How Inductive Automation Uses Ignition

Most people think of Ignition as software for SCADA or industrial automation, but there’s a lot more to the platform than that. Ignition is a toolbox for building whatever kind of application your organization needs. Here at Inductive Automation (IA), we have found plenty of everyday uses for Ignition because it allows us to create customized tools that generate tremendous value.

When we recognize the need for a new application, Inductive Automation still evaluates Ignition against other products on the market, but in some cases, using Ignition makes the most sense, whether that is due to our unique requirements or the speed with which an application can be implemented and updated.

In one form or another, everybody at Inductive Automation is impacted by Ignition. Below, discover a few of the ways we leverage our own software platform.

Building Automation System

When IA moved into our 56,000-square-foot headquarters, we inherited an old HVAC system, controlled by commodity HVAC software. Offices were over 10 degrees off setpoint at all times, compressors broke regularly, and heaters constantly reset unbeknownst to the control system, resulting in melted wires and visible damage. The system needed to run 24/7 because some offices would never recover from a shutdown.

It was IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors Steve Hechtman who had the foresight to run the HVAC on Ignition, which was unorthodox, given that specialized HVAC software already existed. His decision, however, proved to be the right one. Commodity HVAC controls would have narrowed the system’s visibility too much to isolate the root cause of each issue. Additionally, this commodity software required an external technician to make changes, resulting in slow, expensive, and sometimes ineffective solutions.

In contrast, Ignition empowered IA staff with its ability to historically log every datapoint, build ad hoc dashboards to investigate issues, and rapidly make changes and refinements. Ignition’s visibility helped us discover thermostats wired to the wrong rooms, incomplete ducting, failing contactors from faulty logic, short-cycling heating and cooling modes that were undetectable in the previous software, and more. Ignition also allowed us to review historical trends and rethink the air handler sequencing to mitigate runaway cooling of interior offices.

Now our HVAC is so efficient and responsive that IA can shut down every night and weekend, resulting in significant energy savings without sacrificing employee comfort during operating hours. Using Ignition on our HVAC also allowed us to test and refine our BACnet Driver before we released it publicly. Overall, the building automation system has given IA the visibility and flexibility to make rapid, informed changes, on our own schedule.

Lobby Sign-In

The Lobby Sign-In application at our Folsom, California headquarters is built in the Ignition Perspective Module, meaning that front desk staff can use iPads to check in guests, vendors, and trainees. The application opens with a “Welcome to Inductive Automation” screen, then gives four option tabs to choose from: Interview, Meeting, Training, and Other.

For in-person training classes, trainees can easily find or input their names. The application saves their information for the week, which makes each subsequent sign-in quicker because they don't have to re-enter their information.

The application efficiently keeps a roster and helps track who is in the building at any given moment, ensuring a secure environment for everyone. One of the application’s standout features is the ability to look up anyone who has checked in on our CRM and generate a lobby sign-in report.

IA’s Sales Engineering Division has made plenty of updates to the application for an easier check-in experience, including the ability to configure different greetings and sign-in methods. They have also uploaded the project to the Ignition Exchange.

Notes App

Sales Engineering is always creating new projects in Ignition and helping integrators build their own solutions. Sales engineers have always had a way of tracking notes, but now with the Notes App, they can derive some analytics from it.

When sales engineers meet with customers, one common question is, “What are the big things you’re seeing? What is trending lately?” The Notes App can create a word cloud based on the terms that sales engineers have recorded from their calls, giving insight into what the Ignition community is interested in. This offers a convenient way to gauge general interest in certain topics right now and over time.

Architecture Builder

Sales engineers build architectures for customers every day. Before they implemented the Architecture Builder, they had to build architectures manually, with basic digital drawing tools. Naturally, because each architecture was essentially drawn by hand, there were variations from engineer to engineer. To solve this problem, the Sales Engineering team needed a way to be consistent, fast, and add additional Ignition-specific context.

