Global Collaboration Helps Steel Manufacturer Implement Centralized Control Room

The main purpose of Uddeholm, a Voestalpine company, is to manufacture high-quality industrial steel tools, applying best practices for an efficient use of resources and a sustainable development. This strategy has led Uddeholm to become the world’s leading steel tool manufacturer with more than 350 years of innovation and presence in more than 90 countries.

Glass Company Increases Profitability With True-North Metrics

HMI Glass was facing numerous challenges impacting profitability, leading to reduced earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) since 2018. The scope of the project was to utilize intelligent manufacturing data to implement a lean management model and drive cultural transformation. The success of the project was tied to fees based on performance and utilized a gainshare model based on a cost of poor-quality improvement.

Real-Time Data & Custom Drivers Allow Power Supplier to Anticipate Demand

First Gen is one of the oldest and largest conglomerates in the Philippines that has an interest in power generation and power distribution. While Energy Development Corporation is a diversified renewable energy company, both are under the First Philippine Holdings Corporation – A Lopez Group of Companies, who constantly strive to meet the needs of its customers. In June 2021, the Enhanced Wholesale Electricity Spot Market Design Operations (EWDO) was launched. This officially started the new regulations for shortening of the dispatch interval: instead of a per-hour basis, it was transitioned to a five-minute interval. First Gen and Energy Development Corporation (EDC) have adapted the five-minute interval in their Central Dispatch Operations (CDO). This new regulation was addressed by installing multiple Ignition gateways for faster data monitoring, collection, and secured control of power generation across more than 30+ power plants (and counting). Controtek developed customized drivers to get the real-time dispatch setpoints from the Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) to meet the demands of the operations and compliance with the new regulation of the EWDO.

Digital Troubleshooting Guide Boosts Chemical Company's Efficiency

Cooley Group has a corporate Manufacturing 4.0/Digital Transformation initiative that it is implementing using the Ignition platform. RoviSys was brought on to help guide Cooley Group on this journey and develop the functionalities it needed in a templatized way that promotes scalability and supportability. Cooley Group requested the use of Ignition to develop a Digital Troubleshooting Guide that operators could use to help resolve downtime events impacting their OEE. For this project, RoviSys implemented a creative solution that gave Cooley Group exactly what it asked for, yet made it easy for it to build and configure on its own within the Ignition designer.

Water Utility Seamlessly Transitions Operating Systems and Speeds Development

Design and develop a new treatment plant HMI to replace WinCC and condense third-party applications into one platform.

Reliable Data Supports Cleaner Energy Initiative For 50 Sites

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

Enterprise SCADA Gives New Zealand Meat Producer Standardized Control

Tamaki Control implemented a new Ignition Perspective standards framework for ANZCO Foods. This framework replaced unsupported SCADA systems and enabled new automation projects and ERP API integration solutions across its 10 manufacturing and processing sites in New Zealand. The project involved upgrading or installing Ignition 8.1 at each site and connecting them on the Gateway Network through an enterprise architecture with the Enterprise Administration Module. The result is a cohesive and efficient system that has positioned ANZCO Foods for continued success.

New Control System Improves Safety And Compliance For Pharmaceutical Company

Initially, Zendal approached Optomation Systems to tackle their needs for monitoring unmanned storage units holding pharmaceutical final products for their customers. When Optomation introduced Ignition, it rapidly evolved into a larger project with a broader scope to encompass the data acquisition of varied equipment, process control and supervision, alarm notification, data historization, and automatic report generation. The main objective of the project was to implement a system that acts as a data repository for the information collected from the dedicated equipment in the different production areas and auxiliary services, both to satisfy regulatory requirements and prove compliance with CDMO obligations to customers. In addition, the system integrated new production areas into the system and expanded functionality to include control and supervision of several processes. Field devices and sensors are connected to controllers that execute automated sequences, and from Ignition, operators have full access to the operation, just like a traditional SCADA system.

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

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

Cloud-Hosted Enterprise SCADA for Large Provider of Aggregate Material and Cement

Dolese Bros. is a large provider of aggregate material and cement throughout the state of Oklahoma. Over the past several years, Dolese has upgraded many of its quarries with advanced automation, networking, and operational systems. A key component of this strategy is the deployment of Inductive Automation’s Ignition platform at each quarry, and then a cloud-hosted enterprise-level Ignition system to provide reporting, visualization, and business system integration at a corporate level. Dolese enlisted the help of Industrial Networking Solutions (INS) to accomplish their goals.

