Kanoa MES is a modern Smart Manufacturing solution designed in and for Ignition. Learn about the Kanoa MES Modules, Kanoa MES Database, and Kanoa APP Ignition project you'll use to get started with Kanoa MES. Check out a live demo of Kanoa Ops and Kanoa Quality to see how you can configure your MES in days and get insights into your manufacturing data with ease.

Transcript:

00:01
Jason: I'd like to start by thanking you all for coming today to hear what it is we're doing at Kanoa, and thank Inductive for creating Ignition, for creating this incredible platform that has allowed us all to do the amazing things that we're doing today. In 2018, we formed Kanoa to help companies implement Ignition-based MES solutions with a bent on project management, lean Six Sigma solutions, and change management to help them drive continuous improvement. We'd seen way too many projects fail, and not because of software, but because of people's failure to transition. And it seemed that most companies were so focused on the digital transformation part and the implementation of software that they really hadn't spent any time on the people side of making sure that these projects were successful. So for us, selling MES software and solutions is a really poor business model if companies do not get value out of the solutions that we're implementing. So we really do focus, we come in for companies here. If it's your first time implementing an MES solution, we're going to work with you. Once you've got a proven track record, you've rolled this one out, you've done your pilots, you've got production lines, and people are actually deriving value from it, then knock yourselves out, you can carry on, you can use this as much or as little as you want.

01:33
Jason: MES applications are not trivial, and there's a fair amount of customization that has to take place. What we found over the years was really the difficulty in keeping up with the constant pace of a release train. I mean, every few months or every five weeks, they keep changing, they keep adding to it, and we have gone through so many refactors, we all have. We went from... Well, we started on 7.5, then 7.9 to 8.1 was a refactor vision to perspective, a huge one. Then we started changing expression tags to reference tags to take advantage of MQTT. And this is none of this is a bad thing. It's a constant evolution. But we have constantly had to keep reinventing ourselves to remain relevant. And because of that customization and the constant change, we found that some customers ended up potentially throwing away their solution, and starting again every time with the big changes. So in 2020, we decided to take a fresh look at what an MES solution or platform should be. And from what we've learned over the years, keeping the good and replacing the bad. So for a while now, we've been touting MES for masses. This is not a communist manifesto, but it's more of a guiding principle that really drives the products that we develop, in a sense, do I press or do you?

03:03
Jason: You got, amazing technology, go, it should be affordable. And we follow because of this, we follow the same licensing model as Ignition. It works for them, nobody books at the cost of Ignition. And the Ignition platform has been so flexible, in the sense that you could throw everything on a single server, every single one of your sites, your enterprises, your assets, run it up in the cloud, and you could have Edge devices pushing it up, but you could also distribute it. At the end of the day, the architecture that you're going to use is going to be driven by whatever constraints, whatever requirements of the applications you're building. In that vein, we said, let's follow what Ignition does, if you truly want to have an MES cloud server. And we think that's a great idea. Everything it has to connect to ERP systems is up in the cloud. Why not have a connectivity up there and use MQTT and Edge devices to push it up? It should be accessible. And that's a fairly easy thing to do because we are building modules exclusively for Ignition, and their licensing of unlimited users, unlimited tags, has been a game changer since 2010 when I first started using it.

04:17
Jason: If you're going to drive continuous improvement, you want everybody inside your corporation, your company, to have access to the information that's going to allow them to drive continuous change. It should be intuitive, moving to perspective. We absolutely love this because we can really make the user interface intuitive. And quite frankly, if you look at Amazon or Google, any of those companies, we use them every day. Nobody has ever read the user manual to be able to buy something on there. We kind of feel the same. Yes, there are aspects of MES that might be a little bit more specific, but if you use the same interfaces that people are using on their phones, if you give it to them in the same devices, it can be on a computer, a tablet, or a phone, then we can make it intuitive. And if it's intuitive, people will use it. And it has to have value. Value is in turning data into information. So when we built Kanoa MES, we started from the ground. We started with data. Data is the most essential part of it. So we built a third form, normalized database schema that stores the data, and it's open, and it's accessible.

05:34
Jason: So we build our APIs, our system functions that will interact with that database. They will give you the analysis, and it's lightning fast, and it's the smallest footprint that has data integrity and constraints. But you can also call those same stored procedures if you want to share it with Power BI, or Tableau, or an ERP system, or SSRS reports, it really doesn't matter. But you build from the data, you get value.

06:01
Jason: And then finally, it has to remain relevant. Keeping up with Ignition release train is like trying to board a train that's got no doors. You're never going to do it, and that may sound like a bad thing, but consider what Ignition gives us with this release train. They keep us relevant. They keep us on top with the newest technologies. They ensure that security matters are handled. They've given us MQTT, they've given us Kafka. I still don't know what Kafka is, but they've given it to us. And that's what Ignition does. So in this journey, we've got to keep abreast of the train. So whatever solution you're building here, it's got to be relevant, and it's got to be upgradable. So we, in our design, have ensured that our modules and our implementation have the lowest coupling with Ignition, because they're going to make changes anyway. We want you guys to be able to update with impunity and not fear that you're going to be held back by using our solution. Now, having said that, give us a chance to check under the hood of 8.3 before you upgrade. But with that, that's enough about words. I'm going to hand it over to Sam. He'll show you around. Thank you.

07:12
Sam: Yeah, thanks, Jason. So, really, all of those design ethos that Jason is talking about has culminated into the Kanoa MES platform that we have built. This configurable, flexible, intuitive MES software that is really meant to empower teams and drive continuous improvements. Because we are not doing MES just because it's fun, even though it is for some of us, but we are doing it to really improve processes and make plants run better. So when you get Kanoa MES, there are three components that you get every single time to make sure that you are starting from a strong foundation. You get the Kanoa MES database, that third form normalized database schema that Jason was just talking about. That is where all of that core key MES data is stored, as well as all of your configurations. You get our Kanoa MES modules that plug into Ignition and give you almost 400 new system functions to go and call the data that you need from that database. And very importantly, you get the Kanoa app Ignition project. This project is designed to give you a starting point with all of your configuration and analysis and daily operation tools that you need to get started with an MES from day one and continue to expand, customize, and tweak that application using the power of Ignition to make sure it can fit your application.

08:30
Sam: There are three modules that we sell over at Kanoa, actually, I guess two that we sell, but three that we make. Kanoa Core comes with any other module that you get because that has a lot of those core functionalities that you're just going to need for any smart manufacturing system. Theming, languages, security, all of that is in our core level and is shared across all other modules in Kanoa. But really, the two things that we're here to look at today are Kanoa Ops and Kanoa Quality. Kanoa Ops is going to be your system for OEE, work order management, asset management, scheduling, and shifts, and all the analysis that comes along with that. And then Kanoa Quality is a pretty unique offering in that this is a form design and dispatching tool that also gives you the tools that you need to analyze the data that you got from those quality forms. All again designed within the Ignition application. So, I am going to try to do the fastest demo I have ever done in 15 minutes and try to give you all enough time for questions at the end. But I do plan to do a webinar within the next two weeks after ICC to do a more thorough one-hour demo.

09:32
Sam: So if you like what you see here, definitely come and keep track of our LinkedIn page and our website to get more information on that. But without any further ado, here is our Kanoa Ops system. So as I mentioned, we do have two modules, Kanoa Ops and Kanoa Quality. You can get them together, you can get them totally separate. I'm going to start with Ops and then do Quality second. So let's kind of go through the day in the life of a production operator and the way that you could be using our Kanoa Ops platform. We'll start with looking at our work orders, scheduling some work, running that work in production on a line, and then getting some of the data afterwards. Then we'll actually peek into the configuration as well. So if I'm going to go ahead and manage my work orders, I need some interface for actually downloading all of those production orders. This can be downloaded from an ERP. They could be made right here in Kanoa MES. You are just picking the work order name the material that you need to run and how much of it you need to produce.

10:31
Sam: Once you have all that, you need to actually schedule that work on a line. So we have our operations schedule here, where you can actually see we're taking advantage of the BIJC calendar component that we do include with any Kanoa purchase. And this lets us do all sorts of things like create non-production events with certain recurring rules and things like that. Really fantastic tool to help manage all of these schedules. We have our normal production schedule here, but I can also do things like pop open our work order list, drag and drop a new work order into our timeline. The system's going to go, see what material you're running, see the appropriate rate that it runs on that line, and schedule it for the proper amount of time, which I'm then going to delete before it tries to run two work orders at once. The other thing that we have in here is our shift scheduling. So our shift scheduling is really cool. What it gives you the ability to do is to define shifts at any level in the hierarchy, and an asset will look for its closest parent with a shift. So if your whole plant runs on a four shift complex rotation pattern, except for the packaging area that runs in a different shift schedule, you can manage that very easily within Kanoa.

11:38
Sam: So we have our work orders, we've scheduled that work on a line, we have all of our shift data, we're going to track our data within the context of those shifts. Now it's time to actually open up one of these lines and get some work done. So from here, you can see our main enterprise overview page. You'll notice a couple of things here. So we're kind of following an ISA-95 style hierarchy with our enterprises at the top, a number of sites with areas, and then OEE enabled assets underneath them. We like to say we're ISA 95 inspired but not restrictive. So if you wanted to have, say, a business unit layer and organize all of your sites into business units between your enterprise and your site, go for it. We totally enable all of that. We want to have a site in an enterprise, but besides that, we're really flexible. So I can click into my production area here and get a summary of how all of my production lines in this area are currently running. We can see we got a little bit of an issue over here on Pac Line 1, and our other lines are running at various degrees.

12:35
Sam: I can go ahead and click into Bake Line 2 here and get to what we call our asset Operations screen. The idea of this screen is that every BIM operator that is responsible for this piece of equipment, everything that I need to run it is right here within this interface. I can see my current production modes and states. I can go into my run control and manually override my mode to say we need to go into a changeover.

13:00
Sam: I could manually select another work order or another product that I need to run from here. I can also go ahead and check things like the schedule right here from this interface. And then one of the very common things is, of course, to go and check on all of my downtimes. So I'm going to go and say, what were all of my downtime codes over the last seven days? And then from an interface like this, I can always double-click into one. I can recode things, I can add comments, I can add, delete, or change downtimes that we have recorded. Again, we like to collect all this data automatically and perfectly whenever we can, but there are plenty of times you need to do some manual work afterward too.

13:38
Sam: One other report that I'll show really quickly is our run review. So, this is really critical in letting you kind of see all of those production events that have gone through a certain asset. So what I'm pulling up here is we can see I've done three production runs on this line. It's breaking them up by shift and I'm getting certain metrics like their total runtime minutes, their OEE downtime minutes, all here from this screen. So another type of... We also have some more complex analyses. I'll pull up our downtime report as one example, taking advantage of some of the Apex charts here. Thanks again, Travis and the Ignition team for helping prepare all that. We can see all of our downtime by category, by state, and reason, broken out and seeing how it distributes by shift. I can do a stacked bar chart of my total downtime by reason, by day, and down here at the bottom, I can put it all into a table with a handy little export to Excel button. 'Cause I can make you the greatest dashboard in the world. And what's the first thing that you're going to ask me? How do I download it to Excel? I'll take it.

14:44
Sam: I'll take it. So again, in the fastest demo ever, I also want to quickly show you some of the configuration about this because one of the coolest things about Kanoa is again, everything I'm showing you here, you just get in that starter project that we are going to give you, including all of these configuration tools that you need to get you a significant amount of the way into your MES implementation. So you can see over here, I have my asset hierarchy. I can drill into a site and an area. I can click into a specific line and see I have this OEE enabled. You say, something's OEE enabled, we're going to go ahead. We drop a UDT into the ignition designer. And that's where you're wiring up your points. Another interesting thing to note is that everything I've shown you here runs off of three tags per piece of equipment. Give me your Infeed count, your Outfeed count, and your state. Everything else is configured over here in the Kanoa app. And granted, I know it can get more complicated than that. There's a lot of ways that you can make it more complicated than that.

15:41
Sam: But you can get all of this with just three pieces of data per piece of equipment. We have things like modes and states, where I'm designating all of the modes that are appropriate for this, and our state list where I am associating specific states with an asset, giving it a PLC code. That's how we're tracking all of your downtime. But it's really great that all of this is right here, configurable in the app with handy, intuitive tools. I can come in here, we can drag and drop this mix line into Jacksonville Juices if you want. It'll let us do all of that on the fly. So drag and drop assets, rename things. All of your data goes along with you. It happens all live. So that is a very quick preview of Kanoa Ops. Let's totally switch gears here and talk a little bit more about Kanoa Quality. So Kanoa Quality is all about paper on glass, right? You're running around with a bunch of check sheets today. You need to move that into a digital system to not only just get that paper off the shop floor, make that data more real-time, but also as we're moving these systems into digital platforms, we can establish more accountability.

16:46
Sam: We have this sense of a state of each of your check sheets. We're tracking the state of these as they go through. So check sheets can become overdue or missed, and we can flag operations and management teams when the sheets aren't getting done the way they need to get done. And that starts with our main overview schedule. Here you can see I have one approved test in my queue. I have four missed tests. Let's go and just do one of those missed tests, a little bit late. I'll double-click into this. I can even get a little bit bigger because again, we're just using Perspective for all of this. That's an important point I'll mention is that all of this is built in Perspective and none of this is using custom components. We are just using regular Perspective components that we are providing to you in that open starter project. So we're going to take advantage of Ignition's inheritance features. You're going to make new projects that inherit our projects where you can then override screens, make your own screens, all with our examples that you can build from. So I'm going to come in here, we're going to do a couple of checks to make sure that we can switch over this packaging.

17:49
Sam: Our area is clear of debris. Our machine is shut off. I'm going to take out my rye bread packaging and it's going to weigh 566 pounds. I'm going to put in our next wheat bread packaging. Notice this control limit up here as I put in something that's 625 pounds, and that gets flagged as orange in our little progress bar and in our control limits. I do a final checklist to say yes, my tooling is out of there and yes, my machine is turned back on. I do a final check to make sure that all of this data is the way that I want it and I go ahead and submit. So that was a very manual test. It doesn't always need to be that way. We can get data automatically from PLCs. We can get data and do run quality checks that don't have any manual data. And it's more like an event-based historian. The advantage of doing that is that we get all of that data into Kanoa Quality and then we can run our analysis on it. So I'm going to come into something like our fermentation temperature check, where I believe every 20 minutes this goes and collects three points out of our simulator and spits it back out here into this report.

18:52
Sam: Notice how quick that just happened. Right? Let's actually do for all of the data for this month in September, grab those three data points collected every 20 minutes, go get the data. It's done. That's the power of this database that we have in the background that's storing all this information. I can click into one of these zone temperatures, and I can chart that. This is where all of our SPC comes in. I can pick our Nelson rules. I can apply all of those. I can see my rule two violations, my threes. I can put it all in a histogram too.

19:19
Sam: Now, like ops, one of the most powerful things about this is, you don't need to go into the Ignition designer to do almost anything that I've shown you here. The only thing that you would need to do is to make certain tags available to the quality system so that you can just tie them in and get automated data. But the rest of this form design is done here in the app. If I come into our Kanoa quality configuration and look at our check sheets, I can take a look at that packaging changeover that we were doing earlier.

19:48
Sam: We can see things like if it's enabled, if this requires a sign off, if it's only appropriate for certain assets in my hierarchy, I can go into the checks themselves. And here is my machine shutoff check where you can see it's a string where I can add in specific instructions for my operators, where we can create a pick list of what shows up for them to be able to enter. The whole idea here being your quality managers and the ones that are making these forms, not necessarily the people that you want in your Ignition projects every day, they need a different interface to go in, add more instructions, tweak checks as things change. And that is why we give them this interface here. In addition to that SBC data and the configuration here, we did also talk about kind of the efficacy of the checks as well. So I can also do my check summary and by check sheet I can see how many are getting missed, how many are getting approved. I could put this on a shift heat map to see if there are certain shifts that are not doing the test they need to on time, again driving that continuous improvement and really trying to drive accountability around a lot of this data.

