SafetyChain Exhibitor Demo: The SafetyChain Module for Ignition: Leveraging Real Time Data & Driving Productivity

Learn how process manufacturers are leveraging the power of SafetyChain & Ignition to drive meaningful value in their production environments. We’ll cover how manufacturers benefit from seamlessly connected systems and the broader impact that has on various segments of their operations. You’ll hear about a case study where thousands of data points derived from a complex manufacturing process were leveraged to drastically improve quality and production metrics. Finally, we will showcase how easy it is for manufacturers to connect SafetyChain and Ignition with a live demo.

Transcript:

00:01
Geoff Nelson: Glad you're here. Appreciate your time here to talk to us. We are here to talk to you about SafetyChain and our Ignition Module to help capture real-time data for a digital plant management system. My name is Geoff Nelson, I am the VP of Technical Solutions for SafetyChain Software. This is Jonathan.

00:21
Jonathan: Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I've been with SafetyChain a little over three years working as a Solution Engineer. But I primarily come from the food and beverage manufacturing industry. I spent over a decade working in a plant and SafetyChain is a plant management platform. So, I'm really excited to talk to you guys about the value that SafetyChain can bring and how we can leverage the Ignition Module.

00:49
Geoff Nelson: So, let's get into it. So, we will talk about SafetyChain, we'll give you some of our key applications where we kinda hit the plant management, plant floor, talk about digital transformation which I'm sure you're all pretty familiar with, give you a customer success story and then go into a demo. So, we'll try to get through these kinda quick so we can show you a demo and leave time for questions at the end. So, we are a digital plant management platform. We're a SaaS solution hosted in Microsoft Azure, we have native applications for Android, iOS and Windows and we help kinda pull everything together, the glue for the digital plant management platform. We are an alliance partner here with Inductive Automation and we will show you our module that we have.

01:35
Jonathan: All right. So, yeah, as Geoff's kinda said, we bring everything together. I like to think of us as kinda like a one-stop shop when it comes to plant management. And as you can see, everything here listed, these are some of the key use cases and applications that a lot of our customers use as and leverage in manufacturing. I'm not gonna go through the whole list, but we touch your whole process from shipping and receiving all the way to getting your product out the door. And primarily, we've come up in the food and beverage space, but we have had other applications outside of that. Now, as it relates to the Ignition Module, that specifically focuses on how we're capturing data for our customers.

02:13
Jonathan: So, with the Ignition Module, we can capture any data that's already mapped to their Ignition Gateway in SafetyChain. And SafetyChain is already a pre-built solution for you to extrapolate your data. You can aggregate that, graph it, trend it as you need. We could take for an example, temperature logs here listed right here. Instead of having a maintenance tech or operator go in and take hourly required check and write that down and put it away in a folder or binder, SafetyChain helps you digitize that process and take it a step further by automating it. So, with the module, we could set off a trigger where we're capturing that specific data tag on a specific routine or basis, or if there's a condition that needs to be met, we can trigger it as well. We have multiple ways of triggering that data collection point.

03:11
Geoff Nelson: So, like Jonathan said, these are the key areas of impact, what we do, it's pretty customizable. And so, you can build really your own process out within SafetyChain. And then he's highlighted here these blue ones as real-time, maybe ones that resonate more through Ignition. But then you can bring this data in and it can live next to all of these other impact areas as well.

03:36
Jonathan: So, again, I talked about my time in the plant. This slide kind of really illustrates the process around capturing data and using that data to further your continuous improvement efforts. SafetyChain is basically gonna help you do that and then the module's gonna help you also automate that. So, in SafetyChain, primarily you could collect data via a workstation or tablet. So, we're device-agnostic. You can use a Windows workstation, you can use an Android or iOS tablet. Typically, it's operators entering checks or maintenance guys entering their work orders, things of that nature. But you can also trend and track that data and find your opportunities for improvement, find your opportunities to save time and waste and then you gather insights and you act on that data. And as you're acting on that data, as I said, you're pushing your continuous improvement and you're pushing the bottom line so that ultimately you're growing as a company. That's what we try to help our customers and try to generate those success stories from helping them leverage that data.