New SCADA Improves Productivity for Biomanufacturing Company

National Resilience Inc. offers a broad mix of customized manufacturing and development capabilities at their Mississauga, Ontario facility to serve the needs of biopharmaceutical companies at all stages of the drug development process – from pre-clinical development to commercial supply. Resilience requested Grantek’s assistance to develop an Ignition SCADA to support new GMP manufacturing processes in the building area known as the “H-Area.” This solution was needed to rapidly scale a brownfield contract pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, allowing Resilience to maximize their productivity and meet their commercialization goals.

Improved Monitoring of Power Generators Nationwide

Brown Engineers developed a USA-branded solution specific to their needs for monitoring a nationwide fleet of generators for high-reliability customers.

Industry Leader Reduces Paper, Gets Faster Reporting and Better Productivity

This project was created by FG Automação Industrial for Saint-Gobain, a world leader in the design, manufacturing, and distribution of materials and services for the construction and industrial markets. To better attend to their customers' needs, FG Automação Industrial used Ignition Perspective and Sepasoft's OEE Downtime modules. By combining these modules, they were able to transform the Saint-Gobain tube production management process into a robust, user-friendly, dynamic, reliable, and 100% digital interface.

New Mobile Capabilities for United Airlines at Houston Airport

In addition to the HMI baggage handling system Vision application running on the workstations for Houston Terminal C/E (and now B), the intent was to offer the same functionality on a mobile device, such as a tablet. While incorporating the same security roles as the Vision application, the operator on the tablet can view/acknowledge/shelve alarms, view graphics, view and interact with device statuses and controls, view statistics and view connection status details from the new Perspective application.

Variety of Connections and Unlimited Licensing Aid Cancer Therapy

This project involved using Ignition in the personalized medicine industry to handle multiple communication protocols in one 21 CFR Part 11-compliant environment. The same regulatory data integrity requirements exist in personalized medicine as in large-scale productions and Ignition has proven to be a valuable tool because of its flexibility, mobility, and above all — device integration.

Improvements Beyond Expectations for Global Leader in Beauty & Wellness

This project was developed for a greenfield site, built for the manufacturing of beauty and wellness products. The customer had outgrown their original site and had to expand their production to meet demand. The new site had to provide a solution with improved visibility on their systems, services, and manufacturing processes, and provide consistency in the quality of their manufacturing procedures.

Improved SCADA, HMI, and MES for Ninth-Largest Craft Brewer in United States

Stone Brewing is the ninth-largest craft brewing company in the US, located in Escondido, CA, and was founded by Greg Koch in 1996. The goal of the project was to upgrade the existing Siemens BRAUMAT brewing automation system with a new design consisting of Rockwell PLCs, networks, Ignition HMI, historian, batch, and MES software for the two brewhouses at Stone Brewing Company in Escondido, California.

Lower Costs, More Data for Australian Water Agency with Over 300 Sites

A regional municipal council has implemented the next generation of remote telemetry monitoring and data-driven decision-making. This represents a significant step for the water industry in Australia and provides access to the same data-driven decision-making process used by large water authorities for a fraction of the cost. Since implementing the new system, the council has seen the commencement of significant cost reductions, improved planning, and data-driven decision-making

Global Automotive Machinery Company Gets Single Source of Truth in Every Department

Ignition is used to create a SCADA/MES application that replaces a lot of separate Excel sheets and an old Citect SCADA platform. By using Ignition, AT-Automation instead created a single source of truth for every department (production, process engineering, technical service, quality, logistics) within the company.

Modern HMI/SCADA Improves Oil Pipeline for Global Agribusiness Cooperative

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

Enterprise SCADA Streamlines Processes for Renewable Energy

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

New SCADA and Greater Mobility for Large Water-Management Agency

The evolution of Réseau31 agents' missions requires more and more mobility and access to management and supervision tools using mobile terminals (smartphones, tablets). In addition, the rapid changes in the infrastructure to be monitored and operated (organic changes in the network, maintenance, new contracts, etc.) require frequent changes to the applications.