20:53
Sam: So I did it. That was a very quick demo. The one other thing that I will show really quick, 'cause I actually even have a little bit of extra time, is I didn't really get to talk too much about some of those Kanoa core functions that you get within every application. And there's three main things that you really get. One is over here and that we do have multi-language support. We are just using the embedded Ignition translation engines that you have in there. So we do have a couple of languages out of the box, though I've heard our Korean is terrible. We also have all of our themes in here. Jason would not let me do this presentation in grape, despite how bad I wanted to. These are also totally configurable. So you are totally welcome to go ahead and brand this for what you need for your specific company. And I will shift this back to blue before I go and show you the other main thing that you get out of the core modules, which is our security. So we're still using Ignition for all of your authentication, but we do add an extra layer of security here in Kanoa, just because the roles and permissions that you need in MES are a little bit different.

21:56
Sam: But we're doing it using things that you're all used to. We have our individual users that you put into groups. You give certain permissions to people in those groups, and you could do all of this by asset too. So I could be a manager for the packaging area, but just an operator somewhere else if I want to. So there's a lot of other exciting things that we have built or are building in the Kanoa Ops and quality platforms. We do have a mobile solution for Kanoa Quality if you wanted to run all of those checks on your phone with a slightly different interface. We do have a new dashboard editor as well as we are making new widgets to give people the capability to design their own MES dashboards. And we are also introducing lot tracking as a free upgrade in Kanoa Ops very, very soon. So we just need to upgrade some of the UX for it. The bones of it are all there and working, but it's really exciting to see that we can now have lot tracking and track traceability within our OEE solution, so that all of our counts are going to match up and all of those production orders and the tracking is all synced with a single source of truth.

23:02
Sam: So, again, that was a very fast demo. Keep an eye on our website and our LinkedIn if you wanna get more information on a webinar coming up soon. We do have a booth upstairs, but now is a great time for questions if anybody has anything they wanna ask us.

23:17
Audience Member 1: Can you talk about ERP integration?

23:20
Sam: Can we talk... The question is... Sorry, I'm gonna repeat it just 'cause I know there are some mics going around in the live stream. The question is, can we talk more about ERP integration? So, yes, we do a lot of ERP integration into these systems very frequently. Two of the most common points would be downloading all of those work orders that you have from an ERP into your MES. We can download them into the work order table and then have you schedule them manually, or we can fully schedule all of that work as well. The other one would be around material, something I didn't go through in the demo today, where we can download all of the materials that you run on your lines and then associate specific materials to specific assets with the rates that they are expected to run at, Jason you wanna talk more about that?

24:01
Jason: Yeah. Just to add, in terms of the interfaces, we can use all the tools that Ignition provides. So we can use web dev module for web services, you can use the Sepasoft one. If you wanna use the SAP business connector, it's really entirely up to you. Generally, we will do a RESTful API and then just have the ERP system pushing production orders down. If they push down a production order that's got the item, the item doesn't exist in our system, we will create it. If they then wanna put information about a start and end date for an item or an asset, we will create the association that this item can run on this asset. We'll give it default information. Every ERP integration that we've done is different. There are different business rules, so you've got to have that flexibility. But certainly, yes, web services are favored. We've done flat files. Hate doing flat files. Done middleware tables as well. Not really happy with those either. It's always funny when you have these digital transformation projects, they talk about everything they're going to do and then they're saying, yes, you can open this flat file and get the data out of it.

25:00
Sam: Great question. Any other questions? Yeah, right there.

25:06
Audience Member 2: So does the Kanoa Quality Module provide mechanisms to have a, say, PDF or image or something like that that is a helping guide in addition to the instructions and text?

25:16
Jason: Yes.

25:20
Sam: Yeah, sure.

25:20
Jason: Yeah. And again, everything that we've shown you here is we made a conscious choice. These are just Ignition perspective components. We've seen too many times where you'll get like a really complex component which doesn't allow for customization. So you can look at our views in here. If you're going to start like a production order, you're going to take a quality check, but you wanna have the operator do an additional step. I mean, you can go in, you can add, you can see how we're doing it in the background. They've got the PDF viewer, they've got the iFrame. So again, with every company you're going into is saying, sure, it'd be great to give them work instructions. Where do you store them? Is it in SharePoint? Is it on a network drive? How do you want to do it? We also add support for images. So particularly on the phone, we've now got it where people can take a quality check and it's saying, take a picture of a weld. From here we can use the phone, it will capture it. We store it as a blob in a database or we can push it out. All of that stuff is the customization.

26:13
Jason: What we're giving you here is not going to be 100% solution. It never is, but it gives you 80% of the way there. It's a fully functioning application. It's on you guys now to extend it as you see fit. And as you're doing that, if you find that there's stuff that you want, you see that you need, you can talk to us. Absolutely. If it's out of left field, we'll say, that's all on you. But if we look at it and say, that's actually really good for the product, that makes sense. Absolutely. The more we can get into the product, the better it is for us and for you. Because ultimately, what we're focusing on here is building a product that we can support for the long term. We have documentation, we have training, and we're going to make sure it's a supported product so that you guys don't have to.

26:58
Sam: Yeah, great question. I see one in the back over there. Yeah.

27:02
Audience Member 3: Is there like an API library for scheduling something like automatic work order stops and starts, or doing like, basically, you know, automated sample collection on the machine?

27:11
Jason: Yes.

27:11
Sam: Yeah, so the question was. Sorry, the question was about the API hooks that you have and kind of how you can build your own things with the API. Jason, yes.

27:18
Jason: Yes, I said we got 380 functions there, so absolutely, you can build your solutions in there. Everything that we do through here is going to be calling one of those system functions. So we can be called from a tag. You could stick it on the end of a web service call if you wanna do it from another system. However, that data is in there. But yeah, everything's through an API.

27:37
Sam: Yeah, but like for example, that downtime report that we do, there is a system.Kanoa of.events.getdowntime events for this asset with this start date, this end date. And yes, there's a lot of other variables you can kind of put into there. But yeah, we're giving you 400 system functions like that to put in and retrieve data from that database.

27:53
Jason: Let's have Dan. And we were promised a mic runner. Where's our mic runner? All right. Okay.

28:00
Audience Member 4: Hey, Jason, is this available as a trial?

28:03
Jason: Yes. Yeah, I mean it's just modules, so it works exactly the same, as Ignition, but you can do trial license. We actually think we do one better. One of the things here is that there's work and effort involved in getting the modules and getting it up and running. We'll just give you a container. So we've got a bunch of Linux cloud containers. We can run eight docker containers all running at the same time. So we'll actually get it where it's configured, it's set up for you. You can get in there and the design it, you can play with it and try it out. And if you do want to like an extended period, we can give an extended period trial license.

28:38
Sam: Yep.

28:39
Audience Member 4: Please.

28:41
Sam: But no, definitely those for the, the integrators and the people that just kind of wanna try this stuff out. Those containers are a really fast way to get onboarded. You meet with us, I kind of show you some of the basics and setups, and we kind of go through a basic configuration and then you usually have it for two weeks to show it with your teams and start to play around and see if it's going to be the right thing for you. So, if you are interested in something like that again, you can reach out to us, booth, website, however you want to. And we're happy to schedule some time to get you connected with one of those. Any other questions?

29:13
Audience Member 5: I saw that the quality module looked really good. We do a lot of that with our shop orders. So would I need both modules to essentially execute an order that collects a lot of data?

29:24
Jason: Yeah, actually, I can take this one. So when we built them separately, because there are a lot of people, they already have their own MES solution. They want a quality one. That's saying one of the things that we can do is everything through our APIs forget... Ethan, I didn't recognize you there. Nice to see you, man. So you can create a view table of assets. You could do it for work orders. You could pump it in if you didn't wanna use it at the same time here. If you're going to use quality in here, but you wanna configure assets and stuff. Yeah, we can absolutely figure that out.

29:54
Sam: Yeah, in the front.

29:55
Audience Member 6: So one of the things you guys started out with was providing a full solution. Not that this isn't. But to go from a great piece of software to return on investment. How are you guys tackling that?

30:09
Sam: Yeah, so we do think that... So I think this is our last question. I've just got flagged for. But it's actually a really great one. Because that was, as you said, that was a big part of our philosophy that we're not doing this for fun, as much fun as we find it, oddly. But we wanna drive continuous improvement. The software only gets you there so far. A lot of it is then around adoption and change management and actually intentionally doing continuous improvement. So a lot of what we think we're kind of trying to provide in this software is something again that kind of is intuitive, that with minimal training people can go in and actually be using, which we know is a huge adoption hurdle for a lot of these systems. That's why we really wanted to embrace things like language support, which I also think is a hugely important hurdle that we wanna be able to cross over. But then really a lot of it is also kind of just whether it be through Kanoa or the teams managing the projects or a trusted integrator or consultant really working with that end user to talk about their continuous improvement goals and how they're going to achieve them and having an intentional plan to do so.

31:08
Jason: Yeah. And to add to that, still the same last question. It's the nature of the beast of MES. Every implementation is going to have different challenges. So you can go into a company where they've really got their stuff together and they don't need any. They've got it figured out. But you've got the other companies where you need like it's the connections to PLCs, the manual lines is a real part of the data collection, which is going to be a challenge. We go in, we always talk about an engineering study, but it's a collection of meetings that go over the first week of in there where we're first off, we'll do education. So we're PMPs, we're lean, Six Sigma certified. We've been doing this for a really long time. We know the pitfalls and we know the risks of MES projects. We'll start off with half a day of education with all the stakeholders from everyone from operations, maintenance, quality, IT, finance, planning to basically discuss. And we've done this to various levels of degrees of success in that some companies have actually after that training, they've just stopped because they said we realized we weren't ready as an organization, we are not ready and it's a waste of time.

32:17
Jason: You have the other ones who they say, "I hear what you're saying, Jason, just write the software." It's like, seriously. So we can, we'll provide changes, whatever it's needed there. We'll do change management, we will help. We say, you need a project chart. So you certainly need a vision for what it is you're doing. You need a cross functional team. You need stakeholder agreeing and buyin. And let's figure out who's being affected by this one. Let's create a process map of what your existing systems are, because we're going to be deprecating some of those in here by the very nature of that act. That's where you start to actually uncover areas for continuous improvement just in implementing.

32:53
Sam: That's a great question to end on. Thank you all so much.

32:55
Jason: Thank you.

Eurotech will showcase the benefits of running Ignition on an ISA62443-4-2 certified device. This demonstration will highlight how Eurotech's advanced device management capabilities can simplify the process for OT systems integrators to securely manage applications remotely. Attendees will gain insights into how the integration of Eurotech's ReliaCOR 40-13 Industrial PC with Ignition software provides a robust and cybersecure foundation for industrial applications. This collaboration not only meets stringent cybersecurity standards but also enhances the efficiency and scalability.

Transcript:

00:06
David Bader: My name is David Bader. I lead business development for a company called Eurotech. Has anybody heard of Eurotech before? A few? Yep. So I've been with Eurotech for about a year. There's, I'm the least I have the least longevity with Eurotech, even for companies that are not Eurotech. There's a lot of Eurotech employees and other companies here as well. Dave.

00:21
David Woodard: So I'm David Woodard. I'm a Solutions Architect with Eurotech. I've been here a bit longer. I've been with the company for 11 years and have been in IoT and industrial automation for probably closer to 15. So pleasure to be here.

00:36
David Bader: Yeah, I beat him out in the longevity of being in the business for sure. So I've been doing automation for 40 plus years now. So I've been involved in systems integration and distribution. I worked for AWS for a short time and led robotics for AWS for a while. The idea of coming to Eurotech was to be able to bring that kind of security level that AWS and the other cloud providers offer in the cloud down to the edge. So Eurotech is, if there's one thing that you take from this, it's that Eurotech is a company that provides enablement at the edge, right? So we provide a secure way to orchestrate and maintain your systems kind of at the edge. And we're gonna talk a lot about cybersecurity today. There's two themes, overall themes, that we that we kind of talk about from Eurotech. It's cybersecurity and the ability for systems integrators and OT providers to be able to uplift your cybersecurity posture in an area where we normally would turn that over to IT, right? So the concept is if we can provide the IT level of cybersecurity down to the OT space, that's kind of gonna be the theme that we're gonna talk a little bit about.

01:55
David Bader: And then the other one is to maintain kind of a secure remote access and remote device connectivity, right? So being able to do things that you normally would do by plugging into the device remotely, but in a secure manner, right? So being able to do VPNs that have the IT kind of functionality that you would expect from an IT perspective. So I'm pretty informal. If people have something that's genuinely on your mind, say it, but we are gonna have some questions and answers at the end. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Eurotech does and where we are from a... why cybersecurity is super important. And I'm gonna it over to Dave at the end, that he's going to talk about this brand new cybersecurity wizard that we're introducing here for the very first time. So you guys, the very first time you're, hearing anybody's hearing about this. Dave's going to do a demo on that.

02:49
David Bader: So Eurotech's been around for 30 plus years. We're headquartered in a small town in Amaro, Italy, which is in the Northeast part of Italy, all the way up near...

03:00
David Woodard: Austria.

03:00
David Bader: Austria. Thank you.

03:01
David Woodard: Never think of it.

03:05
David Bader: We have operations in the U.S., we have a bunch of people in the U.S., we have people in Canada and all. So some of the things that we've kind of been known for over time way back in the beginning of the, of the Eurotech history, we kind of worked with some people people that worked for Eurotech at the time developed a small protocol called MQTT. Anybody heard of MQTT, right? Yeah. There's a few people that certainly know MQTT, right. So over time we've kind of evolved from kind of a board manufacturer into a industrial automation solution provider for hardware and software. So we're very excited to now be part of the Alliance Program and out in a table 11 right across the hall here is the very first Ignition Edge, a piece of hardware that is certified to IEC 62443 IEC, ISA 62443 cybersecurity standards. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about what that means to get through some of this stuff. Our portfolio is pretty big, right? We build hardware from gateways for different applications for transportation, for industrial automation, for medical, all the way up to pretty beefy GPU-based processors that run AI and those kinds of things.

04:25
David Bader: So for any kind of application, including running Ignition on any of these devices almost, we can meet your needs. But again, the differentiator is that cybersecurity and that remote device access in a secure manner, right? So I would guess, right? I've asked a few questions already. How many people talk about cybersecurity with their customers on a regular basis? So a good portion, which I would guess, right? Because you're in this room and you wanna learn a little bit more about it. What I find really interesting is there's also an equal number of people that don't talk to customers about cybersecurity, right? They say, "Hey, that's an IT function." And I think we've passed that threshold in the space where we have to talk from an OT perspective about cybersecurity because there's a large percentage of cybersecurity efforts that are being, that are stemming from the OT space. So is that something that you guys, that resonates right from an OT space? 20% of all of the attacks are happening from an OT, from the factory floor, which when I put this deck together, I was knocked out by that number. I would have thought it was 2% or 3%. It's more than 20% now. It's pretty amazing.

05:41
David Bader: So when you think about that, what does that turn? What does that kind of mean in terms of dollars? It's significant, right? So the average financial impact from data breaches way back in 2018 was seven and a half million dollars. It's significantly more now. But why, right? The concept is we have more connectivity in the factory floor now. It's not relevant that the person on the floor, he's not missing anything. He's just not been trained necessarily in cybersecurity. It goes back to that conversation earlier where I said, most people aren't even talking about it. We've got PLC systems. They're out on the floor. Anybody got GE 90-30 back still running in their plants. Right. So these things were not designed with cybersecurity in mind. Right. So and now we're asking to put more SCADA, more capability, more MES in the plant floor that are opening up all kinds of vulnerabilities, if we don't think about it. Yeah, I messed that one up. So this is just a brief slide that you can't read, right?

06:46
David Bader: That's too small. But it's a timeline of things that have happened in the world in the last 10 years or so, right? Maybe 20 years. So Stuxnet, that resonates. Everybody's heard of Stuxnet, right? That was a, that was a cyber attack that came through an HMI, right. On a machining center. So all the way up through Target got hit, Jeep got hit, BMW got hit, the Ukraine power grid, right? That's a big deal. These things are significant impacts to the world. So I picked two, two unique applications that happened in the OT space, Brunswick Corporation, billion dollar company that makes boats. They got attacked in June of '23. So that's pretty relevant, right? Really close, only a year away. And it disrupted their entire facility and it cost them 85 million dollars, right? So that's just a small company. Well, it's a big company, but it took their quarter two financials. They saw a big impact in their quarter two financials. So if I'm a CEO, I'm pretty upset about the fact that somebody was able to breach my system through a, through the factory floor. Right. And then on another level, there's a company called Applied Materials, which are big company, right? Multi-billion dollar worldwide company. February '23, still relevant.