The Architecture Builder has a drag & drop editor that allows sales engineers to build out architectures quickly. The application lets engineers move servers around, choose modules, as well as create a bill of materials and pricing quote for the entire architecture. The Architecture Builder gets to a place of real value because more than just giving customers the quote or the architecture, it can additionally provide hardware recommendations based on the architecture and system size.

Zendesk Display Dashboard

IA’s Support Division helps customers with their Ignition systems every day. And Ignition helps Support do that in a number of ways.

The Zendesk Display Dashboard gives Support managers and team leads a quick overview of their teams. They can filter and set audio notifications to check in when a call exceeds 45 minutes to ensure a speedy resolution. The dashboard also shows what Support staff is doing at any given time, whether they are on a call, researching, or just sending an email.

The application has available and unavailable tabs, so managers and leads know who they can assign emergency tickets to. The dashboard is integrated with Slack to display live status, showing who is out sick, in a meeting, or on their lunch break. In any of those cases, instead of being in the available tab, they will be automatically moved to the unavailable tab. These tabs can also be filtered by team, position, or shift.

Project cards display the number of tickets in each respective queue in Zendesk: Open Problem for unassigned tickets; Special for enterprise customers; Tech Triage for tickets that haven't been triaged yet; No-Contract tickets; and Suspended tickets. By clicking on any of these, the application will show general information about the ticket, including the current assignee, subject, time history, and links to any relevant Slack conversations with the Development Division.

Thread & Slack Stats

One of the more difficult tasks that Support has to do is look through thread dumps because they don't always know what these threads are supposed to be doing or what they are responsible for. The Thread Stats feature has collected hundreds of thread dumps and parsed them for key metadata about each thread pool. This gives Support a resource for understanding what normal behavior looks like so they can better identify what is acting abnormally.

Slack Stats is another integration with Slack. When Support staff run into a roadblock while troubleshooting an issue, they reach out to the Dev Slack channel or just start a general support channel to ask questions. This project monitors those individual messages and makes sure they’re being answered in a timely manner. If they haven't received a reply in 30 minutes, it will trigger an alarm.

CRM

A few years after its founding, Inductive Automation was looking at different CRM systems. However, since Ignition's unlimited licensing is so unique, we realized that any other CRM would need to be completely customized to suit our needs. IA decided that building an in-house CRM would provide the exact application that we wanted as well as allow for continual improvement.

These days, Inductive Automation upgrades the CRM to every new version of Ignition, with a dedicated team for implementing updates. Like any company, IA faces a variety of business challenges and having an application built in Ignition lets us solve them faster. IA needs to be agile and this application allows us to be exactly that.

The CRM synthesizes both Ignition visualization modules, with the bulk of the application built in Vision and the executive dashboards in Perspective. The CRM lets the Sales team easily manage not only the organizations and companies that IA does business with, but also quotes, invoices, and license keys.

IA lets the CRM be the single pane of glass that pulls data together into one place, and because it’s built in Ignition, the CRM can integrate with other business intelligence tools as well. The CRM interfaces with our accounting software, our marketing lead generation tool, and helps us stay ADA-compliant. IA uses the CRM not only for our ordering system so the Sales team can create quotes and orders and manage licenses, but also as a reporting tool.

All of our training courses are connected to the CRM. When someone signs up for a training course, the CRM creates the order and registers that person to the class. The CRM also lets us adapt quickly to new situations. For example, when we sell tickets for the Ignition Community Conference, we use the CRM to track attendees’ dietary restrictions.

License Portal

The License Portal fulfills a need that is specific to Inductive Automation. Ignition’s server-centric licensing lets organizations choose the architecture that’s right for them, but it also means that there’s no off-the-shelf solution for managing Ignition licenses.

The application, which is built in Perspective, allows for IA employees, integrators, end users, and Authorized Ignition Distributors to manage Ignition licenses, and view certification statuses, quotes, and invoices. They can search for specific licenses by criteria like license key, location, status or role, edition of Ignition, and more.