04:41
Geoff Nelson: So, whether you're coming from paper and we're helping you create a digital process or you already have data being collected and you're just going to multi-site networked cloud solution, we help you come to ask questions that you didn't even realize you had because you're doing that CI, that continuous improvement, on your processes and on your data. So, I'm gonna tell you a little story about Egglife. So, I don't know who here is familiar with Egglife. They make the tortilla alternative out of egg so you can have tortillas that are made from egg. They took the Ignition Modules. They already were using SafetyChain, they had gone from a paper process to a digital process on their tablets. So, they're using tablets to gather information, they're gathering downtime, dwell time, temperatures, all sorts of information within SafetyChain and already performing analytics. Then, they moved to the Ignition Module because all of that data was available within Ignition but they still needed to collect the data for auditability, for compliance and for audits that come in. Now, they took about 12 manual processes. They had people going up to the machines or going up to the HMIs and collecting this data in a tablet.

05:55
Geoff Nelson: They moved it over to the Ignition Module and all this data's still being captured but in an automated way. So, they took 12 processes and automated them. So, that's people, that's time now that people aren't having to go walk up with a tablet and it's all within SafetyChain and they can still perform their analytics. It's all in the cloud and it's all stored long-term. So, an opportunity there for them to save time, save money. And then now, they can use those operators really to do something else more valuable than looking at a screen and collecting data. All right, now we're gonna jump into the demo. So, bear with me just for a second here. Okay. So, I am bringing up the module first and then we'll jump into SafetyChain. So, this is just an Ignition Gateway here which I'm sure you guys are all familiar with. We have a module that can be installed and it puts this SafetyChain piece here at the bottom. It's really easy, I mean, a few clicks to install a module and then you get your connections, your Form Collectors, your OEE Collectors and your Tag Collectors.

07:01
Geoff Nelson: This allows you to really grab any data that Ignition has access to and then put it into SafetyChain in different ways. So, I'm showing a Form Collector here and it'll make more sense when we start showing SafetyChain in a moment because we'll show you our Demo 1 tenant. I'm just gonna go into the kettle temps here and just show it to you real quick. And I am using this connection here at this site and connecting to a VM, so might be a little bit slow here. When this comes up, it gives you a user interface that allows for configuration to create an integration between Ignition and SafetyChain. So, Ignition has view into what SafetyChain data exists. So, we call these Forms. So, a person might be entering, writing on a piece of paper what their kettle temps are and then so we digitize that into a digital form within SafetyChain and then Ignition gets access to that. So, a user could come in here and access all of the forms that exist within SafetyChain, pull it into Ignition, set up a trigger, so when do I wanna send this data to SafetyChain? Do I want to do it time-based, every five minutes, every one minute? Do I wanna do it tag-based? So, if a temperature exceeds a certain value, does the dwell time exceed a certain value?

08:20
Geoff Nelson: Send this information to SafetyChain, there're different ways to do it. Do I wanna do it manually so you can actually script this execution? You can put it into a button and perspective revision into a screen, and then you map each of the fields. So, I can have my Kettle Temp 1, 2 and 3. I have which line is it coming off of. Average is a calculated value within SafetyChain, so I don't have to send it. The temps, the tags, the fields within SafetyChain have different sources. So, you can choose a tag, a static value, an expression. You can choose a data source which allows you to go to any data source that Ignition has access to. So, if you have a SqlConnection or something, you can then pump that data directly here through configuration. So, it allows you to really take, like we said, any of the data that Ignition has access to, package it and send it to SafetyChain. I'll show you one more. So, what this does is it pulls the SafetyChain context into Ignition. So, Ignition knows how to talk SafetyChain language. The other option that we have are tag and OEE Collectors which really just says, "Hey, give SafetyChain the tag," and then it will deal with it.