08:09
David Bader: They got hit through one of their suppliers. So one of their major suppliers was attacked. There was a vector that came through. They were, they had vulnerable, they had access to Applied Material's systems, and it, and the attack came through their vendor. And that one cost them 250 million dollars. So we're not talking about peanuts when we're talking about OT attacks, right? This is significant dollars and significant impact to the business. And if you're a systems integrator and you're not talking about cybersecurity, in my opinion, this is a line of, sorry, in my opinion, this is a line of business, right? This is a way for integrators to spin up a new, a new way, a new piece of business, right? Talk to your customers about cybersecurity and how you can elevate it. So I'm gonna go fast. We build, everything that we do, everything that we're talking about today is about certified cybersecurity. There's a lot of ways that people address cybersecurity in the OT space.

09:08
David Bader: We think that being certified, building to standards, designing from secure by design is a significant piece, right? What we do is we have the ability from a remote access perspective to use VPNs. Everybody probably has the way to use a VPN, but we have an on-demand VPN capability that allows for automatic teardown, right? So if you're an IT guy, automatic teardown makes a big difference. Being able to connect, remotely access, do what you need to do, and then have the VPN shut down automatically. So you don't inadvertently leave it open and leave that attack vector space available. And please, Dave, jump in if there's anything that... So nobody wants to be this guy, right? Like it's not a good thing. So secure by design, right? The whole idea is if we do this right, everybody benefits, right? Suppliers of the hardware, suppliers the customer, and then we maintain that kind of security from the start, right? So again, I'm talking about secure by design. You have to build it from the beginning. It's not something necessarily that you walk in and say, yeah, I'm gonna create this really high level of cybersecurity in your plant without looking at the overall architecture.

10:31
David Bader: So you do a risk assessment, right? We don't do that. That's not what we do. I mentioned before, we provide enablement into the mitigation process. But you reach out to companies that provide cybersecurity risk assessments. They tell you where the vulnerabilities are. If you guys have that capability, that's fantastic. I think that that's a good way to do it. And then you build, you build these, you buy these features and these capabilities into the solutions that you have. So we provide hardware for running Ignition, right? But wouldn't it be great if you could buy the hardware that runs Ignition that also has this high level of cybersecurity and gives you this remote, this secure remote access capability. And that's the method that we are, that we're talking about. So we're doing it at 62443-4-2-1. So you're not gonna remember that specification. Excuse me, -4-2 as service level two, right? So Inductive Automation is already certified to 4-1. We're certified with our hardware to 4-2. And then the customer then can quickly and easily certify their entire system to 4-3. And that's really the enablement that we're offering is being able to have that customer get to a certified cyber solution in the field very quickly.

11:49
David Bader: And if we, if in the past, what you'd have to do is buy a piece of hardware that was hardened to a certain level. And it limited some of the functionality that you were able to load onto a server, onto gateway or other hardware. Right? So now with this wizard that we're going to talk about in a minute, is you can make these decisions in the field and work with the IT department to say, we wanna certify, or we wanna harden to this level. We wanna harden to 62443 right? Or we don't need to harden to that level, but we're gonna, we're not just going to leave everything open. And we'll show you, we'll walk you through a video that shows that, how that works. So what does secure by design mean, right? You wanna follow zero trust kind of principles and they're very standard and very well defined. So being able to say, we trust no one and nothing, right? So if you start to pass along keys and email certificates and all of that stuff, all of a sudden that becomes a real problem, right? That's not secure. If you're, if you have to email someone a certificate that's standing in front of a machine, inherently that's gonna be a problem because who knows who could get to his email, right?

13:03
David Bader: And then a continuous auditing and monitoring. So when we talk about zero trust, we talk about it from an entire ecosystem perspective. So we manage the certificates, the security certificates, from the TPM level, from the chip that's on our device all the way through to the IoT devices that are connected. We manage all of that. We maintain them. We keep them current and you don't have to worry about that as an integrator or as a customer or in any way. So I think that that's a really important piece. This slide, if anything you get from this presentation, the fact that Eurotech does this for you in an IoT perspective, and then also can do it all the way to the cloud. If your application calls for connecting to the cloud, that's super important, right? How am I doing? Okay. So I talk a little bit about 62443. I mentioned that maybe some have heard about it. There's a lot of things and you see here that I'm, talking about ISA and IEC 62443. Excuse me.

14:20
David Bader: So the, one of the key things is if you build to a standard, it's no longer subjective, right? So Eurotech many years ago decided that this standard was going to be kind of the worldwide, kind of the bar in which, which people should meet. Turns out that we were right. We made a good bet. It took us about two and a half years to become IEC 62443-4-2 SL2 compliant. And now we are the first and only, quite frankly, company that builds IoT hardware and enablement to that level. There's a lot of people that build to those standards, but have not yet gotten certified, right? We don't think we'll be the only ones. We think that we were the first, which is good to be first. So we use independent testing to validate that we're built to those standards. Again, what that does is it allows you to talk to your customers about building a secure system and maybe your customer doesn't want to certify. Maybe they don't wanna get to a 4-3, but you can say to them, "Hey, these are all of the components that you would need to, if you wanted to get to certify to a standard." Now, if anybody's from Europe, anybody here from Europe?

15:39
David Bader: Yeah, there's a few, right? It's not a guessing game anymore. It's required, right? You, you have to develop, you have to deliver 62443 standard products just to meet the law, just to meet the requirements. So we're an Italian company. We build in Italy and in Germany, all over the world, quite frankly, but we know that this standard is going to permeate not just in Europe, but beyond Europe, right? So what does that mean to us in the U.S. or in Canada? It's not mandated. It's not something that they're saying that we have to do, but quite frankly, it's an ROI conversation, right? It's something that when we talk to customers about this, we can put dollars and cents. I just showed you 250 million dollars right? It's pretty hard not to show the ROI on an investment in a piece of software that has a little bit more cost to it to get to that standard. But it's helping to prevent that 250-million-dollar hit, right?

16:37
David Bader: So even if the U.S. isn't mandating it, although we do mandate cybersecurity now in a lot of ways, right? It's suggested in a lot of ways. I think this ROI discussion in this line of business discussion for the integrators in the room is super important, right? We can now talk to customers about a higher level of cybersecurity at their OT level, at their OT floor. Make sense? How am I doing?

17:00
David Woodard: Fantastic.

17:05
David Bader: Okay, good. I like constant feedback. How am I doing? You guys feel pretty good so far? Okay. Nobody's left the room yet, which is very unusual actually. So I mentioned about how long it's taken and we like to show this slide on like every presentation that we do because it's actually a physical document that you get when you get to certification, right? It's not, oh I built to this standard, but I didn't get certified. No, we've actually gone through the certification. It is a physical document that we can send to you and, and say to your, to the IT team, look, we're buying product that is built to these standards. So how does this resonate worldwide? Right? There's a bunch of teams, people from Europe here. Obviously we talked about that. And then in vertical industries, right? In vertical industries, the 62443 standard it kind of travels to different areas, right?

18:00
David Bader: So if you're in industrial automation it's 62443, if you're in rail, it's Shift2Rail, energy is 62351, and so on and so on. Right. So there's, TSA is involved. So there's a lot of different almost, every standard is actually adopting 62443 as the core to the standard and then put it, putting it into individual, their individual requirements for their particular vertical industry. So I would say that in this slide, there, we'd be hard pressed not to touch every person in this room at some point in one of these verticals, right? Everybody's touching something in these verticals, right? And if we can meet the 62443 requirement, then these are all reciprocal standards that view 62443 as a, as kind of a guide, right? So if you've got a customer that's in a process automation and they're saying we need to meet TR 63069, then we can go in and have a conversation about 62443 and how that is actually 63069 at the core.

19:10
David Bader: For medical, I think medical is... Medical up there, we have medical 60601, 100% copy and pasted from the 62443 standard. So if you're in the medical space and customers are saying, "Ah, you gotta build something to 60601 standard," we can do it. We can help you. Make sense? Okay. So then I mentioned that we're certified to SL2. What does that mean, right? So I thought it was important to kind of make sure that people understood what that means. So the idea, right, is the SL1 is the components, right? To protect the components from casual access, casual mistakes and things like that. One of the things that the standard actually does is also includes tamper resistance, right? So if somebody goes in and messes with the server, there's a switch inside the server or inside the gateway, that is a bit, that ties back to our software that you can enunciate in Ignition or send an email from our software or any of those kinds of things.

20:08
David Bader: So if somebody inadvertently, a maintenance guy comes in and says, "Hey, I gotta upgrade the firmware or something on this," they can immediately get a response. You can literally shut the computer down if it's an onsite breach. So there's lots of ways that you can use that tamper resistance piece. And then SL2 is actually designed to mitigate and kind of prevent generally acceptable or generally recognized attack vectors. So Eurotech again felt that it was important enough for us to get certified to the SL2 standard. Not too many people have considered that. All the standards that we meet, not all of them, but many of them. So today, I thought that it was important that we talk about how do you get there, right? Like how do you put a... Take a computer, put it on a shop floor, what do you have to do to get to maintain that 62443?

21:08
David Bader: And these are all the steps. I'm not gonna go through every one of them, but there's at least 10, maybe more, steps that you have to do to build and harden an industrial IoT device to this standard. So what we've done is we've said, "Okay, you know, let's build something. What are these capabilities, right? So what are the advantages of having this?" There's a lot of words here, but the bottom line is that it's maintaining and monitoring to a rigorous standard the integrity of the environment, right? And then, can I ensure that it maintains that? So, yes. Right? So the idea is that when you certify, all of this gets continuously updated and as you keep your hardware and software current, it gets updated. So again, I mentioned this wizard that we're... Dave's gonna do a demo on.

22:00
David Bader: But the idea is, how does this work during deployment, right? So you can load all the software, whether it's Ignition or other software that you want. Then you walk through this wizard and it guides you to the level of security that you wanna provide at this OT space. Unheard of. Literally takes all of those steps that we talked about before. Excuse me. Now we can do it in the field and then can we be... Can we maintain that security with Ignition? Make sense? Lot of words, but pretty important. So Dave's gonna go through the video, he's gonna talk to that, and then we're gonna do questions and answers. So we went pretty quickly. Hopefully this touched a little bit. It wasn't just commercial. It was about providing some relevance to the market and where secure by design and standards really matter.

23:00
David Woodard: Great. So now that Dave's finished, we can come back to reality of doing all this, right? 'Cause if you wanna do this for a new customer or existing customer, doing all that level of security is really difficult. I think it's one of the most challenging parts of what we do, 'cause we have to understand the IT side and the OT side and how to do like, you know, understanding like that bridge is incredibly complicated and is very hard to do well. So that's why we came up with this, right? So, 'cause what I see a lot when I do integrations or when I do deployments or installations, is you don't do it. You say, "Okay, we need to get the POC working. We need to get this application working. We'll do security when once they buy in." Right? So once they say, "Yes, we wanna do it," then we do security. And then you realize that security is breaking what you did. So the wizard, what it will do for you, I'm just gonna play this video.

23:49
David Woodard: And I'll just talk while it's playing. So basically it's just a web application that's running on these gateways. So all of our gateways from the edge devices up to our more server class boxes, provides you with this walkthrough interface of setting up networking, enabling the secure elements that you need, and being able to do it while you're doing the deployment, right? Or if you say, "Okay, we just wanna get it working, but then we wanna see what happens if we enable this SSH policy. We wanna see what happens if we try to do this other thing." You can come back to this wizard, enable that feature, and see if it still works. So there's nobody on the command line, there's nobody like hacking your Linux file system stuff. There's nobody doing that crazy stuff in a working factory or in a pilot.

24:38
David Woodard: You do it in this wizard. Let the... Let our software manage it. And so here you can see it's doing the... All these things are relevant for the certification Dave was mentioning. So if you want to come here and just say, "Hey, I just wanna be IEC certified," you can click one button. It enables all those features and you're done. This video I think is three or four minutes, but you can do it in less than a minute. And I think even more importantly than that is this is not even necessary, right? So once you do this, once you say, okay, this is the standard that we want, these are the settings that we need, this is just a configuration for us, right? So you can say, okay, now I need to order 10 of these boxes, or a hundred, or a thousand. They can come preinstalled with all these settings already on there.

25:19
David Woodard: You don't have to worry about it anymore. I think the other cool thing about this, so you'll see now they're actually going through some provisioning with AWS. We can do the same thing for Azure. We can do the same thing for custom cloud endpoints. It is an extensible interface, right? So if you say, "Oh, but you know, we need this custom thing for our cloud services or for our customer," it is an extensible platform that you can add on to. So think that's it. We do have it running on this box I have here in front of me. So if you wanna come by our booth, I can plug this in and show you live what it does. We didn't wanna do that here just for timing, but, I'm happy to show that to you if you wanna come by the booth. So I think leave time for questions.

26:01
David Bader: Yeah. We have plenty of time for questions actually. Yeah. I think we have a half an hour for questions.

26:06
David Woodard: No.

26:08
David Bader: I'm just kidding.

26:10
David Woodard: Okay.

26:10
David Bader: Yeah. I'm making the guys in the booth nervous. Go ahead. Yes, sir.

26:15
Audience Member 1: So you are saying you're providing a software stack only for the remote device, the edge device, or there is also a kind of some cloud platform?

26:23
David Woodard: It's both. So there is the edge and there's a cloud platform.

26:25
David Bader: So the question, just to repeat the question, are we providing a software stack just for the device or is there a cloud platform? And Dave's answer is yes, it's both, right? So there's a component that loads to the software or to the device itself, and then there's a cloud-based product that allows you that remote device... The remote access and the remote device connectivity. Yep. And that, you know, we can shape and manipulate that depending on the scale. I mean, the whole concept going back to that first slide is, is we wanna be able to do this at scale, right? If it's one piece, two pieces, that's great. We're all for helping with that. But if it's a 100 or 200, we wanna make it super easy. See, I told you there's always somebody that leaves early. I'm just kidding. Any other questions? Come on. There's gotta be. Yes, sir.

27:13
Audience Member 2: So your own network that's used to update the unit themselves, can they, you can you use your own wire in the private cloud network as an input?

27:25
David Woodard: Yes. Yes.

27:25
David Bader: So let's repeat the question. Can we load our remote access capability onto a private cloud or onto a server or something like that? Yes. You know, it's Dockerable, it's containerized, and you can load it almost anywhere. Yeah.

27:41
David Woodard: Yeah. We have use cases where the cloud's actually running just in the factory. Like just, no, none of the data leaves that factory. It's all isolated there. So we just run the cloud directly in that factory.

27:49
David Bader: Inherently, you know, out of the box, it's running in the cloud, it's running in AWS, but we can work with you to do it anywhere. Yeah. And in fact, we have customers that build other components that buy that capability and load it onto their devices themselves and run it in their private cloud so it doesn't have to just be on our device. Yes, sir.

28:15
Audience Member 3: This is probably a dumb question, but does this only apply to your end devices?

28:22
David Bader: No.

28:24
David Bader: No. So that's what I just said.

28:25
Audience Member 3: Some of yours, but I might already have an installed base of a thousand of some other manufacturers, Linux based, whatever controller, can your software widget be configured so that I can use your software to just secure everything?

28:42
David Woodard: It is my favorite answer in the world, and I'll say it depends. So if you want that level of security, it would require you recertifying those devices. So at least taking one and saying, "Okay, we put your tech software on here, we've done all these same steps, but you have to have it re-certified."

28:56
David Bader: That's a 62443 requirement.

28:57
David Woodard: That's not... That's just a requirement. But what I'll say is, as long as your box is running Linux preferably, but we have the ability to understand how your operating system works and that we can tie into it and make these changes, then yes, we can run on other people's hardware relatively easily.

29:14
David Bader: Yep. Not a dumb question at all quite frankly.

29:15
David Woodard: No, it's a great question.

29:16
David Bader: It's a really good question.

29:17
Audience Member 3: I might not want to replace everything.

29:19
David Woodard: No...

29:19
David Bader: Exactly.

29:19
David Woodard: Yes. And if you don't need that level of security, we can also run in Docker, right? So if you just wanna deploy it and use it for remote management and use it for some of the, some security features, but not all, that's a really easy way to deploy it and at least try it and test it and see if it works.

29:34
Audience Member 3: You sell your software...

29:36
David Woodard: So that would be a service you... We don't do, right? So that is not what we get into. So we actually, we use two external companies. I'm blanking. Two, Nord is one, but I can't remember the other. But we do our own audits, so we have to send products to them. It is periodic, I think it's three times a year, four times a year. We send them new devices, they test them to say, "Yes, you're still certified." So you would have to do something similar. And those companies, and that's how they make their money, right? So it's...

