing visualization. As such, this document covers the modules for those features.

How Meister Cheese Uses Ignition to Streamline its Manufacturing Operations

Meister is an award-winning cheesemaker in Muscoda, Wisconsin. The company has been in business since 1916 and is currently in its fourth generation of family ownership and leadership. Over the past 100 years, Meister has grown into one of the top makers of premium cheese and whey products in the world.

Technical Pathways Program Map

The Inductive Automation Technical Pathways Program supports career development for individuals who join the company as Software Technical Analyst and puts them on a path to more advanced positions in the company. Above is the map of who Inductive Automation employees can move through the program.

3 Ways Ignition is Modernizing Water Utilities

At Inductive Automation, we have always championed water and wastewater utilities, so when a recent hacking attempt in Florida caught our attention, it underlined just how vitally important yet underfunded water utilities are. We strive to provide free resources and affordable solutions for organizations with limited budgets, helping them to create cutting-edge systems without exclusionary pricing. Really, there’s nothing more inspiring to us than stories of how utilities are discovering innovative ways to upgrade their processes while saving money with Ignition.

Perspective Planning Checklist

To get the best out of your Perspective project, we developed this project checklist for you to use. While you can easily build your project in Perspective right out of the box, having a plan of attack will enable you to use Perspective in its full capacity. We recommend that you follow this checklist prior to your build to help jumpstart your project.

How Ignition Helps Water Utilities Do More with SCADA

We collected and combined three recent articles from Water & Wastes Digest about integrators and end users who faced very specific challenges and found that Ignition by Inductive Automation provided a perfect solution. Continue reading for stories of quick implementation that cut project deadlines in half, monitoring field operations remotely, and putting real-time data in the hands of an entire team with a server-centric system.

21 CFR Part 11 Compliance with Inductive Automation’s Ignition Platform

The Ignition platform can be configured to be Part 11-compliant, ensuring data integrity through implementation of ALCOA+ concepts. This white paper will discuss the various components of Ignition that allow for Part 11 compliance and implementation of data integrity principles.

Let’s Build Something: Making Templates in the Vision Module

Templates are a simple but very powerful feature in Ignition’s Vision Module that you can use with your windows. The power comes from the ability to modify only the template in one location while affecting all of the instances used throughout the project.

What is SCADA?

A quick breakdown of what supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is, who uses it, its history, and an overview of modern SCADA systems.

What is HMI?

A Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is a user interface or dashboard that connects a person to a machine, system, or device. While the term can technically be applied to any screen that allows a user to interact with a device, HMI is most commonly used in the context of an industrial process.

What is MQTT?

Discover the basics of MQTT (once known as Message Queuing Telemetry Transport): What it does, what its advantages are, why it was created, how it works, and who uses it.

What is IIoT?

IIoT promises to revolutionize manufacturing by enabling the acquisition and accessibility of far greater amounts of data, at far greater speeds.

Java Security and Ignition

Java has been in the headlines of late for all the wrong reasons and recent Java security concerns have raised some eyebrows among the Ignition user community. In an effort to help put those concerns to rest, this white paper will cut through the media hype and take a hard look at Java security.

Evolution of the Control System Engineer

Industrial organizations’ increasing demand for data is causing a convergence between operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). With their unique perspective on OT-IT convergence technologies and trends, control system integrators are incredibly vital to industrial organizations’ efforts to stay current. Based on an industry survey sent to over 9,000 integrators, this white paper examines the current challenges and future developments for industrial controls professionals.

3 Tips for Building Better Reports

Effective reporting is very important to an industrial organization: it helps to measure operational performance, identify areas for improvement, and increase accountability among team members. But any report is only as valuable as the data that goes into it. That’s why the key to building more effective reports is not to add fancier charts and graphs but to focus on the data and delivery methods you’re using. These basic factors are critical for effective reporting, regardless of which reporting system your organization currently uses.

3 Template Tips for HMI/SCADA Projects

Developing HMI and SCADA projects can be tedious and time-consuming, especially when they involve a high number of repetitive tasks. Copying and pasting components over and over again not only slows you down but also sets you up for problems in the future. Fortunately, there’s a better way to get your project done: templates.