09:34
Geoff Nelson: So, here, it's not talking SafetyChain language, we're just sending, okay, this tag goes to SafetyChain and it is your in count or it is your out count so that SafetyChain can then track your downtime, it can track your throughput, your productivity. All we need to know is the tag, just send us the tag and we'll do the rest. So, in this context, all the business logic is in SafetyChain. In the Form Collector, the business logic is basically in Ignition but it allows you to really do the integration in whichever way is needed.

10:02
Jonathan: Yeah. And then we can visualize that. Once we have that data and we've set up all the configuration on the back end on the SafetyChain side, you can then see that visualization and reporting of your OEE and we're going to demonstrate that a little later as well.

10:15
Geoff Nelson: So, that's what we'll jump to now. So, that was the Ignition Module. So now, what does that look like in SafetyChain? So, this is what we call our reporting or our grid screen. It's just one click from the homepage to get here. And now, we can quickly start to see and visualize the data. So, all the data that comes in, whether it's from Ignition, from a user on their tablet or on their phone, on the PC app or even a web-based browser interface, they can put their data within SafetyChain and it all here lives together. So, if you wanna perform analytics, deep dive into the data, you can have your automated data right next to your manually collected data and start to make decisions. Once you come in and start to look at your data, so it looks like I am here looking really at our kettle temps. You can also start to then perform actions. So, you can create tasks to assign to users. So, for follow-up, you can trigger notifications. So, if this is out of compliance, you can also do verifications. So, you can create your own sign-offs and verifications within the system.

11:23
Geoff Nelson: So, if you're doing data verification, pre-shipment review, that all is done within SafetyChain. So, you can have your processes built out and start to see the digital plant management part of it. So, I'll just show here the verify and I don't know, Jonathan, this is your site more than mine. Is this data verifiable?

11:44
Jonathan: Yeah, for sure.

11:45
Geoff Nelson: Well, you see here, so we had Sign-off, Record Review, FS Coordinator and Pre-shipment Review. So, those are verifications that have been built into the system, it's just all configurable and this data then can be verified and it's all tracked historically, so who did what when is not alterable. So, a person would come in here, so I would be here with my user, I would go verify these. So, I'd select the ones that I wanna verify, I'd sign them and I would put my note and then all that's tracked historically and so all these... So, those records have been verified for that verification that I picked. Do you want to jump in here a little more...

12:26
Jonathan: Sure, yeah. While I'm doing that, as I said, I worked prior to SafetyChain in food and beverage space. How many people here have been a part of an audit before? Raise your hand if you've been a part of an audit. Was that fun as far as like getting prepared and...

12:49
Geoff Nelson: No.

12:49
Jonathan: No? Yes?

12:51
Geoff Nelson: Audits and fun.

12:52
Jonathan: I like to do audits on the weekends maybe. Yeah. So, one of SafetyChain's big claim to fame would be having our customers become 24/7 audit-ready. And I'm gonna show you our Programs feature as soon as I remember where the link is. Here we are. And yeah, I've been a part of a few audits myself prior to going through digital transformation. So, we're talking filing cabinets, we're talking binders, we're talking going through old emails and work orders, it can be a headache and it's usually across a few days. So, when I came to SafetyChain, I learned about our Programs feature. It really resonated with me coming from industry and I'm like, "I wish I had this back when I was on the other side of the desk." So, what SafetyChain can do, as Geoff said, is we do a lot of customization of our forms so that you can capture those and you have record and documentation of that for future purposes. You can link those back to your food safety or internal program and be able to be audit-ready at any notice. So, if you have multiple clauses, we'll look at our HACCP one right here.