30:01
David Bader: Yeah, I thought it was in here somewhere, but it's not. So yeah, I mean that's a normal thing that customers do on a regular basis.

30:08
David Woodard: But we do have contacts with these companies, so it's also, we can help you like at least make those contacts and have that discussion.

30:15
David Bader: Yeah. There's one down here.

30:18
Audience Member 4: So that's the box that you... It's also running Ignition?

30:21
David Bader: No. No, go ahead. You go.

30:23
David Woodard: So this is more... This was the first device that we certified. But this is definitely more of a what you call like a gateway or like a, I say gateway in an Ignition audience. You all think about the software, but this is like a hardware gateway. So this would be running very close to like your PLCs and stuff. You know, the box we have that's running Ignition is a more server class and if you come to our booth you'll see it. So it's got like a Intel processor. It's got more resources. You can run Ignition on this but it'll probably more for like the Ignition Edge product. Yeah.

30:56
David Bader: Yeah. Okay. We have time for one more question. Alright. Looks like it.

31:02
Audience Member 3: Sorry to ask a second question. So I'm with the utility grid sector and you have IEC 62351 TC57. Have you ever heard of NERC CIP?

31:13
David Bader: NERC CIP? I have not. NERC, NERC, but not NERC CIP. Yeah. No, but I'll tell you what, if you would, if you take a minute and when we're done, we'll go back out there and I'll write that down and we'll get you some answers on that because it just may not be on this slide and I may not have run into it. Yep.

31:34
David Woodard: There's so many certifications and regulations that's... Especially in energy, it's...

31:37
David Bader: And that's why I put this slide into deck two is to tie it all together around that core. But I think we hit the time almost perfectly, right? So we're good. We're, again, the booth is right across from this door. If you guys have any other questions or if you want people to send you a lot of emails, come see us. Yeah. Thank you.

31:55
David Woodard: Thank you.

31:56
David Bader: Great job. Great job.

Modern manufacturing generates vast amounts of data from diverse sources, creating challenges in data integration and utilization. Traditionally, data silos have hindered the scalability of analytics across manufacturing and supply chains. The Snowflake AI Data Cloud breaks down these barriers by seamlessly converging IT and OT data, accelerating smart manufacturing initiatives. Join us to explore how Snowflake empowers manufacturers to harness the full potential of their data, driving innovation and operational excellence in the era of AI and Industry 4.0.

Transcript:

00:05
Greg Sloyer: Well, thank you for coming. Sort of during lunch, before one of the keynotes, I'd like to thank Inductive Automation for having us present again. This is our second year presenting at the conference. My name is Greg Sloyer. I'm from Snowflake. I am the Manufacturing Industry Principal, so I look at the business side of things from Snowflake. All the usual, do not buy or sell stocks based on what I'm talking about. Don't plan your 401(k)s and retirement. I've been doing data and analytics for manufacturing, supply chain, operations, logistics, all that for abo ut 17 years now, not all of which was Snowflake. Prior to that, I had 20 years in the chemical industry, DuPont, BASF, and I ran global supply chains and logistics and all sorts of things like that in the chemical industry. So, why is Snowflake at the Inductive Automation ICC conference? I will set this up by saying, Snowflake, how many people are familiar with Snowflake today? Okay, so about half. So, Snowflake started out as a data warehouse, data lake kind of thing in the cloud.

01:17
Greg Sloyer: It's been about 12 years now, and in 2014, the big thing here is we operate across AWS, Azure, and GCP, so all across all the major three clouds. Our big thing, especially in the 2018 timeframe, when you see this disrupt collaboration and this cool-looking thing in the middle, which is maybe a little hard to see, but there's a lot of starbursts and fireworks-looking things, that is data sharing in Snowflake. This is between customers and suppliers, between partners and OEMs, between logistics groups and manufacturers, between what we call our marketplace providers, so data providers in Snowflake, providing things like weather data, commodity pricing, freight rates, logistics, things like that. There's about 2,600 data sets or so in Snowflake that are available. Really cool thing is we do this all without moving data. We're not moving data in Snowflake. It is pointers. We've gotten rid of the ETLs and FTPs and emails, and heaven forbid you put stuff in CSV files and ship them over to a friend of yours. This is all essentially permissions.

02:39
Greg Sloyer: You give permission for somebody to see a table or set of data, or they give you permission to see a table or a set of data or a set of tables. Once that permission is granted, that data shows up in your database like it's one of your tables. So now you are extending your, to incorporate that data in analytics and reporting; you extend your SQL with a join statement. That's what it comes down to. That was in 2018. We've been exploiting that, and more so we have been now building applications. So you're seeing major applications like Blue Yonder for supply chain and others replatforming to Snowflake. And this has really been the progression, and we continue to add on to this. A lot of AI, Gen AI, ML types of capabilities, I'm gonna talk about a couple of them today, being brought to the data. So what we didn't want you to do is spend a lot of time bringing all the data and talk about IT data and OT data today, bringing all that to Snowflake just to then pull it out and have to do something else with it somewhere else.

03:45
Greg Sloyer: The idea is let the data there; let's bring all those capabilities to the data so you can operate all within Snowflake. We launched what's called a manufacturing data cloud at Hannover Messe about a year and a half ago, April of last year. And we looked at what was needed in the industry, manufacturing in general, and what were a lot of these opportunities people are struggling with, things like that. Hopefully, a number of these resonate. So one was IT and OT convergence. Okay. This has been a big topic now for a number of years, and Snowflake had been great at bringing in typical ERP, especially like SAP data, into Snowflake. We've been doing that for a number of years. Lots of big customers who are doing that today with not just one SAP or ERP system but 10s, 20s, 30s. And all of this is published when I provide a name, but Carrier, for example, has 140 ERPs that they consolidate their data into Snowflake on. What we weren't as strong was on the OT side. So bringing in the shop floor data.

05:15
Greg Sloyer: This is where we really pivoted about 18 months, two years ago, working very closely with Inductive Automation, Cirrus Link, and a number of other partners to provide different architectural ways to bring the shop floor data into Snowflake and take advantage of the time series capabilities and a number of those other capabilities we'll talk about in terms of AI, ML, Gen AI, things like that, to the data, which is sort of that third point, which is bringing and really deploying advanced analytics to the data. The middle one is taking advantage of that data sharing. So this is broadening the visibility outside of IT, outside of OT, so the enterprise, and really extending that to that partner network, broadening the view of the supply chain, incorporating that visibility into the decision and analytics process. Really taking advantage of a lot of these different Snowflake capabilities. The difficulties, and I'm sure many of you have experienced this, is that for years, decades, the shop floor manufacturing sites have generally been an island. Different organizations, different functional reporting roles from that systems sort of standpoint.

06:18
Greg Sloyer: OT sometimes reported into the CIO, but generally not. It reported into VP manufacturing. This created a lot of separations from a systems standpoint, made it not technically difficult but more organizationally difficult to sort of integrate and bring that data in, integrate it with sort of the rest of the data. There's some architectural discussions that happen, things like that. So different opportunities. And for those of you who have multiple plants, what I always say is if you have 50 plants, you probably have 48 different MES, MRO, LIMS, or QM, and all those systems because a lot of those plants came up from acquisition. As I said, it's an island. Investments weren't made, or if it wasn't broken, we're not gonna fix it. That kind of thing. So a lot of that is changing, but also the architectural patterns that you have to utilize that data, especially to bring it to the cloud, need to account for the fact that all these plants are different. They may have different protocols, different configurations, all that kind of stuff. So the solutions have to be adaptable.

0:07:38.7
Greg Sloyer: And that's really where, in partnering with Inductive Automation, all that, we've helped simplify the environment of bringing that data into the cloud, into Snowflake. So let's first take a very broad view as we look at the supply chain. So as I mentioned, we have everywhere from marketplace providers with commodity data, pricing, availability, geopolitical kinds of things that impact supply, the logistics areas, really bringing that sort of view to the plant, as well as then when you look outside from the customer standpoint, especially if you're building connected products, so products out in the field that are generating their own data after they've left manufacturing. How do I incorporate and create that visibility up and through the supply chain, through the ecosystem, to be able to make decisions more holistically to not just help manufacturing but to help that whole enterprise environment? And then this is the thing we were really putting in 18 months or so, two years ago, which is that ability to get much more fine-grained, granular data at speed.

09:04
Greg Sloyer: I won't call it real-time. Let's call it near real-time into the cloud. This is not replacing shop floor systems. If you have a safety system, your cloud is not your best spot to put those. That's gonna be edge-driven kinds of stuff. But as we look at how do I take advantage of that data, how do I bring and broaden access to it, how do I look across those 50 plants, how do I run much more advanced mathematics on that data to do root cause, cycle time, predictive quality, all those kinds of things? That's really why we're pulling that data into the cloud and combining it with a number of other components of the data. For example, let's say you are great at doing quality control and things like that, even looking at that from the shop floor, the isolated plant level. What we wanna do is show that vision extending that supply chain to say, okay, that's not the only variables going into your manufacturing facility. Your supplier quality, that delivery variability, all of those things come into play when you start looking at quality or predictive maintenance, those aspects. And then how do returns, how does warranty quality, for those of you more on the discreet side, how does that impact and how can I utilize that information from customer service, from field maintenance, things of that nature to see what that potential root causes were that started in manufacturing and started in supply?

10:37
Greg Sloyer: So again, being able to broaden that view for those organizations that have started moving beyond doing really cool and fancy analytics on their shop floor data, how do I paint that vision of the future? And this is where we really see the extending of that data and incorporating more of the IT types of data into those decision processes. So Snowflake has many, many more partners than this. These were the partners as part of our manufacturing cloud launch. Marketplace partners, there's 2,600, 2,700 different data sets in the marketplace, but there's everywhere, as I mentioned, financial data, there's ESG data. If you type in ESG into Snowflake marketplace in the search, you're gonna come up with 40 or 50 different data sets that are available, freight rates for kites and dart, things of that nature. From that perspective, again, to help provide that greater visibility. As I mentioned, Snowflake has really been doubling down in terms of applications and the capabilities there, building those on Snowflake.

12:00
Greg Sloyer: So Blue Yonder and a number of others are replatforming. In a lot of cases, there's ones that were built specifically by companies on top of Snowflake, taking advantage of that power of the cloud and cross-cloud. So as they build something, it's not just in AWS or in Azure; it goes across all three. And then system integrators, the SIs there. And again, many, many more are partners. But these were ones that stood up and said, I have built in Snowflake a supply chain or manufacturing or operations type of solution with a customer. And they're raising their hand and going, "Yep, they did a great job. We did it all in Snowflake. And that's how they were on this list." And this continues to expand as we work through. The main areas I mentioned so supply chain optimization, smart manufacturing, and connected products are the three areas where we start utilizing the manufacturing data, the supply chain data, and that sensor data, whether it's coming from the shop floor or from connected devices out in the field, to be able to really provide that visibility, take advantage of the cloud infrastructure.

13:23
Greg Sloyer: And depending on which booths you go to behind you here, you'll see slightly different versions of this. This is my extended version. And sometimes today if I get surprised by a slide, it's because somebody's legal, they're legal, our legal, somebody's marketing department got a hold of them. So I always enjoy this 'cause then the slides are as much a surprise to me as they are to you. So with Ignition, and we've had this now in place with them a little over a year, I wanna say closer to 18 months that we've been working with Ignition or Inductive Automation and Cirrus Link. But this is the easy button for getting data into Snowflake. This is zero code. When the part of the secret sauce is that IoT bridge for Snowflake that is available via Cirrus Link. And this drops the data in from Ignition. So not just the tag data, but the metadata all around that, that structured data. So all of that lands in Snowflake. And if you have a chance to see a demo, Arlen Nipper, I don't know if Arlen's in the audience today. Arlen and others have done this many, many times. I'm probably on many, many calls per month with him with different customers and prospects.

14:55
Greg Sloyer: And within that demo, Snowflake goes from knowing nothing about your shop floor to knowing everything about it that's coming through Ignition. So very, very fast, very, very easy method for getting the data into Snowflake. And these are some of the reasons why we're one of the partners of this versus some of the other ways you can land that data within the cloud is we really looked at this with them in the process engineer. So the plant is driving the configuration in Snowflake. Snowflake is not defining a structure that you've got to be so many levels deep and it has to have certain kinds of attributes and all that. It is driven from the edge. So the plant defines how you look in Snowflake. Snowflake does not define that. That's one of the keys. And then some of these other nuances, for those of you who get into the much more excruciating detail about data types and things like that and what can you land. But we're landing this all with MQTT. The cool part of the demo for me in terms of the processes within Snowflake is that MQTT is great for transmitting data and for storing data.

16:22
Greg Sloyer: Really, really small footprints for both. Allows you to go very quick, allows you to get the data up because of that event sort of driven change control that they have. Not so great for BI and for analytics. It has lots of nulls. Mathematics tends not to like nulls, and BI tends to not like a lot of zeros with a spike and a lot of zeros with a spike. Snowflake's got a, we use views in Snowflake, so you're not gonna repopulate and have to store all that data. But from the view perspective, it's hydrating those nulls with the previously good value. So now you have an analytic data set that your data scientists tend to like without having to code anything. This is out of the box. It's driven the moment you've set up this connection. And your BI tools like it because it's not that flatline spike, flatline spike. So, great. You got the data in Snowflake. Now what can I do with it? This is where the past year or two, Snowflake has been bringing in a lot of AI, ML, Gen AI capabilities into Snowflake. We continue to release new stuff. This happens to be one of our, I'll call it an easy button.

18:01
Greg Sloyer: 'Cause different levels, different organizations have different capabilities around data science, around analytics use, things like that. And we have for the data scientists in the room, Python, Java, Scala, all that can be done in Snowflake. It's not just a SQL house. So you can be writing all the cool data science stuff. I don't think I have it on here, but we're in the booth right across the hall. For those of you into optimization, you can be running optimization, mathematical optimization in Snowflake through the Python libraries. It's really cool. I've been, in the '90s, I watched optimization fail. And I'll talk a little bit on why I think it failed. But the ways we're getting and the capabilities that now are being brought to this data are really, to me, driving a lot of really cool stuff happening in manufacturing. But this two lines of code here with anomaly detection, this is using an ML function. I think of this as the trend function in Excel. So for all of you who are familiar with Excel and you use the trend function, all you had to know to generate a forecast or see the trend of data was trend parameters, and what are those two, three, four parameters I had to put in the trend function.

19:21
Greg Sloyer: You did not have to know the mathematics behind it was least squares at the time. You didn't have to care. You could just write a trend function. This anomaly detection, and there's about a dozen of these, what we call Cortex ML functions, that are available is something similar. You have to know the parameters, just like I had to know with the trend function. But now I can run an ML-based, I think it's gradient boost, anomaly detection on the data as it lands. I don't have to be a data scientist to apply that mathematics to the data. So there are functions like forecasting, and there's a couple of others that are out there that are more manufacturing-based. Like I said, there's about a dozen overall. But the ones I tend to see for manufacturing, supply chain, or anomaly detection, forecasting, and there's some contribution factors, things like that, that really get exciting, 'cause you're applying ML techniques without having to be a data scientist. So simplifying this approach.

20:22
Greg Sloyer: The screens here that I'm showing are actually built in what we call Streamlit. This is a Python-based graphics package that is in Snowflake. So the data does not have to go out. It will not compete with a Tableau or a Power BI. We can also go to there. So if you wanna do really cool and fancy dashboards, super. We operate with those. But for folks, data scientists especially, who wanna just show quick, easy visualizations of the data, of the results of their very cool mathematics, this is available for them as well. So why do I think optimization failed? But why do I get nervous about being able to use advanced analytics broadly across your organization? And I'll point to this and go, there's different reasons. But the biggest one, and why I think in the 90s optimization failed, for example, and what I don't wanna see with things like Gen AI and AI and ML, which are really cool tools, is that we had organizations wanting to go from here to here without doing the groundwork in between. There was too much change management.

21:33
Greg Sloyer: There was too much. There was not enough data governance, data quality in those processes. Optimization is great if you've got really good data quality, especially pricing, timing, things like that. The mathematical models rely on that. That is no different for Gen AI, AI, and ML. The square root of a bad number is still a bad number. It doesn't get better because I threw cooler mathematics at it. So this is where we, working with the partners, working with you folks, it's not that we're gonna say, "No, don't ever do this." What I'm saying is, as a warning, keep in mind that those structures in place, where there's governance, and this is really where the IT and the OT coming back together to help, through this process, really help then create the environments where AI and ML are gonna be a lot more successful. Make sense so far? All right.