Data from Numerous Processes Aids Large Salmon Producer

This project has been developed by employees at the automation department of Nordlaks Produkter AS for the Nordlaks group. The project consists of several departments where operators can control entire processes and managers can extract information and data all the way down to the component level.

Largest Publicly Traded U.S. Water/Wastewater Company Benefits from Enterprise Solution

More organizations are bringing Information Technology (IT) and Operations Technology (OT) together to assist in business decisions at every level of the organization. American Water teamed up with Flexware Innovation and Automated Controls Concepts (ACC) to create an Ignition ecosystem for SCADA/HMI standards, central data collection and analysis, and integration with other backend systems to support data-driven decision-making across the company. This project was the first and largest-scale standardization of their operational technology systems, and consisted of converting an outdated SCADA system to a modern system that is ISA 101-compliant. Ignition Perspective and Cirrus Link MQTT modules were included as key parts of this solution.

UK’s Leading Leather Manufacturer Has Better Data, Better Results

The project allows Scottish Leather Group to track rawhides through an intake fridge system, and categorizes these hides based on their food grade, weight, gender, origin and status to intelligently fill the fridge rails. An outfeed selection algorithm helps operators choose the best available hides for a given fridge outfeed job (i.e. lime processing, recirc, etc.).

Strong Scalability with the Cloud, MQTT, Mobility & More

The ESM team developed a MQTT fleet management system for a client with systems across Australia. See how Ignition makes cloud scalability a reality.

Largest Offshore Oil Operation in Argentina Improves Production

ENAP Argentina has operations in the Austral Basin and the San Jorge Gulf Basin. The Magallanes area has five oil and gas production platforms. It is the largest offshore operation in Argentina. ENAP has an integrated business model based on a strategic management process and projects, whose ultimate goal is to increase the value of the company with safety and responsibility, contributing to the integration and energy supply of Argentina and Chile.

Automation Solutions Ecuador

Custom ERP Software for a Variety of Businesses

North Point Technology, LLC has created ProFusionSM, a cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP system designed for small project-based businesses that need all the features of the big brands without the price tag. North Point calls it “ERP for the Rest of Us.”

Real-Time and Historical Data Improve OEE

Piedmont Automation chose Ignition SCADA software for visualization and Sepasoft MES software for optimizing OEE downtime in this project for Daimler.

Modern SCADA, MQTT, and the Cloud Bring Intelligent Buildings for SNCF, the French National Railway Company

This project is about digital transformation for railway stations across France. The challenge was to collect and interact with greenfield and brownfield facilities in a highly distributed BMS-like environment.

Improved Data Management for High-Speed Catamarans

The purpose of the project was to develop a DNV-GL approved Ship Integrated Management System (SIMS) to manage data from various inputs on the ship and present information in a consistent manner on operator workstations distributed throughout the vessel.

New SCADA and OEE for Ariens, Maker of Four Million Snow Blowers

Ariens has a state-of-the-art landscaping equipment production facility that includes industry-leading machinery and manufacturing principles, but its data-gathering process was falling behind. The company was able to offer highly granular data, but the data came at the cost of time, meaning any insight gained lagged behind. Ariens brought Corso Systems in to take the OEE data collection process from pen and paper to automated real-time results using Ignition Perspective and the Sepasoft OEE Module.

Mobile Robots and Logistics Automation for Avery Dennison

More and more organizations are introducing automation into their logistics operations through the use of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs). Over the past several years, Flexware Innovation has assisted customers with this effort by leveraging Ignition to integrate these vehicles into their existing ecosystems. This integration typically includes interfacing with automation/control infrastructure, inventory management systems, and other line-of-business applications. The result of this continuous development is a highly configurable, Ignition-based middleware framework named LIFT (Logistics Integration Framework Technology). 

Modern SCADA Improves Operations Across Three Water Districts

Read how three counties in Kentucky are using Ignition to leverage MQTT and SCADA for their water treatment plant operations, gaining flexibility and scalability in the process.

Real-Time Data Across the Entire Enterprise for a Leading Oil & Gas Company in Latin America

Pluspetrol, one of the leading oil & gas companies in Latin America, acquired Block 10 operations in Ecuador and successfully finished migrating one of the largest SCADA systems in Ecuador to Ignition in 2019. The fact that all Ecuador operations chose Ignition as their monitoring, control, and information platform allowed the corporation to evaluate its benefits and choose it as the appropriate tool for digital transformation of the company at the corporate level.