14:18
Jonathan: I like to think of these as kinda like those binders but in digital form. You can see all of your forms that have been linked to that specific program so that if the auditor was to come in and say, "Hey, I need to see records from this date to this date for this specific clause," it's right there at a few clicks of your fingertips. So, you can see all the records, you can see all of your documentation, so that means any SOPs or work orders and instructions that you have already listed specific to those clauses and that program, you can put that in there and it's customizable. So, we're not just doing food safety, we're not just doing SQF or HACCP in this case, but we can do an internal program that's specific to your specific company guidelines. So, if you have an EHS program or safety program, if you have maybe a GMP audit that you do internally, you can set that all up and have that traceability in there as well.

15:14
Geoff Nelson: You could do, like he said, internal binders or maybe customer or auditor ones. So, if you build one specific to what an auditor might look for, you can do it that way. And instead of having a piece of paper or a single physical drawer or location, these digital binders or programs, you can have multiple assignments. So, that form that we looked at like the kettle temps or any of those ones that we build out can belong to multiple programs and it's just at that form level so then any of the data that comes in will go to all these. So, if you filter for... If it's in Master Sanitation and it's in Food Standard 9, the data will all exist there without further mapping. So, there's nothing you have to do after the initial configuration.

15:54
Jonathan: Right. So, as far as all of the prep work, you do most of the lift up front when you're doing your configuration, setting up your forms, storing your documents and then from there, as you're collecting your data, as you're going through your typical everyday work processes, it's automatically going to its right place as related to your program. So, these are just a couple examples in our demo environment. As you can see, you got your docs, your forms and then your records for a given time. You can go out longer. So, this is the date and time filter at the top. So, if you wanted to go back three months, you could do that and you'd have even more records there. Yeah. So, here we go with the same HACCP one that we were looking at. It's got 492 records and so if an auditor was to come here, walk in today and say, "I need to see your HACCP records," I can pull that up pretty easily. Should I go into OEE now?

17:00
Geoff Nelson: Yeah, let's do it.

17:00
Jonathan: All right. So, another one that's near and dear to my heart would be around line efficiency and OEE tracking. I spent some time as a production manager, so knowing how the lines are running on a given day, basis, knowing where your opportunity is to reduce downtime is a very big deal especially in the manufacturing space. And that's where our OEE module comes into play. So, with the Ignition Module, as Geoff said, we have the OEE collector and we can map those tags back to our OEE solution so that we can generate this right here. This is one of our main screens here, this is live monitoring. So, in real time, we're capturing those tags and the counts from the machines coming from the line and we could tell whether the line is up or down, we could tell how fast it's running and we could tell if we've made our plan for today or where we're at in regards to what we were scheduled to produce. So, very impactful.

18:02
Jonathan: We have different screens, we could look at a more abbreviated version as well where you don't see the graph and you just can see at a high level. It's green, that means it's running. If it's red, it's down. You can see what your current rate is, obviously, what your total downtime is right there and what your current OEE is for that specific run.

18:21
Geoff Nelson: And here, we're looking at a single line but this is made for a multi-line, even multi-site so you can look across locations, built for scalability to look. Yep, here we go. So, he's showing two lines now. And so in the slim view, you might look at multiple... There's different views even to make them even smaller. But you might put it up on a screen down at the plant floor, pull it up in your office, put it up on your phone at a different site to get you visibility into how you're performing. Are you currently down? Why were you down? Why are you not meeting your goals?

18:54
Jonathan: Right. Yeah, this is a lot more lines here now. So, yeah, this view kinda... I'd say like the supervisor, manager/operator view, so you can see specifically what's going on on your production floor from an OEE standpoint. And then from a reporting standpoint, we have some out-of-the-box reporting as well where you can focus in on how you're doing as a plant but also if you were looking at an enterprise view, how you're doing across all of your plants. As Geoff said, we're very scalable. So, if you had multiple plants, you could see how specific SKU was running across your different plants if they shared SKUs. This is the enterprise view right here. I need to go out in more time to skip data.