22:45
Greg Sloyer: So data foundation is necessary. We build these out. We work with the customers and the partners to deploy these things. Like I said, we've been great at IT data, really excited about all the partnerships we have to bring in the OT data, take advantage of our time series, geospatial capabilities, things of that nature. So you can do all sorts of cool math with that. And then extending those with the partner data or sharing that data with your partners, customers, suppliers, logistics, for example. So what's that mean? So from the Unified Namespace, this is what we are continuing to develop: bringing IT, OT, connected products, getting all that within Snowflake, improving that visibility, and allowing you then to run greater AI, ML models, Gen AI, at the data, not, again, separating it out. So that you can take advantage of not just the ingestion of that kind of data, but what do I do with it after I've got it somewhere? So with that, any questions before I send you across the hall to the 1:00 o'clock keynote?

24:15
Audience Member 1: For a lot of us, the issue is not just the data. It's also the application. So you saw, basically, a lot of the applications there. What's the result look like if you wanna get the data out of Snowflake and give it to an individual in order for someone on the shop floor to be able to use it? Does it have to live alongside each other? And should we not think about it like it's a replacement for a data broker? It's just something that lets you do higher-level data?

24:37
Greg Sloyer: Generally, the question is, is there a path to go from Snowflake, let's say, back to Ignition as well? There are organizations that have gone down that route. I would say that the Ignition group, Inductive Automation, is the best ones to talk to. There's always the security and protocols and things like that that you have to work through on that. Technically, I do not believe it's an issue. But generally, it's been a one-way path to go up into Snowflake, because then you're looking, like I said, if you have 50 sites, you may have 50 Ignition brokers or whatever, and they're coming up into Snowflake. So you're looking more holistically at that data. I've not seen SAP data go down to Ignition or anything like that. That's usually staying up within Snowflake. Sure.

25:25
Audience Member 1: Oh, somebody else. So at the beginning of the presentation, you talked about how it's kind of a big permission space, rather than storage space. But then later on.

25:32
Greg Sloyer: For the, for data sharing.

25:41
Audience Member 1: Okay, 'cause when we saw the architecture diagram, if you define it in the namespace for Cirrus Link, it moves up. Where is the storage part in that situation?

25:50
Greg Sloyer: So it's in Snowflake. The data is coming into Snowflake. It's stored there. You have chosen, as a customer organization, AWS or Azure or both, let's say, for different reasons. And Snowflake sits on top of that. So physically, they can talk to you about where it makes most sense. But generally, it's in Snowflake. One last question real quick. Yes.

26:11
Audience Member 2: No. Yeah, that was it.

26:14
Greg Sloyer: No. Oh, okay. All right. Super. So I've already been shown the hook kind of thing 'cause they want you to get across the hall for the 1:00 o'clock. But thank you. Appreciate your time. And we are across the hall for any more detailed questions.

4IR Solutions will demonstrate how their platforms can deliver OT, As-a-Service in the cloud or on premises making it easier, faster and cheaper to build and manage your Ignition infrastructure.

Transcript: 

00:01
James Burnand: And we'll get some late streamers in here, from what I understand, so all of them will be pointed out and embarrassed as they come and sit down late. I'd like to be the first to welcome you to ICC 2024. I didn't realize I was gonna get that honor when we signed up for this time slot, but it just worked out that way, so I hope you guys had safe travels in. Looking forward to walking you through a little bit about what 4IR does and sharing with you some of what we think is some pretty cool stuff. So to get started, why do we exist?

00:29
James Burnand: While OT systems can be a little bit of a challenge to manage, so when you don't manage your OT systems, the risks that you face are unexpected downtime, security issues and risks to your data fidelity. These are problems that are fairly common across our industry, things that we run into on a fairly regular basis, and something that unfortunately is somewhat ignored in some cases inside of the manufacturing and industrial marketplaces. So to understand maybe a little bit about how does that happen? I'd first like to do a little classification exercise and all your lights turned yellow, which is kinda cool.

01:05
James Burnand: So first of all, how many, show of hands... How many folks in here are end users? Okay, we got about maybe a half. And integrators? We got a lot of integrators. Cool. And everybody else? There we go. Perfect. So what I've done is taken the opportunity to classify what we see is the different types of end users. Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone, rings may be true, but what we do is we're gonna lay out who we think are the folks that are out there that we run into.

01:33
James Burnand: So the first kind of end user we run into are what we call Yodas. Yoda is an exceedingly rare species. There are very few of Yoda species in the universe, and they are masters in their trade. They are considered so totally in control and capable of everything that is necessary for them. Jedi Master. We find these folks to be exceedingly rare, but they do exist and users that have totally figured out how to manage and operate and handle all of the different pulls and pushes of OT as well as all of the rest of the responsibilities that they have.

02:06
James Burnand: The next type of end user we run into, and this is very, very common, is what we call super heroes. So these end users wear a cape, they often have many responsibilities of which managing OT and doing things like updates and patching and security is just one of many, many things that they have as their responsibilities. We find that these folks have a strong desire to be better at managing their OT environments, but often face the issue that it's an important but not urgent issue until it becomes an urgent issue. I'd say these are the most common folks that we run across.

02:41
James Burnand: And the final type of end user we have are what we call Bon Jovis. These folks live on a prayer, and they don't realize the risk that they run until they unfortunately have something that happens. We tend to meet these Bon Jovis after they've had a security incident or they've lost a computer, or they've lost an application for a long period of time and dealt with a significant downtime or cost issue, that's when we usually meet the Bon Jovis.

03:08
James Burnand: So what we have done is we have created a solution that hopefully appeals to all of the folks, although I will say that the Yodas are far less likely to be interested. We offer OT as a service. So we call that FactoryStack and PharmaStack. We'll talk a little bit about what the difference is in a second, but what that means is that we offer as a service, a delivered platform that provides you all of the best practices from Inductive Automation, security hardening guide from database management, as well as the best practices from the IT provider, so folks like AWS and Azure, and we put that and we manage that in a very straightforward way, so that you can focus on applications, you can focus on process, you can focus on the things that matter towards the end goal of improving manufacturing, and someone else is taking care of your OT systems for you.

04:03
James Burnand: So I did mention PharmaStack briefly. PharmaStack is essentially an extension of FactoryStack, and really what it does is it adds in some additional capabilities around data retention, around data integrity, and around 21 CFR Part 11 compliance, so that for companies that are in the pharmaceutical space, they can use PharmaStack to be able to make things like change control and operation of their and validation of their systems faster and easier. Fundamentally, they do the same thing. I'm going to talk about them interchangeably, so if I say FactoryStack and you're thinking PharmaStack, don't worry, they do fundamentally the same things under the hood with again, the additions to PharmaStack being specific for that industry.

04:47
James Burnand: So what are we actually trying to do? We're trying to make it simple to deploy OT infrastructure. We're trying to make it easier, faster, cheaper, and more secure for you to be able to have these architectures and these capabilities deployed both in the Cloud and on-premise for you to be able to take advantage of those. And that sounds very wide and that sounds very kind of vaporous, so if you think about it from a... What is our mission is we're trying to simplify and give you access to these transformative technologies without you necessarily needing to learn them, so you can focus on what's most important for you, which is solving problems for end users or solving problems as end users.

05:27
James Burnand: So how does that work in the ecosystem? Is really an interesting thing. So what we've done is we've laid out a little bit about what is the Ignition ecosystem, so you start off with Ignition itself, there is the Ignition standard, Ignition Edge, and Ignition Cloud addition platforms. They're all somewhat similar in that they share a lot of commonality between them, if you've used them, if you've noticed that, and that they provide a basis for a lot of other things to happen.

05:42
James Burnand: On top of that, there's the modules, so we're showing the partner modules here from Cirrus Link and Sepasoft, who are strategic and solution partners for Inductive Automation, similar to us as solutions partners. These extend the capability of Ignition, so you can do things like communication to MQTT and to the Cloud, and MES capabilities and Sepasoft got some, neat stuff this week.

06:19
James Burnand: That extends the capability beyond, but it still doesn't solve any problems for end users. That's where the integration community comes in. The applications are truly the thing that solves the problems for the end user. This is where you build out a back system or a EBR system or whatever may be the end application that ends up providing that value to the end customer. And if the stack was this simple, it would be very easy to do. It's never the simple. What ends up happening is at least you need a database, you probably need time series data, you probably need source control authentication, MQTT brokers, external applications. All of these complexities are things that are part of these systems that are deployed, whether they're directly a part of it or whether they're integrated into it, they're important pieces, and our goal is to deliver that as a service.

07:10
James Burnand: A different view on what that looks like is this next diagram, and I apologize about the glare moving around on there. What you'll see is we have a couple of things shown on here where... Down at the bottom, we're showing a couple of different deployment locations, so on the left, this is essentially if we offer this as a SaaS, so that's where we deploy it inside of our Tenant, and it becomes a service that you just use.

07:42
James Burnand: The next is inside of your Tenant, so this is for bigger enterprise customers, typically where they already have a big, strong relationship with an AWS or an Azure or some big Cloud company, and they have a basis where they would like to control their data inside of their environment, we are capable of deploying and operating those workloads inside of that space for them really as a platform as a service or PaaS.

07:58
James Burnand: And the final option is on premise. And we'll talk about a couple of options that we offer there, but the ability to have the advantages of operating something in Cloud while it happens to live on-prem, so you can still have that low latency localized capability, but somebody else is taking care of it for you. In the middle, this is really what 4IR does. So managing, supporting, monitoring, providing all of the capabilities for disaster recovery, updates, and ensuring that there's 24x7 support in place for all of these systems is a key component of us ensuring that this is an available and operational system for you at all times.

08:42
James Burnand: And this layer of glue in the middle is really what we are best at. When it comes to the applications, that's your choice. If you want one Ignition Gateway or 12 Ignition Gateways are 200 Ignition Gateways. If you want an Azure SQL database or you want a Postgres database, for us, we're able to flex and provide what makes sense for your use case. So we work a lot with system integrators and end users to help them decide what goes in that application space, but fundamentally, it's up to you as to what it is you need to solve your problems.

09:15
James Burnand: The way that works is we essentially sell by instances. So there's an Edge version of Ignition and an Edge version of FactoryStack and a Cloud version of FactoryStack. They come with the core services that you can see on the top of those boxes, and on the right, you can pick from our application catalog is to what you want available inside of those different locations. And then from then on, it's operated to manage as a service.

09:43
James Burnand: So I think it's important to talk about how are people actually using this. So the very first use case that we'll talk about is, Hey, I've got a couple of plants, or I've got a plant and my executives really wanna see a report or a visualization or some information from that, and it's hard for them to look at on their cell phone, or it's hard for them to be able to get access to that information. So in this scenario, which is a fairly common use case is you have existing Ignition gateways and you simply publish data from those gateways up to an instance in the Cloud of choice, again, whether it's our Cloud or your Cloud, and you build applications up there that take advantage of security principles like multi-factor authentication and DNS attack protection, and the use of a modern suite of security tools so that you can provide a secure way for those end users to be able to access that information that used to be trapped inside of the facility.

10:42
James Burnand: The next use case is around enterprise application, so this is often... And we have a talk on this tomorrow. This is really where there's a single application where I want to go and provide this capability to a fleet of facilities or a fleet of assets. And OEE is a great example of that where, hey, I really wanna have a consistent OEE deployment across my X number of facilities or my fleet of facilities that I have, that can be a really challenging thing to do when you have different IT folks in different buildings and when you have different infrastructure in different buildings, and what we find is for certain types of applications, it makes a lot of sense to use an edge-to-cloud architecture where your edge is provided as a data pump, it's buffering information, it's doing all of the connectivity to those local applications, and you're actually hosting the applications themselves using the Cloud.

11:32
James Burnand: That doesn't mean it all has to be hosted in one gateway. Some of our customers will actually dedicate a gateway per site, so there's a one-to-one relationship between a Cloud application as well as an Edge data pump. We see that as being a very common use case, because what it allows for you to do is to deploy very quickly without having to stand up a bunch of complex infrastructure in the buildings and to be able to take advantage of consistency in the application itself, so using things like the EAM module or DevOps capabilities with Git to be able to manage and operate those projects that are located up in that Cloud position.

12:15
James Burnand: The next piece is an OEM Edge, so where we see this most often is machine builders or folks that are delivering a piece of equipment to a lot of locations, so they would put on a small IoT Edge instance inside of that machine and use it for capturing statistics, creating reports, creating a user portal. So if you're using Ignition Cloud edition, one of the things you're capable of doing is having multiple tenants connect to that instance in the Cloud, so you can imagine if you're a machine builder and you deliver a 100 of this piece of equipment into these locations, the ability to then have some sort of dialed home statistics gathering allows for you to do things like, number one is monitor the equipment, but also find common failure modes and use things like AI to generate insights and inference on how those systems are performing and most importantly is you can actually create upgrade packages for those pieces of equipment based on what you've seen on improvements that you've done on other pieces of equipment. So this allows for you to use that kind of spread out architecture, that Ignition enables to be able to provide an additional service, which is often a paid-for service to your users or to your customers.

13:33
James Burnand: The last one, which is, I'll say newer in this space, is a hybrid. So, is anyone familiar with hybrid? That term make any sense to anyone? Alright, no hands are going up. So what Hybrid is, is it's a little bit of Cloud in your building. So rather than using an Edge device that is essentially there to operate maybe some Docker containers or maybe there to just provide some function, maybe a database or an Ignition gateway, Hybrid Cloud is literally taking a piece of cloud and deploying it inside of your building, so you don't operate it by logging into the server. It looks like a server. So Stack HCI is offered by a bunch of the common vendors, you would know, so Dell is a good example. It looks like a Dell 750 chassis server, but you can't log into it.

14:26
James Burnand: What it is, is it's a thin operating system that connects up to the Cloud, and then you operate and deploy all of the workloads that are on that server sitting in your building through the Azure portal. The nice part about that is you get access to certain services that are available inside of Azure. So the nice part is now I all of a sudden I have access to hyperscale databases and VDI and Kubernetes clusters that lets me put not just FactoryStack, but a variety of different services that live locally can tolerate the internet going out and still operating, but I get the benefit of being able to manage them as if they were deployed in the Cloud because they're being deployed using that same common methodology.

15:11
James Burnand: I see this being a really important step in the next several years for manufacturing, moving from a completely on-prem sort of a set-up to somewhere where there's an on-prem and in cloud hybrid. Yes, the word means that, I guess. Where we see this is traditional SCADA, alarming applications, commonly places, things like regulated environments that want something physically on-prem or they have to have data residency that doesn't leave a building or a geography. These are common use cases for this. And again, we see this as being a very interesting, but also a very useful set of tools that not a lot of folks in the manufacturing space are using as of yet today.

15:54
James Burnand: Interestingly enough, there are several different ones out there. We believe that in this case, Stack HCI is the one we're advertising, 'cause we think that's kind of the furthest ahead. Amazon has their Snow series. If you take a look at that, or their outpost series, there's Anthos from Google and then stack, Azure Stack as it's called for Microsoft. There are others as well. Those are kind of the leading folks in this space, and it is a growing space.

16:26
James Burnand: Oops, so where do people start? So I talked about a couple of use cases, I talked about different ways of thinking about or looking at different types of applications, but most often this is where people start. They set up an Ignition system, a database, a Git repository, everything with integrated Entra ID, multi-factor authentication, everything monitored and secured and they look for a place or an application to use for it. Most often, it's typically focused around statistics or information gathering or unified namespace, integration with AI systems. These are all different use cases that kind of use the same architecture.

17:09
James Burnand: The nice part about this is you can start with a single gateway and a single database, and you can grow this to whatever meets the needs of your use case and your customer, so there are limits, but they're very, very high, and I haven't seen anyone getting or close to them yet, where you can start with a single gateway and you can run hundreds inside of the same infrastructure without making any real fundamental changes to the way it's built.

17:40
James Burnand: So part of what I think is important to understand is what does 4IR do in all this is that we are operating, managing it, and making it simple for people to use, so your interface as an integrator or an end user is the Ignition Gateway in the Ignition Designer. You don't really need to know or understand all of the inner workings behind this. What you need to know is that someone that understands OT is taking care of it for you, and that we are ensuring a simple interface for you to be able to use that takes care of some of the complexities that you may run into.