OEE, SPC, and Real-Time Dashboards for Greater Insight into Six Production Lines

Gaining real-time and historical insight in the production process on any level is the key in this project. All of this is achieved by leveraging the options that Ignition delivers. Using standards in combination with the customization resulted in a state-of-the-art project.

Improved Data Integrity and Easier Compliance with 21 CFR Part 11

Par Pharmaceutical worked with Grantek as part of Par’s corporate data integrity initiative to improve production data quality and regulatory compliance. The project related to fluid beds, which are pieces of equipment used to reduce the moisture content of pharmaceutical powder and granules. The project was to draft corporate data integrity requirements for all control systems across Par Pharmaceutical's industries, and then develop a new system for the fluid bed as a pilot against the new requirements.

Smithfield Hog Production Improves Feed Mill Operations with Modern SCADA Platform

This project — automating the hog feed production plant at Smithfield Hog Production’s facility in Milford, Utah — uses Allen-Bradley CompactLogix processors accompanied with Flex and SLC I/O hardware. The computers are based on a virtual environment, having all machines running on a common server connected to thin clients. CPM Beta Raven’s MillMaster is the interface for the consumer to receive product, run recipes, track inventory, and loadout product seamlessly and accurately.

Advanced Monitoring and Control for a Data Center Leader in Italy

This project provided Aruba with an advanced real-time monitoring and control system for its revamped IT2 Arezzo Data Center. This was Aruba’s first data center, put into operation more than 15 years ago, covering approximately 2,000 square meters.

Cloud-Hosted SCADA with MQTT Gives Water Agency Faster Access to Data

This water utility in Michigan uses the Ignition platform to leverage MQTT and SCADA for water treatment plant monitoring and control.

Creating a High-Capacity Lab for COVID Testing in Just Nine Months

Ginkgo Bioworks built a new diagnostic sample-processing lab using the Ignition SCADA platform. See how to leverage a modern SCADA system in pharma applications.

Edge Computing and MQTT Help Uncrewed Vessels Gather Data from Oceans

XOCEAN is an Irish company with offices in the UK and Canada that has designed and developed a fleet of uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) to provide data collection services to surveyors, companies, and agencies globally. XOCEAN’s CyberDeck 2.0 system uses Ignition as its controls platform to create a web-based command and control interface for its fleet of USVs. The system allows XOCEAN to perform over-the-horizon operations with USVs in any marine location, and work with remote pilots in any location with internet access.

AWS, MQTT, Edge, and Perspective for Easy Government Compliance and Better Operations

With this new system, Roeslein Alternative Energy (RAE) can collect data from numerous locations and see all the data in one place. It’s now much easier to do compliance reporting, and data is also used to improve operations in several ways.

High-Performance HMI and Single User Interface for Minerals Division of Global Resources Leader

This project is a high-performance human-machine interface (HMI) which assists technicians at BHP’s Technology Remote Operations Centre (TROC) for Minerals Australia in monitoring and managing the status of critical technology infrastructure and components across the operations.

Single Platform Brings Greater Efficiency

This Ignition project encompasses all of the control for cheese manufacturing and retail cheese packaging at Meister Cheese, responsible for converting 225 million pounds of milk per year into final products. All of the automated processes from milk receiving through final packaging are included, and the project supports scheduling, traceability, and reporting systems that have streamlined manufacturing and back-office processes.

Greater Mobility for Large Battery Manufacturer in Italy

Quality assurance, progress reports, and product documentation were done through paperwork. The standard MES solution had a hard time connecting to equipment such as simple scales. It was also difficult to implement needed customizations. This all led to more time needed for data entry, delayed communication of issues, delayed solutions, and a lot of hardware to be maintained by the IT department.

Perspective and Edge for Better Results

Ennis-Flint contracted DSI to help automate the material flow process for each of its polymer-producing machines and record the data for reporting and material consumption. DSI has automated the facilities in Ennis, Texas; Richmond, Virginia; and Thomasville, North Carolina. Each facility has several mixing systems, with up to 20 independent raw-material feeders, along with tank farms, flow meters, weight scales, and agitators. Current plans include automatically sending recipe information from the company’s product development and ERP systems to enhance the end quality of the product and reduce the possibility of mistakes.