The application displays which customer a license is associated with, plus all related modules and activation history as well as all the developers in an organization and their current certification status. Beyond just seeing licenses, the License Portal also gives the ability to add additional context to licenses by setting and/or editing a location, and adding descriptive notes or searchable tags.

The other critical feature of the License Portal is the ability to view quotes, pay invoices, and generate new licenses. This aspect of the application is particularly useful for Ignition distributors around the globe because they can quote and place orders directly through the License Portal. It gives distributors autonomy, which is especially important for locations with dramatic time differences from our headquarters in California. Being able to independently process and order for their customers eliminates the sometimes multi-day process of ordering using the traditional route.

Quoting Tool

Before Inductive Automation acquired the assets of iControls and launched Inductive Automation Australia (IA AU), iControls was the official Ignition distributor in Australia. iControls acted as a middle entity between end users and IA. As a result, they sometimes had difficulties translating quotes to local currencies and different types of markets, due to IA’s unique business model, not to mention various discounts and nuances of licensing. Prior to implementing this application, translating a quote from the IA website required three people to input the exact same data, so IA AU developed the Quoting Tool in Perspective to improve the sales process.

IA AU wanted to keep HubSpot as a single source of truth, integrating it with the Quoting Tool to bring in important pieces of data like company type, certification level, managed accounts, NDAs, and more.

The Quoting Tool lets Sales create a quote by selecting a combination of gateways and edge products in addition to support and training packages, plus an option to add a completely customized product for special cases. The tool also transparently displays the discounts applied to each part of the quote in addition to the exchange rate for the chosen currency. Once the quote is created, it is saved as a searchable template to expedite the process of building complex quotes or updating an existing one.

IA AU also wanted to address the quoting workflow. Each quote enters a track and trace mechanism as it progresses through the various steps of internal review and approval. Once the quote is approved, the document is ready to be deployed and downloaded by the sales representatives to send to the end user. IA AU is currently working to integrate the Architecture Builder with the Quoting Tool to automatically send the quote and architecture diagram together.

The Quoting Tool has provided an easier path for members of the Sales team to do their jobs, reducing mistakes while gathering data and setting goals for continuous improvement.

Share Your Unique Ignition Projects

Inductive Automation has pain points just like any company. Our approach is to look for solutions in the platforms that we already use, but if they lack specific functionality or interoperability, then we leverage Ignition to make the platforms we already have even more effective.

With its open-ended design and inherent flexibility, Ignition can solve pain points for any organization no matter the industry, so we want to hear your success stories. Share your projects with us and let us know how Ignition is helping your business and your customers.

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Transcript:

00:02 
Travis Cox: Most people think of Ignition as a platform for industrial automation or SCADA, but there's a lot more to it than that. At Inductive Automation, we build applications in Ignition for internal use because we can create small, customized tools that generate tremendous value, and once those products are in place, we can roll out improvements quickly. That's not to say we sink a bunch of development time into reinventing the wheel. We still evaluate Ignition versus other products in the market. We just happen to find plenty of use cases where Ignition is the best option. Everybody at Inductive Automation is impacted by Ignition in one way or another, so we're gonna show you some examples of how we use our product and how it gives us value.

00:40 
Kurt Seifert: When we moved into our 56,000-square-foot Folsom headquarters, we inherited a unique and old HVAC system controlled by common HVAC software. Offices were often 10℉ off setpoint, compressors were breaking regularly, heaters were constantly tripping and resetting without the control system knowing as evidenced by melted wires and visible damage. We had to run the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because some offices would never recover from shutting down overnight. It was a mess.

01:07 
Mike Hechtman: It was [IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors] Steve Hechtman that had the foresight to run our HVAC on Ignition, which seemed unusual at first, given the specialized HVAC software that already existed. But as we soon discovered, his decision was spot on. Existing HVAC controls run on slow networking and hardware with sluggish screens and historical trending. You either don't have enough information logged or you lose your train of thought waiting for information to load. How do you debug anything with that? How do you get to the root cause? And adjusting controls logic has to be done on some technician's schedule, not our schedule?