19:56
Jonathan: Here we are. So, you could see how each location is behaving, you could see how your shifts are trending, if you have one shift that's doing a little better than others, graveyard shift might be taking breaks when they're not supposed to, get your OEE by line and then also by SKU down here. And then another good one is our top five reasons like Pareto. So, figuring out where your biggest opportunities are from a downtime at the source and reason level. And then, we also have some customizable reporting as well in our report builder. So, even if you don't see exactly what you want here, odds are you can use the raw data to build that in SafetyChain as well. So, we have customers that wanna see something specific or specific tables, they're able to build that with the raw data that's being collected via the tags. All right, we are about 20 minutes in. Do you think we should take questions now or is there something else you wanted to show?

21:08
Geoff Nelson: Let's show... Can you show SPC real quick?

21:11
Jonathan: Oh, yeah... I'll let you do it.

21:13
Geoff Nelson: You know the data though, right?

21:15
Jonathan: You talking about the Ignition?

21:17
Geoff Nelson: Yeah.

21:18
Jonathan: Okay. Let me...

21:20
Geoff Nelson: So, like he's saying, this is all out-of-the-box functionality and we do have report builders so you can make customized reports and dashboards. Most of our system, almost everything also can be done through API too, so you can pull your data out into other systems. The Ignition Module allows those screens that we were just showing to be set up really within minutes with a couple of tags per line to get your in count, your out count or even just your in count will drive a lot of those screens. What he's pulling up now is an SPC dashboard just to show a little bit more analytics to the data that we pull in. Was there not one on the main screen?

22:03
Jonathan: I'm not seeing the ones that I built, but I'll probably use one of these other ones.

22:07
Geoff Nelson: This is our demo site like Jonathan said. So, we use... A lot of people use this site for a lot of different reasons and it may look a little different from time to time depending on maybe who we're demoing to. So, he's searching a little bit. I typically don't go in here, Jonathan does a little bit more than I do.

22:23
Jonathan: With my login, though.

22:25
Geoff Nelson: Oh, right, yeah. This is my login.

22:28
Jonathan: Let me change the secure profile.

22:30
Geoff Nelson: I don't know why my browser's doing that, that's weird. So, as you can tell, this is a part we didn't rehearse, guys. But you saw that chart before. We have a lot of out-of-the-box charts for your data to start populating. Is there one here? Hold on a second, this mouse works. Does this one work?

23:01
Jonathan: I haven't seen that one...

23:05
Geoff Nelson: Well, this is what I get for doing this. But you can build SPC charts that will show up on a dashboard. You can also have ones that will show up on the tablets. So, when a user's entering their data, as soon as they hit submit on the form, it'll pop up the SPC chart to show you how data has been doing across the line or the shift or the day and it could be paired with the Ignition data too. So, if you wanted them to be paired, they could be paired. And then what we're trying to show here too is kinda the plant management piece. We showed you verifications on your data, we show all the data that exists, the forms you can create. Those are all customizable. We also have ones that are kind of what you see over and over again like our OEE and production ones. Those are pretty basic. I mean, they're kind of a template or standard that we do over and over again. We showed you programs so you can collect your data and be audit-ready. We showed you the OEE and productivity screens and... Oh, here we go.

24:09
Jonathan: This is what I was looking for. Okay.

24:10
Geoff Nelson: This is what he was looking for and some SPC charts so the data can come in, you can be looking at your control limits. So, we have compliance, whether a value is in or out of compliance, so pass or fail and then we also have SPC control limits which are different. Are you in control for your process? We have alarming and alerting for different rule violations. So, you can see here the different rules you might violate. This data looks pretty good, so it's not really violating anything. A little bit crazy stuff. But a lot of out-of-the-box SPC charts, some reports and then you can build your own, customize like Jonathan said. So, with that, I think we will turn over for any questions. Yeah, back there.

24:51
Audience Member 1: First question, how does the licensing work on the module?