18:15
James Burnand: A good example. So one of the complexities that a lot of folks run into when they're putting stuff in the Cloud is SSL certificates. So anyone had that problem where their system goes down because of an SSL certificate?

18:29
Audience Member 1: Microsoft Azure.

18:35
Audience Member 1: Special server crashing and yeah, not a problem at all.

18:39
James Burnand: So in our case, we have automated a lot of what you see on the screen, so we use a tool called Pulumi that allows for us to automate the deployment, management, and updating of all of the infrastructure. That also includes certificates. So we don't just deploy a certificate, set it to 2029, and hope no one forgets about it in a few years. We rotate our certificates every thirty days, and there are some changes coming from the browser providers that probably is gonna become necessity in the next few months, maybe a year. But that automation allows for one of those potential downtime reasons to just sort of go away. It becomes something that you no longer need to have as a part of your mind or part of your maintenance plans, because now it's taken care of as a part of the platform that's deployed.

19:28
James Burnand: Maybe leave certificates. So we do have a presentation tomorrow that I'll talk about in a second where we will... We'll go through a little bit more detail what that is, but we do talk quite a bit about security certificates and scale as a part of that. So it's important to know how do you price stuff, and there's a real interesting part of this discussion around how you look at what the pricing is for when you're doing a deployment. So very similarly to if you're gonna go buy a server, right?

20:02
James Burnand: So if you're setting up an Ignition system in a plant, you're probably going to Dell, maybe buying a VMware 321 stack or OpenStack or Nutanix, whatever the case may be. But you're buying something and you're buying it with the intention of having enough capacity in that thing for the next six, seven years, depending on what your lease or your refresh cycle is on your hardware. It's a little different in the Cloud. So when you're in the Cloud, what you're doing is you're trying to figure out, what do I need today, and making sure that when I've created this, I have a flexible architecture. So as I consume more, I have the ability to expand my capability. So what becomes important as a part of this is understanding that the Cloud and on-prem have different ways of handling reliability. So by default, our systems take advantage of multiple availability zones.

20:51
James Burnand: So we have things like mirrored storage across three completely separate physical buildings that provide not just if some hard drives fail, but if a literal building blows up, the system won't actually have any, or it'll have minimal downtime to move some of the workloads across automatically. So the level of availability and reliability that we offer out of the box is actually higher than what most people are capable of doing inside of the four walls of their building. And we can still go up from there. The challenge is cost. So, you know, a lot of folks are like, it needs to be this, it needs to be that without actually going through and understanding what level of downtime can I tolerate as my business? Can I tolerate... And my cohort, Randy says, can you tolerate somewhere between a 100 milliseconds and a 100 days?

21:39
James Burnand: And the reality is that, you know, depending on what your lead time is for different hardware components or what the criticality of your application is, how much data you can tolerate to lose, those are the decisions that help you choose what level of availability that you need to have as a part of your deployed application. That is a direct correlation to what it costs from those hosting services from the Cloud. So we try to guide people through what it is they need, based on what their application is, what their user use case is, and try to create something that makes sense for those users, taking advantage of the technologies that you have available by using different cloud services and capabilities.

22:19
James Burnand: The other things that drive cost is how complex is the application? So how many gateways? What type of databases do I need? Do I need a VPN or no VPN? How long do I need to retain backups for? These are all, again, considerations that have a direct correlation to what I get charged from an Azure or from an AWS.

22:43
James Burnand: Important to highlight. So we do have a few partnerships in the industry. A lot of logos I think that are here this week. We work very closely with these partners on trying to create cohesive offerings as well as working with Microsoft and Amazon to ensure that our solution is qualified and follows all the best practices that they publish. We do work with a lot of systems integrators as well. I'm not gonna put logos up here, but I think it's very much a collaborative engagement with integrators because we don't build applications. That is not part of our business model. We are here to provide enablement and infrastructure and make sure that it's easy for system integrators to deploy these kind of systems or end users to deploy these kind of systems. But we do not build applications.

23:29
James Burnand: We do offer consulting. So if you are trying to figure out how am I going to do this? How does IT and OT talk together? How do I meet these security requirements? Or you get one of those big long checklists that says, do you have this? Do you have that? What's your policy for this? That's what we do. So if you're trying to go through that and figure out a way to create an offering for a customer that meets those obligations, we probably have an answer for that because that's our business.

24:04
James Burnand: So we talked a little bit about the ICC session. Tomorrow, it's just after lunch in stage 2. I encourage you all to attend. So I will be back up here. I'll have my cohort Randy to talk a little bit about Enterprise Ignition specifically. So we're gonna cover details around what makes an Enterprise unique, as well as we're gonna do a live demonstration of FactoryStack. That demonstration is gonna have a number of Ignition gateways running. We're gonna add a whole bunch, we're gonna upgrade a bunch, and we're gonna downgrade a bunch and kill a bunch. So a really neat demonstration of the technology in action and we're looking forward to sharing that with you guys. That's all I have for the presentation. Any questions?

24:54
James Burnand: So there are some that are deploying hybrid because of that concern and they need to have it in the building. But there are others, and it's not typically like consumer packaged goods or pharmaceuticals. It's like oil and gas is a better example where they have distributed fleets of assets and they're actually doing monitoring and SCADA control of those distributed assets using a central platform, which for them, isn't really that different as to what it would look like if they had a bunch of leased lines going to a building that has a dedicated server. So for them, this is a cost savings and risk reduction piece. So now rather than having no one updating their servers and being a little bit of a Bon Jovi, now they have someone caring for and monitoring their systems 24/7 and providing updates and providing kind of that surety of availability. The biggest downtime reason is often the internet connection, not either side of it.

25:58
James Burnand: Yeah. Yeah. It's all pipeline in that particular case I'm talking about. But yeah, like there isn't, you know, for direct control of process and equipment, we don't recommend using the Cloud. And to be honest, there is not a great set of reasons to take that risk on unless you need to. I personally think that in my professional career, we're going to see a time where the reliability of networks between factories and public clouds are at the point where people will start to do that. We're already seeing... We have a couple of like real big enterprise customers that are forcing all of their onsite SQL servers to be moved to a managed service in Azure by default. So you have to provide basically a set of reasons why they're not going to be moved. So they don't actually care what the application is, they're just trying to get rid of that cost of having to operate and maintain those SQL servers.

26:57
James Burnand: And their reasoning behind it is that they've invested in redundant WAN connections and a level of latency and availability between their buildings and their public cloud instance that is as good as it could possibly be, so they feel comfortable with that risk level. I think we're gonna get there in the industrial space, but not for a while. That's why I think hybrid cloud is so important because hybrid cloud allows for you to bridge that timeline and you can run Stack HCI offline for weeks and it still is local, it's still running virtual machines and clusters in the building, allows for your SCADA system to operate as if it was there. What you lose is visibility and the ability to pump back ups up to the Cloud.

27:41
Audience Member 2: All the software, all that's managed in the Cloud. What about hardware upgrades to the on-prem?

27:47
James Burnand: So that's actually managed from the Cloud as well. So the way that works is there's a Stack HCI OS, and again, I'm just talking about that particular instance that's a like a really cut down version of Windows server and it's upgraded kind of like a firmware on a PLC. And those upgrades are become available in Azure and you push those upgrades down to the system. So it's... they're more like unit upgrades than like doing Patch Tuesday. So it's more akin to like a firmware based device than it is like an operating system.

28:19
Audience Member 2: So no real concerns about hardware obfuscating the software?

28:25
James Burnand: So not really. The nice part about it is just like if you're running a VMware setup, you're obfuscating the hardware from the workloads that are running on top of it. So, you know, for you to migrate that cluster, migrate those virtual machines to another piece of hardware, even if it's dissimilar is not an issue. The level of availability of those systems is variable depending on how much hardware you buy. So you can do as little as one Stack HCI server, which gives you like a RAID 5 array and two power supplies and single server level of reliability. You can do two of them running as a pair and you can do 10 of them running as a cluster.

29:06
James Burnand: Yeah. So the question was, how difficult is it to get estimated price and Azure was the question, but it's similar for AWS and how accurate is that? So the cloud companies actually do a really good job of laying out what their service costs are, and they also have some fairly built-in discounting models. So one of the things you can do is you can reserve for a certain amount of time, and then you get a percentage off of that service cost. So for example, if I have a database and I reserve it for a year, I get thirty percent off that price. And that's basically a fixed quantity based on what the calculators say. So we can go in and what we do to try to simplify it for the end users is we'll kind of create a set of boundaries and say, okay, for this subscription you get a terabyte of storage, you get this much ingress, this much egress and these services, and we'll handle some of the risk of that minutia.

30:03
James Burnand: When it's in a customer's tenant or when you're trying to estimate, you know, is this a hundred bucks a month or 10,000 a month, the calculators are really easy to use provided you know the services that you're going to consume, in an approximation. The data's not the most expensive part, it's the services that cost more. So like for example, if you're gonna put in the storage for storing backups, that's rounding error compared to what it costs to put in like a SQL server database service.

30:32
James Burnand: Yeah. So the question was how does Ignition licensing work? We can only buy, 4IR can only buy Cloud edition, because we purchase Cloud edition through the marketplace, just like anyone else would purchase Cloud edition. Any other Ignition purchases are perpetual licenses. We need the eight digit key so we can be able to reup them whenever we need to. Or if we kill a gateway and bring one back up, we have to be able to reactivate it. But those are purchased either by the system integrator or by the end user directly. So we don't... Part of this, so the licensing that we'll provide is for the managed services that we purchase or anything that we purchase through Azure for things like, if I need an MQTT broker, if I need a flow license or an Ignition license that's typically purchased by the integrator as a part of that project that's being deployed. And then we will... Our requirement is that support is maintained on it, so upgrade protection is available so we can upgrade things. But that's kind of the all we're really looking for.

31:39
James Burnand: Okay. I think... I'm starting to feel like we might be out of time. So I wanted to say thank you all for your time today and I hope you guys enjoy ICC. Have a great one.

Sepasoft’s workflow solution can map out and execute the production process for almost anything – including made-to-order bobbleheads! Our demo will showcase how simple it is to manage production workflows, collect real-time data, and utilize document management with 3D models and form entry. We’ll also highlight how to authenticate and verify every action during production for compliance and accountability using Electronic Batch Records (EBR) and electronic signatures. Join us to see the latest Batch Procedure technology in action.

Transcript:

00:00
Tony Nevshemal: Hey everybody. Welcome and thank you for coming to our session today. I'm really excited to be here at ICC. It's actually my first ICC. But when I started... Well, today, my colleague Doug and I, sorry about that, are gonna be presenting "Sepasoft's Workflow Solution: Building Bobbles with Batch." We're gonna be building these really cool bobbleheads today using Sepasoft's Batch [Procedure] Module. And within Sepasoft, there's often been some controversy about how we start... How we named our module "Batch" because it's, some people think it's a misnomer. That it only applies to batch manufacturing. However, it truly is a workflow solution. It'll handle any workflow that's incorporated or associated with your manufacturing, and we intend to show you something of that today.

00:55
Tony Nevshemal: My name is Tony Nevshemal. I'm the CEO of Sepasoft, and I'm also the new guy, having joined just recently. Many of you know Tom, Tom Hechtman was the prior CEO of Sepasoft, and he has transitioned to the CTO role where he's in charge of the product roadmap, product innovation, and thought leadership. Prior to joining Sepasoft, I was actually at, a CEO of an ERP, a manufacturing ERP. And prior to that, I was an operations director at a large manufacturer. I'm very happy today to come down the Purdue pyramid to level three where all the cool kids are and one of them is Doug. So Doug, introduce yourself.

01:38
Doug Brandl: Yeah, thank you. My name is Doug Brandl. I'm an MES Solutions Engineer with Sepasoft. My background is, I've got 10 years of experience in pharma as an automation engineer and consultant, and then application development before then. But I grew up around the MES space, I grew up around the standards. My father was really involved in them, and our dinner table conversations with me and my brothers and my family often involved talking about operations, responses, and all the different object models. It was a bit nerdy, a bit geeky, push the glasses right up your face. But I've got an ingrained, internalized understanding of the space and I've been with Sepasoft for a little over a year and thank you to everybody who went to our session last year, and thank you for coming to this one today.

02:36
Tony Nevshemal: Well, and before I joined, I endeavored to take all the training classes at Sepasoft for all of our modules. But one of the training classes I have not taken yet is our Batch [Procedure] Module. So Doug is in the unenviable position of walking me through our Batch [Procedure] Module, the unit procedures, changing up a recipe, and you guys get to see it all in real time today. A quick word about Sepasoft before we proceed. Sepasoft is of course an Inductive [Automation] Solutions Partner. We have the broadest and deepest MES solution on the platform. We have batch processing production workflows, we'll be showing some of that today. We have genealogy and WIP inventory with our Track & Trace Module. ERP connectivity, we can hook up to pretty much any ERP, and we have a direct connector with SAP.

03:31
Tony Nevshemal: We're well known for our production efficiency and scheduling with our OEE and downtime, quality tracking is handled with SPC. We have a bunch of ancillary modules such as settings and changeover, document management, barcode, those types of things. And you can control it all at the enterprise level with our multi-sync management, multi-site management, not sync. I'm very happy to tell you that this week we're announcing another bullet point added to this list, and that's SepaIQ. So please come to our session on Thursday. SepaIQ is really an exciting breakthrough that we've made, that Tom's made, and it relates to our manufacturing, machine learning, AI, data contextualization, all of those topics. So please come to our session on Thursday to learn more about that.

04:21
Tony Nevshemal: And finally, a quick word about a change we've made regarding our Quick Start program at Sepasoft. Our Quick Start program is effectively access to our design consultation engineers. We've opened up that access to be universal to any and all Sepasoft customers. So to the extent that you need expertise with your MES project, whether that's at architecture, design, implementation, rollout, consider us part of the team because when you succeed, we succeed. So I think that's enough of that. Let's get into the presentation.

04:55
Doug Brandl: Yeah. To give everybody some context on what we're doing, we are receiving orders from our ERP system for made-to-order bobbleheads. And we're going to run through to assembly, and we're going to try and highlight, and I challenge you to think of it this way, the procedural control and workflow of what it takes to go from order to execution of making these bobbleheads. And Tony will have to put them together for us. We're gonna leverage our best procedure tool, we're gonna use our Track & Trace modules. We'll, hopefully, if we have time, be able to see some of the genealogy of lot consumption, and you'll see a handful of our components that we use to do all this and our recipe editor.

05:43
Tony Nevshemal: Yep.

05:45
Doug Brandl: Alright.

05:45
Tony Nevshemal: Alright.

05:46
Doug Brandl: So first things first, you guys are gonna have to excuse me, I've got to turn around to do this. We're gonna refresh our orders off of our ERP system, and I like this bobblehead for the Sepasoft company logo, that's awfully convenient that one's right at the beginning. So we're gonna go ahead and start a batch, and as you can see, we've got our batch ID, proceed to the review page before we can assemble. So what we've got here is, this is just a standard Perspective page, we've got our document viewer, which is an HTML5 WYSIWYG. You can do a lot of things in it, a lot of really cool things. In this case, we're embedding a WebGL model, this we do with the help of the Web Dev Module. And over here on the right side, we've embedded some form entry fields and all of this gets tracked to the batch, this gets tracked to the electronic batch record, the EBR, and I'll show you what all of that looks like here in a minute. But I guess probably before we go, I should give you a quick overview of the recipe so that we can...

07:00
Tony Nevshemal: Yeah. Is there a way to graphically view that?

07:01
Doug Brandl: Yeah. I put a little slide out here. Right over here is a visual representation, and this is also very similar to... Sorry. This is our recipe that we're gonna be executing and we here have "Review Station" which in this case is gonna be my computer where I'm going to do some 3D model review. We're going to do some authentication challenges. This links into the identity provider provided by Inductive [Automation].

07:29
Doug Brandl: And we'll challenge for some electronic signatures. We've got some logic that we can do to that where you can require double signatures, you can set up which roles need to be to gate certain steps. And then after our review, if we're happy with our model, we go through the assembly, so I have an equipment phase here. If you're not familiar with the standards, think of the phase as like a step. In this case, this equipment phase is a simulated PLC where I'm going to send to our printer, our 3D... Our beautiful Amazon printer here. Our 3D models that we're going to print, we're going to e-sign to make sure it didn't turn to spaghetti, and then we're going to measure, record the values to our SPC modules and then assemble our 3D, our little 3D bobblehead. Alright, so Tony.