01:44 
Mike Hechtman: Often, by the time someone can come out to fix something, you've forgotten the important details. Adding time to a problem is much more expensive than people realize. But with Ignition, we can make changes on the fly. Historically log every data point, calculate and chart how far off setpoint the entire building is. Make ad hoc dashboards to compare this to effects of outside temperature. We can wire inputs to physically verify equipment is running and show this on the HMI. We can investigate any issue as it's happening on our own schedule. We can do anything we dream up. It is empowering.

02:21 
Kurt Seifert: Ignition's visibility helped us investigate and discover thermostats wired to the wrong rooms, incomplete ducting, faulty logic that shortened equipment life, and short cycling of heating and cooling modes, which couldn't be detected in the previous software, and the list goes on. Once all this was handled, Ignition allowed us to review years of historical trends to totally rethink the air-handler sequencing we were provided, at a high level, which helped us solve offices that were often eight degrees under temperature despite minimum airflow. Now our HVAC is so efficient and responsive that we can shut down every night and weekend for significant energy savings without sacrificing employee comfort during open hours.

02:58 
Mike Hechtman: Using Ignition on our HVAC also allowed us to test and refine our BACnet Driver before it reached the public. It's a testing ground for us. If there is ever anything wrong with Ignition, we are gonna feel it in the office. But overall, Ignition gave us the visibility and flexibility to make rapid, informed changes on our own schedule, really challenging the norm, and it was actually a lot of fun.

03:23 
Dara Claiborne: Our Lobby Sign-In application runs on Perspective, which means that we can use iPads upfront to check in guests, vendors, and trainees. The process is pretty simple. The application opens up with a "Welcome to Inductive Automation" screen, and then gives four option tabs to choose from: interview, meeting, training, and other. For in-person training classes, the trainees can find or input their names. The application saves their information for the week, which makes the sign-in process quicker because they don't have to retype all their information. The application as a whole officially keeps a roster and helps us track who is in the building, ensuring a secure environment for everyone.

04:05 
Dara Claiborne: It's really easy to integrate other systems with Ignition, so one of the standout features is the ability to look up anyone who has checked in on our CRM and we can generate a lobby sign-in report. Connor Futa and Chase Dorsey from our Sales Engineering team have made plenty of updates to the application for an easier check-in experience, including the ability to configure the different greetings and sign-in methods for the version that's available on the Ignition Exchange. It's really convenient to have them continually improve the process.

04:39 
Matthew Raybourn: The Sales Engineering Division is always creating new projects in Ignition, like the online Demo Project or helping integrators build their own solutions. The first application I want to talk about is the Notes App. Sales Engineering has always had a way of tracking notes, but now we're trying to drive some analytics from it. When we're meeting with customers, one of the questions Sales Engineering gets asked all the time is, "What are the big things you're seeing? What is trending lately?" The Notes App can create a word cloud based on the terms that we have recorded from our calls, giving us insight into what people are interested in. It gives us an easy way to gauge general interest in certain topics, especially over time. There have been three iterations of this application and you can see the progression through each version. One of the reasons we built this application in Ignition is that we can easily implement changes to better align with how we use it.

05:33 
Matthew Raybourn: The second application that I want to talk about is the Architecture Builder. As sales engineers, we build architectures for customers every day. Before we had this application, we were building architectures manually, using basic digital drawing tools. The problem was that because we were essentially drawing these by hand, there were variations from engineer to engineer. We needed a way to be consistent, fast, and add some additional Ignition-specific context. The Architecture Builder has a drag-and-drop editor that allows us to build out architectures quickly. You can move servers around and click on a server, choose the modules, and create a build of materials for your entire architecture, providing a pricing quote or a build materials. The Architecture Builder gets to a place of real value because we're not just giving customers the quote or the architecture, we can even provide hardware recommendations based on the architecture and system size. The application allows us to be more effective in how we communicate to customers. Both of these applications are relatively simple tools that provide tremendous value. You see that everywhere at Inductive Automation.