25:00
Geoff Nelson: Good question. Adam, do you wanna answer that? No. The module itself in the showcase is free. So, the module itself is free. And then in SafetyChain, we build into the licensing. We license by location, not by user. So, a specific location can have as many users. And then whatever you're purchasing is kinda how we do the cost. So, integrations typically has a cost to it. I think right now we're doing a deal on the IoT piece. Is that right, Adam?

25:27
Adam: Yep. Correct.

25:28
Geoff Nelson: So, if you... Till the end of the year, for now, I think it's a year free on the IoT piece. So, you would just be paying for SafetyChain on a per-location basis.

25:38
Geoff Nelson: Right now, our Ignition Module is sending data from Ignition to SafetyChain. We are frequently enhancing it, but we do not do bidirectional in the module. However, we do have APIs that can do just about anything. So, if you wanted to customize some work, you could pull any data down, record data, you could do tasks, really just anything. Not native embedding of a specific chart but this is all web-based. So, if you could embed a web page or like a browser framed, you could do that. But otherwise, the charts won't embed themselves. No. Was there a question over here? Yeah.

26:15
Geoff Nelson: So, your question was, basically can another system trigger events within SafetyChain? Is that right? The answer is yes, it can. And there are two ways really to do that. One, like I said, we have APIs that can do just about anything and you could call our either Task or Record API to create actions in SafetyChain. So, you could assign a task to a person to go do some work based on whatever other system was doing. The second one is, through Ignition, you could create a record in SafetyChain and that record could be tied to what we call a dynamic flow that says, "Hey, go do another thing." So, based on whatever you send us, we configure in SafetyChain somebody else to do whatever the work is. So, depending on whatever your use case is. So, yeah, you could definitely do that.

26:57
Geoff Nelson: Are the forms dynamic? Absolutely. Yeah, they're dynamic, customizable. So, you create your own from scratch. You can have fields that are hidden and dependent on values of previous fields. So, it's very customizable and dynamic. Yeah. Are the forms developed by a developer? No. So, it is a user interface where a power user would go in and create their form. Really the requirement there would be on change management, so deciding who has the power to go create forms. Because once you release it, that's it, everybody gets it. So, if you cause a problem or something that users didn't expect, then you'll hear about it. But yeah, it's a user interface for you to drag and drop fields and configure them. Yeah.

27:36
Geoff Nelson: Is there an enterprise piece? Yeah. So, that goes with how you wanna do your roles and permissions. So, you can choose a certain level of user that has access to edit and create forms and then nobody else has access. So, at an enterprise level, you could say, yeah, this is a group that we've created, maybe you pick a person per site or a region or however you wanna manage it and then... Yes, then they would be able to edit. And then you could even have a different set that can release them which means now that people can go use them.

28:02
Geoff Nelson: Good question. So, in the downtime, reasons are configurable. So, you would configure them in SafetyChain, so which options you have available to you and then users can come into that screen that we showed and just select the reason for it. So, you can do a category, you can do a source then you can do a reason.

28:17
Jonathan: Right. And there's a free text portion as well if you need to add more information and detail.

28:22
Audience Member 2: You said you were getting that... Does your tag fill that out?

28:26
Geoff Nelson: You can in our downtime tracking with our automated downtime tracking, you can do that. Yeah. And I think we're just about out of time here. Was there one more back there? Yeah.

28:35
Audience Member 3: Does it have access to if a user enroll info from like Azure Active Directory or Ignition?

28:44
Geoff Nelson: We do have SSO available. It's SAML 2 or OpenID Connect is what we support. So, yeah, Azure, Okta. I mean, just about any of them. Yeah. Last one here. Last one.

28:55
Audience Member 4: So, you said you have these apps, mobile app as well. So, if we are performing audits and on the shop floor, there's no internet connectivity, do we have like saving in offline...

29:04
Geoff Nelson: We do have offline mode and then when connection's restored, it will push back up. Yeah. So, on those native apps, it's offline mode. So, when you go down, it'll store it. Okay. I think that's all the time we have here. Thanks, everybody.

29:14
Jonathan: Thank you, everyone.