08:26
Tony Nevshemal: Yes.

08:27
Doug Brandl: Well, I guess this is all me, I'm the reviewer. As far as... This looks appropriate to me. I'm not really seeing any mesh errors.

08:36
Tony Nevshemal: And all components, all three are present.

08:38
Doug Brandl: Yes, all of this is present. So I'm gonna go ahead and click through these and I'm gonna say this is all good, and I'm going to... You can't see it in the bottom right because it's covered by my shadow, but down here, we've got our button to finish this document. Now, when I do this, I'm gonna slide this back out. You can see where you've been and where you're going with our batch monitor. And when I click on this and expand it, I can see all of the relevant metrics that we're capturing as part of this step. I can see, right up here, I can see the model is appropriate. So this is really good for auditing and figuring out what really happened during the execution of a batch. Slide this guy back out, and I can see I've got an e-signature required to complete the review step.

09:28
Doug Brandl: I will go ahead as a reviewer, do this challenge, so here I am Doug, and my password. Alright, I accepted that. I could also reject it, which in our batch, in the recipe that you saw or branches, you can get pretty complex in your conditions that you put in there to do really whatever it is that you need. Next up, I guess we go to our assemble stage. Here, this is just a simple Perspective page that I put up tied to our fake little PLC. You can see I say that the state is running. Our PLC is saying that it is running, but in reality, it is waiting for some filament. So Tony, if you don't mind, could you scan some...

10:21
Tony Nevshemal: Sure. Beep.

10:24
Doug Brandl: Perfect. Alright, there we go. Okay, now we're off to the races. So, while this is running, I'm just capturing a handful of metrics, we're looking at filament consumed, layers printed, extruder speed, etc.

10:35
Tony Nevshemal: How did you build these screens?

10:37
Doug Brandl: Yeah, this is just standard Perspective. All of these are tag-driven, so this, when you install our modules, you get an MES tag provider. And as you configure which phases, which, as you configure the batch module, you can expose each step when it executes for a particular unit, you can expose all of those values as tags. So all of these are just tags, and I just... It's a very simple like plain old Ignition Perspective. And then, again, on this while it executes, I didn't pull it up fast enough, but we are tracking, you see Base_Out at the top, we see filament. These are material transfers, so this is actually piggybacking our Track and Trace Module. It allows us to consume material, track lot usage, and we'll see that hopefully at the end with our trace graph, and then it'll also... You get a file name, you get the extruder speed, all of that gets tracked live, and you can store those values as they change, you can store the last value, so that you can... And you can see all of this in your EBR at the end after execution.

11:56
Tony Nevshemal: And for those that don't know, what's an EBR?

11:58
Doug Brandl: Electronic batch record. Alright, so we'll go over to our measure. I forgot I have a e-signature here. Alright.

12:07
Tony Nevshemal: Well, it looks like they printed.

12:09
Doug Brandl: Okay, they didn't turn to spaghetti.

12:11
Tony Nevshemal: No.

12:11
Doug Brandl: Alright.

12:12
Tony Nevshemal: We got the parts.

12:13
Doug Brandl: So I'll go ahead and sign off. Or would you like to sign off?

12:16
Tony Nevshemal: Sure.

12:17
Doug Brandl: Yeah. And again, this is any identity provider in Ignition that you set up, so you don't need to do anything crazy, it's just part of the platform. Alright. Now we're good, hopefully. Well, I hit the login button. Now we're good to go to our measure. Alright, so we've got some annotations now here on our 3D model. Tony, I need you to take some measurements here.

13:00
Tony Nevshemal: Okay.

13:02
Doug Brandl: So let's look at the head first.

13:04
Tony Nevshemal: Which one?

13:06
Doug Brandl: And I want you to get the diameter of that section on the 3D model.

13:15
Tony Nevshemal: So that is 6.12.

13:17
Doug Brandl: Alright, and then let's go to the base. If I can put that. There we go. Now we're gonna grab that right there, the diameter.

13:32
Tony Nevshemal: Alright, 6.16.

13:37
Doug Brandl: And then finally, let's go for the spring diameter.

13:43
Tony Nevshemal: 6.02.

13:47
Doug Brandl: Perfect. So I'll go ahead and complete this step. Now, I don't know if you guys noticed, but part of our process, we measure, we record the values to SPC, which it popped up while I was looking away, but we record the values to SPC and then we go to assembly. But we may run into a problem in the future, so I think there's an opportunity for us to modify this recipe and for Tony to dabble in the batch recipe editor, so we are good there. Now it's just assemble.

14:19
Tony Nevshemal: Alright.

14:19
Doug Brandl: If you don't mind.

14:22
Tony Nevshemal: So how do I assemble?

14:23
Doug Brandl: No, that's...

14:24
Tony Nevshemal: Okay. So you take...

14:25
Doug Brandl: Yeah. Take the spring, put it in the hole. Now, obviously you use your imagination and your projects, this could obviously be significantly more complex. You don't have to use a 3D model like we are here, you could use documents. We can retrieve these out of controlled document management systems. The world is your oyster when it comes to this. Alright, cool. It is assembled. I'm gonna go ahead and complete the step. Alright, so we have, we've completed our assembly and now we're gonna send the label to the printer and that's that. But we did notice that there are some opportunities. So Tony, if you don't mind, I'd like for you to go ahead and go into the recipe editor and modify the recipe, and let's see if we can account for times where... Let's go with the spring is not gonna fit in the hole. We're not gonna be able to assemble this. So we've got our happy path, we've got our green path through this workflow, but we don't have a red path, we're not handling exceptions appropriately, so this is a great opportunity to show you how easy it is. So Tony, can you open up the assembly unit procedure on the bottom left?

15:39
Tony Nevshemal: Sure.

15:41
Doug Brandl: And scroll on down, and after the "Record Values" and the "Record Transition," we're going to insert a branch into this workflow, so you can delete that line right there. And then I want you on our logic controls here in the editor to drag on "Or Begin." What this is gonna let us do is this is gonna let us say, "When this condition is met, you go down this path. When a different condition is met, you go down another path," etc., etc. And you can change these. So connect that, and then we're going to put in those conditions.

16:16
Tony Nevshemal: Okay.

16:16
Doug Brandl: So if you could drag two transitions in, the transition is where you're going to be able to put in that expression, and we'll have one for our green path and one for our red path. Or happy and sad path. And go ahead and connect those guys. Perfect. And then let's edit. You can connect them to the next one as well.

16:41
Tony Nevshemal: Sure.

16:42
Doug Brandl: And then let's go ahead and edit that transition. Let's give it a name.

16:47
Tony Nevshemal: So this is good measurements, right?

16:49
Doug Brandl: Yes. And then this transition expression, so this transition expression, what we can do is we can look up through the recipe, through what's been executed, and we can pull out some of those metrics. So we had our operator record on that document, we had them record the diameters of the spring and of the head and the base, so what we're gonna do is we can grab those values and apply some rudimentary logic. So Tony, we called it "measure," is the name of that step, of that phase. "Measure" and then you're gonna say ".diameter" and let's go. So in this case, our good one is when the spring is smaller than the head and the spring is smaller than the base.

17:35
Tony Nevshemal: Right, so when the spring...

17:37
Doug Brandl: And, nope, we don't need to...

17:44
Tony Nevshemal: Oh yeah. Just less than...

17:46
Doug Brandl: Yeah, maybe too tight.

17:47
Tony Nevshemal: "Measure.Diameter_Spring" is... "Measure.Diameter_Base" right?

18:19
Doug Brandl: Yes.

18:20
Tony Nevshemal: Okay.

18:21
Doug Brandl: Go ahead and save that. And then let's do the same for... Let's do the inverse, the logic inverse of that for this red path, so let's just call this "rejects."

18:31
Tony Nevshemal: Reject.

18:31
Doug Brandl: Reject measurement. And then our transition expression is going to be when the spring is greater than or equal to the base, or the spring is greater than or, and... Is greater than or equal to the head.

19:00
Tony Nevshemal: Spring, is greater than or equal to. What did I do first?

19:11
Doug Brandl: You did the head first.

19:12
Tony Nevshemal: Alright, so this is base. Okay.

19:13
Doug Brandl: Perfect. Save. And then what do we... What do you think we should do?

19:19
Tony Nevshemal: Well, let's say... So if it fails its measurements, that means you're not able to assemble. So we should probably tell the assemblers.

19:27
Doug Brandl: Yeah, probably don't wanna waste their time.

19:28
Tony Nevshemal: Right.

19:28
Doug Brandl: Yeah. So let's throw in a user message. So we have some built in... You have like a whole standard library of phases that you can drop in. And in this case I've configured it so that our assembly station can have a user message. So if you can just click that, drag it over into that unit procedure and connect it. And let's go ahead and configure it.

20:00
Tony Nevshemal: So we'll call this "notify"?

20:02
Doug Brandl: Yeah, like "notify operator" or something.

20:04
Tony Nevshemal: Yeah. Okay.

20:14
Doug Brandl: And then let's just give them a message down at the bottom where it says "parameter value."

20:21
Tony Nevshemal: Yeah. What do we wanna say here?

20:24
Doug Brandl: Let's just say "assembly not possible."

20:25
Tony Nevshemal: Okay.

20:26
Doug Brandl: We'll keep it simple. In your own projects, I'm sure that you'd probably wanna put more in there. And then go ahead and save that.

20:33
Tony Nevshemal: Yep.

20:33
Doug Brandl: So I'm not covering it. But you can also do calculations where you can pull in values. So a lot of our phases have that. Yeah, let's go ahead and require acknowledgement on it.

20:43
Tony Nevshemal: Yeah.

20:44
Doug Brandl: There's a lot of ability to make it dynamic so it's not all static. It's not like you're always gonna say the same thing. Sometimes you want to include values from previous steps or maybe include batch parameters as part of the message or part of any other phase. So we do have also the ability to include that as part of like a calculation. But we're not doing that here. So let's go ahead and hit save.

21:05
Tony Nevshemal: Alright.

21:08
Doug Brandl: And then we're gonna put a transition on this. So every phase needs to have a transition after it's done. And in this case, we're just gonna say "complete." Once the notification has been sent and this phase is... The execution of it is complete, we'll continue on and we'll terminate the batch. So you can go ahead and insert suggested here. And what this does is it's gonna look at the link up and just say whenever that step is complete. And this is good. We'll go ahead and save it, and then put on a terminator in the logic controls on the...

21:39
Tony Nevshemal: Let's try it without a terminator.

21:41
Doug Brandl: We can't do it.

21:42
Tony Nevshemal: Can we validate it?

21:42
Doug Brandl: Yeah, you wanna validate it? So if you don't do this, we do have some validation of our recipes where it'll look at it and it'll tell you what's wrong. And in this case, it's saying the assembly unit procedure, UP5 transition needs to be followed by something.

22:00
Tony Nevshemal: Okay, cool.

22:00
Doug Brandl: Let's go ahead and drag the terminator on and connect it. And then let's validate. Again, make sure that that resolved that issue. Recipe is valid. Cool beans. Let's save it.

22:16
Tony Nevshemal: Alright.

22:21
Doug Brandl: Alright.

22:22
Tony Nevshemal: Right. Let's run it again.

22:23
Doug Brandl: Yeah, so we'll fly through this for the second time so that we can get to questions since we've got four minutes to go. So, alright. This is gonna be the world's fastest 3D printer here. I'm gonna go ahead and kill all of these old orders. These are on the old recipes. So we do version our recipes. So these are using, it's the version 61 of that recipe. We're going to reset this and I'm gonna go retrieve some more orders from our ERP system and that'll be version 62. So refresh orders right here. Alright. So this is the same steps. I'm gonna go fast for the sake of brevity.

23:04
Tony Nevshemal: Let's quickly review them.

23:05
Doug Brandl: Yep. Oh, this looks great. We've seen this one before. Check, check, check. Check. E-sign. I'll go in as an admin. Password.

23:21
Tony Nevshemal: Cool.

23:22
Doug Brandl: Cool, cool, cool. Close those.

23:24
Tony Nevshemal: It's printing.

23:25
Doug Brandl: Yeah, let's go over to our print. Beep boop, scan the lot. We're printing. We are printing at 50 layers a second.

23:36
Tony Nevshemal: Yeah. It's screaming.

23:37
Doug Brandl: This is a fast printer. I can tell who has a 3D printer in here and knows how frustratingly slow that they are. Alright. We're gonna have an e-signature.

23:50
Tony Nevshemal: Okay.

23:51
Doug Brandl: Verify it didn't turn to spaghetti. So I'm gonna go ahead and sign that one as well. Tony, it didn't turn to spaghetti, did it?

24:00
Tony Nevshemal: It did not. We have something.

24:03
Doug Brandl: Alright. So now we're on our measure step. So this is after this step is where we added our transition. So let's go ahead and measure the head outer diameter.

24:16
Tony Nevshemal: Okay, that is 6.2.

24:20
Doug Brandl: 6.2. Let's measure the base.

24:25
Tony Nevshemal: That is 5.9.

24:26
Doug Brandl: Whoa. Now let's do the spring.

24:33
Tony Nevshemal: That is 6.02.

24:35
Doug Brandl: 6.02. Alright. So clearly we are gonna violate our recipe. So when I do that, let's go ahead and take a look and see what happened. So right here, I expand this. Sorry, let me make this a little bit bigger here. I just like watching him walk back and forth with the shadow. So here you can see this transition. So we proceeded down this route here and you can look at this transition and you can see what specifically caused us to go down whatever path it was. And in this case, it was our spring is greater than or equal to our base. Our base was too tiny or our spring is too big. And then we have our notification. So that notification's up on the top right here. And we did require acknowledgement. So I'm gonna go ahead and sign in as an admin. Password.

25:35
Doug Brandl: And here we have our... Just a standard batch message list. This is, again, one of our components where I can click on it. Assembly not possible. I'm gonna acknowledge that. And again, all of this is tracked to the EBR. There's an awful lot that I wanna show you guys as it relates to our EBR, as it relates to our trace graph. I'll hit the trace graph really fast and then I think we're gonna have to go move on to Q&A. And if you want more you can come over to our booth and I would be happy to show this to you. Alright. So here I'm looking at all of the different types of filament, all the different batches. So here what I'll do is I'll slide that over. So right here I can see we have a completed bobblehead. This right here is the assembly unit procedure for that particular batch.

26:24
Doug Brandl: Looks like it was one that I had done on the fourth, I guess. I could see which filament I consumed. I can get the lot number for the base. So I create... As part of this step, I'm also creating that lot. I can see everything in and I can see all of the material that is created as part of it. And then if I click here, I can see all of the five other batches that use this same material. So this is really useful if you're looking, if you're doing any investigations for quality, for recall, any of that stuff. So this is a really good way to visualize, what did I use? I received green filament and I have it on this particular assembly, this batch right here. So I know all of the bobbleheads that came out that used that specific green filament. And this trace, there's not a realistic limit on this. So it does run back. You can chain all of your material transfers back and forth. I think that's all I've got time to show. Does anybody have any questions? I think it's the Q&A time. Yeah, go for it. Oh, she's going to give you a mic. Yeah.

27:39
Audience Member 1: The object model that you have, the recipe, like how accessible is that? Let's say that I've got basically something that's dynamically generating parts from like a pick-and-place machine, right? And I'm not gonna have all that data until it hits the end of the line as a transaction. Can I write all of that at once? Can I then query essentially every transaction I've had for these measurements and get something like capability? Or am I gonna need to layer in other modules like traceability and SPC to do that kind of stuff?

28:07
Doug Brandl: So if you're doing anything with material tracking, you're gonna need the Track and Trace Module. So material transfers as part of the batch. So you could do all the built-in phases, but when it comes to material in and material out and tracking any of that, and suppose you've got 100 different types of dynamic materials, you can set those for the material in property on the phase. So if you want, I can show that to you probably over at our booth. I can show you what that looks like. But yes, you can do that. But it does require the Track and Trace Module.

28:41
Audience Member 1: Okay.

28:42
Doug Brandl: Yeah.

28:43
Audience Member 2: Hi. Is there an array-based entry? I see the graphical method to put all these essentially routes in, but is there an array base or some other way that you could do it in bulk and not all the clicking and dragging?