06:43 
Corbin Harrell: IA's Support Division works with Ignition every day, helping customers with their own Ignition systems. And Ignition helps us do that. One of the main ways is the Zendesk Display Dashboard. This dashboard gives the managers and team leads a quick overview of their teams, which they can filter, and they can send audio notifications to check in when a call exceeds 45 minutes, so that we can ensure a speedy resolution to the problem. The dashboard also shows what everyone is doing, whether that means they're on a call, researching, or just sending out an email. We have available and unavailable tabs so that we know who we can assign emergency tickets to. The dashboard is integrated with Slack to display live statuses. We can also see who's out sick, in a meeting, or just on lunch. In any of those cases, instead of being in the available tab, they'll be automatically moved to the unavailable tab.

07:31 
Corbin Harrell: These can also be filtered by team, position, or shift. These project cards tell us how many tickets are in their respective queues in Zendesk. This first card is the Open Problem queue for unassigned tickets. This card is for our enterprise customers. Tech Triage for tickets that haven't been triaged yet, No-Contract tickets, and Suspended tickets. Click on any of these and you can see general information about the ticket, including the current assignee, subject, time history, and links to any relevant Slack conversations with the [Software] Development Division. Here on the side, we can look at Thread Stats, which is a pretty new project. One of the more difficult tasks that support has to do is look through thread dumps because we don't always know what these threads are supposed to be doing or what they're responsible for. So we've collected hundreds of thread dumps and parsed them for key metadata about each thread pool.

08:20 
Corbin Harrell: This gives us a resource for understanding what normal behavior looks like so we can better identify when something is acting abnormal. Slack Stats is another integration with Slack. One of the most common Support workflows is that when we run into a roadblock while troubleshooting an issue, we reach out to the Dev Slack channel or just start a general Support channel where we can ask questions. This project monitors those individual messages and makes sure they're being answered in a timely manner. If they haven't gotten a reply yet for 30 minutes, it will trigger an alarm. This project has been a continual work. It's super useful for the Support Division and handles a lot of how we're getting data behind the scenes, but that goes for all Ignition projects, right?

09:01 
Vannessa Garcia: Back when Inductive Automation was only a few years old, we were looking at different CRM systems, but Ignition's unlimited licensing is so unique that if we used any other CRM, we realized that we'd have to completely customize it to suit our needs as a company. We decided that building our own CRM would give us the exact application that we wanted and let us continually improve it. Fast forward to today, Inductive Automation has upgraded our CRM with every new version of Ignition. We have a team that manages the CRM and actively updates it all the time. Like any company, IA faces a variety of business challenges and having an application built in Ignition allows us to solve them faster. We need to be agile, and this application allows us to be exactly that. IA's Chief Technology Evangelist Travis Cox built the original application. The CRM synthesizes both of Ignition's visualization modules, with the bulk of the application built in Vision and executive dashboards built in Perspective.

10:08 
Vannessa Garcia: In Sales, the CRM lets us easily manage not only the organizations and companies that we do business with, but also our quotes, invoices, and license keys. Travis built those executive dashboards for Steve Hechtman, IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, because Steve wanted a fast way to see data. Since Perspective runs in your browser, that is the fastest way to do it. Building the CRM and Ignition lets us integrate other business intelligence tools as well. The CRM interface is with our accounting software, our marketing lead generation tool, and helps us stay ADA-compliant. All of our training courses are also connected to the CRM. When someone signs up for a training course, CRM creates the order and registers that person to the class. The CRM also lets us adapt quickly to new situations. For example, when we sell tickets for the Ignition Community Conference, we use CRM to track attendees dietary restrictions. What our customers get from Ignition, we get too.

11:18 
Vannessa Garcia: It's a tool to capture and manage data the way we want. We use the CRM not only for our ordering system, so our Sales team can create quotes and orders and manage licenses, but we also use it as a reporting tool. The CRM application really has its fingers in all different parts of the organization. We let CRM be that single pane of glass that pools data together into one place. This is the most important tool we have. We rely on Ignition daily to run our business, so we know firsthand the amount of trust it takes to go all in with Ignition.

12:00 
Yegor Karnaukhov: The License Portal fulfills a need that is specific to Inductive Automation. Ignition's server-centric licensing lets organizations choose the architecture that is right for them, but it also means that there's no off-the-shelf solution for managing Ignition licenses. The application, which is built in Perspective, allows for IA employees, integrators, end users, and Ignition distributors to manage Ignition licenses and view certificate statuses, quotes, and invoices. They can search for specific licenses by criteria like license key, location, status or role, edition of Ignition, and more. The portal displays which customer a license is associated with, plus all related modules and activation history as well as all of the developers and organization and their current certification status. Beyond just seeing licenses, the License Portal also gives the ability to add additional context to licenses by setting and/or editing a location and adding descriptive notes or searchable tags.

13:04 
Yegor Karnaukhov: The other critical feature of the License Portal is the ability to view quotes, pay invoices, and generate new licenses. This aspect of the application is particularly useful for Ignition distributors around the globe because they can quote and place orders directly through the license portal. It gives distributors autonomy and independence, which is especially important for locations with dramatic time differences from our headquarters in California. Being able to process an order on their own for their customers eliminates the sometimes multi-day process of ordering using the traditional route.

13:41 
Francisco Carrión: Before Inductive Automation Australia, when we were still a distributor, we were that middle entity between end users and Inductive. As a result, we sometimes had difficulties translating quotes to local currencies and different types of markets. We had tried another software to handle quoting, but it was really hard to customize because of IA's business model, not to mention the various discounts and nuances of licensing. With our previous setup to translate a quote from IA website, we ended up having three people input the exact same data. So we developed the Quoting Tool in Perspective to improve our sales process. We have used HubSpot as our CRM since the beginning of the operation, which we wanted to keep as our single source of truth.

14:24 
Francisco Carrión: HubSpot integrates with the Quoting Tool to bring in important pieces of data like company type, certification level, managed accounts, NDAs, and more. Then anything that we quote is translated into a deal in HubSpot. The Quoting Tool lets us create a quote by selecting a combination of gateways and edge products in addition to support and training packages. There's even an option to add a completely customized product for special cases. The tool also transparently displays the discounts applied to each part of the quote in addition to the exchange rate for the chosen currency. Once the quote is created, it is digitized as a searchable template to expedite the process of building complex quotes or updating an existing one.

15:06 
William Bowen: We also wanted to address the workflow, so once somebody requests a quote, it goes through an internal review and we keep a track and trace mechanism for the quote as it goes through the various steps for approval. Once the quote is approved, the document is ready to be deployed and downloaded by the sales rep to send to the end user. We haven't automated the delivery yet because for complex architectures we want to attach an architecture diagram, but we are working to integrate the Architecture Builder so soon we'll be able to automatically send the quote and diagram together.

15:36 
Francisco Carrión: The Quoting Tool has provided an easier path for people to do their jobs, an easier way to request, an easier way to review, and an easier way to approve. We are reducing mistakes while gathering data and setting goals for continuous improvement. Sometimes the fear is that you're using Ignition for something that is potentially out there already, and so it's a waste of resources. Our approach is always to look for something in the platforms that we already use, but if they don't have the functionality, or if the data that we want cannot be communicated between platforms, then we leverage Ignition to solve the problem and integrate those softwares. For us, the key word is "orchestration." We are using Ignition to make the platforms we already have even more effective.

16:19 
Travis Cox: Inductive Automation has pain points just like any company, but we address them using Ignition and rely on the customized tools that we built with our own platform. Due to its open-ended design and inherent flexibility, Ignition can solve pain points for any organization no matter the industry. We want to hear your success stories, share your projects with us, and tell us how Ignition is helping you and your customers.