28:57
Doug Brandl: Yeah, you can script this too. You can script the creation of recipes, of batches. You could pull it, some people even pull it out of their ERP system and dynamically create recipes. So all of this is backed. So we have this frontend here, we have these components. If you don't want to click and drag and you've got some more complicated system, you can script the creation of all of these recipes. And the execution. Yeah.

29:27
Audience Member 3: Does the system have a functionality to do order maintenance to modify existing batches in run to reflect the new recipe?

29:36
Doug Brandl: At the moment, I don't believe we do. Yeah. I'll let Tom answer that.

29:41
Tom Hechtman: To start a recipe, that's a ISA-88 model. So you have your master recipe and you create a control recipe. So once that... Sorry. Once you create that control recipe and you're executing it, it's isolated from the master recipe at that point. Now, if you modify phase or templates, we have templates and different things like that, you do have ways to push those changes down into your recipe and such.

30:13
Audience Member 4: And you can create something... Are there already existing scripts to help facilitate that that you need to customize for your use case?

30:20
Doug Brandl: Yes. So I definitely encourage you to reach out for the Quick Start program, reach out to our design consultation team. They've got a lot of experience doing that.

30:29
Audience Member 4: Awesome, thank you.

30:31
Doug Brandl: Yeah. Any more questions you guys have, please come visit us over at our booth and I really, really, really encourage you come on Thursday to Tom and Mark's presentation. It is very exciting what they're doing. So show up if you can. Alright, thank you guys.

30:47
Tony Nevshemal: Thank you.

Using our OEE template as an example, we'll demonstrate how you can streamline your Ignition projects by avoiding complex coding and scripting. This is all about scaling your data processing while adding centralized data and engineering governance. Every new KPI we calculate, event we detect, and batch we process, will be served back to Ignition, an MQTT broker, and to the enterprise data warehouse.

Transcript:

00:01
Jeff Knepper: Data is the new oil. If we're digging in our backyard and a bunch of crude comes up out of the ground, we are not rich. We have a huge liability on our hands. Oil is valuable only after it's been captured, after it's been processed, cleansed, transported, distributed, and value has been obtained from it. Data is no different. Let's talk about data a little bit. Our engineers, engineers, engineers, engineers, anybody in the room, an engineer? You've seen a trend before. That's actually not data, by the way. If we took just one point off of that trend and took away all of the context of what's happened before and what's happened after, that's data. This is information. But there's other types of data that we work with. We have transactional records. And what do we keep doing in our goal of obtaining information. We look up at our trends. We say, "Oh, I see I've moved from a state of zero up to a state of 10 to a state of 20."

01:12
Jeff Knepper: And I want to know what's going on with this other data when these state changes are happening. So we draw little lines down our trend charts and we write a bunch of code and we try to figure out how that value has changed during that state. Or we write a bunch of code to try to figure out what's been happening across a couple of shifts. Or we write a bunch of code to figure out what's been happening every single hour, or every single minute, or every single quarter, or how it compares this period to that period, or what it was like when that operator was using it compared to when this operator was using it.

01:49
Jeff Knepper: The point is, in order to try to turn data into information, there is a common factor, and it is we write a bunch of code. It is not easy to turn raw data into information. Our goal is to help you model, transform, and distribute information. My name is Jeff Knepper. This is my partner, Leonard Smit. And today we wanna spend a little bit of time to introduce you to the problems that Flow Software helps you solve. So what is Flow? Flow is a pre-built solution to help you connect to the data sources that matter most to you and your operation. So what are those? Well, in this case, I think we can agree, Ignition. And what is Ignition? Ignition has time series data, Historian. It has transactional data, SQL Bridge. It has manually entered data, Web Forms. And then there's those other sources that Ignition connects to. My quality systems, maybe that's not been built in Ignition, my ERP system, my MES, my CMMS, my enterprise asset management system.

03:06
Jeff Knepper: These are all sources of data that your engineers and your team and your customers really would like to have access to and be able to work with without writing a bunch of code. So we connect to those systems and we do a really neat thing. We normalize those various data formats into one easy to work with format and do a point in time normalization. Now, that's a bit of a measure of words. But what is a point in time normalization? Well, think about those trend charts. We've got pressure that is just moving all over the place. And I've got a transactional record for a batch.

03:48
Jeff Knepper: So batch changed here. Pressure has been moving all over the place. How do I link a point in time on pressure change to a batch record when the timestamps don't match? What Flow does is carry the change from the transactional record forward and assign a virtual timestamp to it, every time I have another timestamp change in my system. So I get a wide table format perfectly set up for row-based calculations so that I have no fear of loss of data when I start to do my transformations. With the data in this type of format ready for me to work with, then I apply my process events, my calendar events, anything that my operations team wants to identify as being important to them. And that is shift patterns, it's financial quarters, it's state changes, it's customer changes, lot runs, batch changes, whatever it is that you need. Maybe safety incidents. It's not limited to machines. And then I aggregate in my model, I write rules in my model on how I'm gonna bring that data together. At that point, Flow's engines execute all of the rules of this model and output the results to a database. Now you have pre-processed and contextualized data ready to be shipped elsewhere. So here's an example of the information that was on the screen before, the trend with the states, the energy usage now contextualized across a batch run. In our little mock simulation here, we're producing water for the fine prisons in the surrounding area.

05:42
Jeff Knepper: Johnny Cash said the water in Folsom wasn't very good, so we're trying to help fix that. We can see that we had a lot. We had a batch start, we had a batch end, we had a duration, we have a customer ID, we have a SKU, and we have a quality check. So now that I've sliced the data by batch runs, I can further slice it. I can say, well, give me lot number one and break lot #1 down into every single stage of that process. I wanna see how much energy did we use during my startup. I wanna see every single downtime. I wanna know why we were down. All of this can be done inside of an information model. Once we've abstracted the underlying data sources, their namespace, and giving your people a really easy namespace that they can interact with. They can code information, they can add comments, they can manually enter data that's missing because it hasn't been automated yet. All of this so that now you have information that's ready to send to any other application, that you wanna send it to. So Lenny, why would I do this in Flow? Why wouldn't I just build it myself?

07:00
Leonard Smit: Well, let's think a little bit of what you need to do to actually get all of those slices, processed and captured. Well, obviously, I need to be able to collect a whole bunch of different data sources, time series data sources, relational data sources. I need a way to actually ingest that into a solution wherever I'm gonna build it. I need to do this point normalization that Jeff has spoken about to get me the boundary values for each and every timestamp whenever the data changes either in the time series data by the source or the relational data source. I need to be able to detect my events. When do I detect an event? When does a batch start? When does a downtime occur? So I need to be able to write all of those rules on when to go and slice it based on my event information.

07:43
Leonard Smit: I need to be able to contextualize that information with data coming from all of these different data sources. And don't forget about the human 'cause the human can also give me context to that data as well. I need to be able to figure out well, we spoke about contextualizing or slicing it per shift per day per hour what is a shift? What is a day? I know it sounds silly to ask you what a day is, but a day means different things for different people 6:00 to 6:00 in the morning or 7:00 to 7:00 or midnight to midnight how do you cater for all of that. How do you not take that information and aggregate it up how do I do a shift to date or a day-to-day total or roll up a whole bunch of production to give me a line production KPI.

08:23
Leonard Smit: I need to be able to version this. If something changed from where I'm getting the data and I'm rerunning the calculations, I need to be able to version it. I need to be able to rubber timestamp it for auditing and governance compliance as well. And then I need to, well, I need to show it somehow. I need to train it. I need to put it on a dashboard. I need to put it on a visualization. And I need to send it out potentially to the hyperscalers, I wanna push this result of this KPI to Snowflake, or I wanna push it to a BI report. So this is just some of the little steps that you need to be able to do, just to be able to get that contextualized data going. I don't know about you, but when I see this list, I just see fingers going crazy and people just coding their life away.

09:04
Jeff Knepper: I could hear the keyboard clicks, and I could see the lines of code starting to develop. And what's the issue with writing code? Maintaining it. The more you write, the more you maintain. The more you write, the less it scales. How do I take the current data project that I'm working on, when I'm done with it, pick it up, and bring it over and put it on this site and reuse it without editing a bunch of code? And if I have to edit a bunch of code, now how do I take it and go put it on 20 other sites? You won't. And if you do, congratulations, you've built a product and now you get to maintain it for the rest of your career. So what does Flow do? Flow starts right after data collection and helps you templatize and model all of these steps while then executing the transformations and the publishing of data according to the rules of your model. Stopping just before you include the information in front of your people or back into other applications to take action on your decisions.

10:13
Jeff Knepper: And you might look at this and say, well, yeah, Jeff, but that's what I do with Ignition. And I'd say, yes, that's what you do with Ignition. That's what you've been doing with Ignition. And we absolutely love Ignition. Our goal is to take your Ignition project and give you a dedicated resource to templatize and execute all of these data transformations and then feed it right back into Ignition so that you continue to build on your Ignition work. And if you're an integrator, to take that work that you've just done, put it into your template library and bring it with you to your next job, standing on the work of, standing on the shoulders of previous work.

10:55
Jeff Knepper: So we know that coding affects us negatively, yet we keep doing it. Maybe it's just time that we say, no more custom code, no more scripting, no more burying this work in applications where I don't have access to it again, no more Excel worksheets that I'm afraid to open up because they're so fragile. And most importantly, centralizing all of this so that I can add governance to my transformations. I wanna make sure that when I define a KPI, that that KPI does not change as I move from one application to the other. I wanna make sure the way I cleanse data is universal across all of my sites, not just based on how one engineer wrote one program over here. Last point, to do all of this work and to do it all in code and do it all in scripting requires a team, it requires people, and it requires people that cost a lot because it is a skill set the more code that you write. Okay, so if you wanna do this and you want to do it well and you wanna get away from code, there's three things that we've identified and built into Flow that will help you do it.

12:05
Jeff Knepper: The very first thing is the ability to write templatized information models. Information models are not, are not master data models. You're not trying to represent every single point inside of your process. An information model is more use case driven. It is the key information that your organization cares about, and it's your ability to govern how that information is brought together over and over and over again before getting shipped out to other applications. Intelligent execution engines, these are simply the bots that do the work that you write into the model. But manufacturing has a ton of challenges. Lenny already touched on it. Data comes in late.

12:51
Jeff Knepper: Data values change. I have to rerun KPIs. If I do secondary aggregation, like rate of change of one KPI over another, if I change an underlying KPI, now I need to rerun those KPIs. That's why it's really important to focus on having complete relational dependencies inside of your model, which of course we've accounted for, and always monitoring the underlying databases. So if data arrives late, or if underlying values change, it triggers the rerunning of all of these calculations, even the republishing of all of those calculations. So if you're publishing this data back to a SQL database or up to a cloud infrastructure like Snowflake or AWS into a Kafka stream, our engines are smart enough to know something's changed, republish. And of course, we're versioning all of the results internally so you always have access to what it was and what it is now. Finally, the last piece is universal information access. Nothing that you build inside of this model, none of the results that get published can stay locked away. I get asked all the time, how are you different than this analytics tool or this analytics tool? And my question is always, well, what you've built in that analytics tool, can you ship it anywhere you want?

14:14
Jeff Knepper: Can you search the model that you've built? Can you move the data freely out of it? And the answer is almost always, no, I can't. And that is the missing piece on almost every single information model and strategy that we come across. So in order for it to scale, we know it needs to stay platform agnostic, be templatized, be API driven, stay away from code as much as possible, be flexible, run on different OSs, and give you universal governance. With that, how about we watch Lenny build a model in real time? You wanna do it in real time?

14:50
Leonard Smit: Let's do it.

14:51
Jeff Knepper: Of course.

14:55
Leonard Smit: So we're gonna cover a little bit of use cases today. Obviously, we're gonna cover a little bit of a batching use case. And then we'll likely touch around OEE as well. But let's get cracking and building out a little bit of a model. Again, the visualization that we started off with today, I've got my state engine, I've got my quality samples, and I've got my energy usage. And I wanna try and make sense of all of this data by contextualizing all of these different data points with one another. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to our configuration environment. So this is the environment that I'm gonna go and create my information model with all of my KPIs. I'm also gonna use the same tool to hook up to all of my different data sources. Now, those data sources can be time series data as well as our relational databases that we spoke about. Let's quickly connect to a SQL database.

15:44
Leonard Smit: What I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go to my data sources on the right-hand side here, and I'm gonna go and create a new connection to a Microsoft SQL database. Inside of the SQL database will be a lot of MES transactional type of data that I would like to have in context and sliced by my energy information that normally sits in my time series historian. So let's do that let's quickly create a connection there. I'm gonna populate this is gonna be my MES data that I'm gonna connect to and I'm gonna just populate the server name of where that database resides and give the name of the database. So my database is called ACME MES so that will now create a connection to that SQL database.

16:28
Leonard Smit: Test the connection, make sure that it can connect to that database yes it can, hit the save button and that will now create a new database connection. Flow will go and deploy that so that my engines will be able to get the data out of that transactional database. Now, when I select this database out of my data sources, what it's gonna do is it's actually gonna go and browse that SQL database and it's gonna see what is the tables and the structure that lives inside of it. So there we go. I've got all of my different tables. I've got my order history, I've got my SKU that I'm making, my work order number, the customer, all of that data is now available for me. Jeff, can you help me please write a joint statement on all of these tables to get it in context with my time series data?

17:18
Jeff Knepper: And this is where it falls apart for me because no, that's not my job. I'm an engineer. I've got knowledge of my process, but I don't know how to do all this database work, but I need access to this data. So absolutely not. No, I cannot. No, I will not.

17:31
Leonard Smit: Okay, cool. So we've got you covered. We can write a definition file for a SQL schema. And what that means is that I can work either with the vendor or with someone, a champion in my organization that understands that database, to make it easier for us as the engineers to actually interact with that data in relation to my time series data potentially. So I've done this before. I've created another connection to this. But in this case, I've loaded what we call a definition file to that SQL database. Now when I browse the namespace, I get a complete different view. I get a tag-like structure that will tell me what is my customer name, what is the SKU that I'm running for all of the different work orders that's loaded within that database. I don't have to write a single piece of SQL code to do all of the joins to that database. And literally, I can now take this, drag it into my data preview here, and that will now do the point normalization for me, and give me what is the work order that I'm running in context to all the other relational data that I have. So I've got my energy usage, I know what the state of the machine is, I know what my sample is, and look at that, I've got the work order number now in context to that data as well.

18:47
Jeff Knepper: And this is where all of the timestamps have already been prepared and aligned perfectly. So that I don't have to worry about looking backwards to try to figure out, well, what was the work order change when I'm looking at this period of time. We've essentially, take in all of the timestamps, align them, ready to go. Now I can work with this information.

19:09
Leonard Smit: Correct. All right, so job number one, done connecting to data sources, doing the point normalization for me, making it easy to use the data that I've got in my production floor. Let's quickly extend my model now. So I wanna go and be able to track this batch, all the different states that my batch goes through. And I wanna do that within the model environment within Flow. So let's go and create a new folder here. I'm just gonna extend my model. This is my ICC live demo. And within that I'm gonna go and create a metric where I'm gonna go and add all of these different inputs that I'm gonna use to add context to my batch of it. So this is gonna be all my inputs and literally all that I have to do is I would go and create tags that represent all of this data for me inside of my model.

19:56
Leonard Smit: So I would go and create a tag that tells me what is the work order and literally drag it across from the namespace into the model. What is the SKU that I'm running? And let's go and marry that with some data from my time series historian. So I've got a little simulator running where I actually now have the state of what this machine is. So I'm gonna add that to my namespace as well. So there we go. This is the actual state of the machine. Let's add that to the inputs and we can also go and add some or the actual energy that I'm using for that as well. And why not marry that with the data from my LIMS system that does all the QC checks for me. Click on that, drag it across and there's my QC check for that as well.

20:44
Jeff Knepper: So three different systems?

20:47
Leonard Smit: Three different systems.

20:49
Jeff Knepper: Represented in one model?

20:49
Leonard Smit: Represented in one model normalized. And what's the best part about this? I don't have to keep this tag name within what is this in the time names historian. I can normalize these names and this I can just, can simply say this is my energy usage. So give it nice normalized names within my model. Okay. I can now use these tags to go and slice the data to all bunch of different ways. And the first way that we're gonna do it is we're gonna slice it per batch. So I'm gonna use what we call an event within Flow, drag that event across this is gonna be my ICC batch tracker and now I've got rules on when do I need to start the event, stop the event and what's the different context that I need to add to that event?

21:29
Leonard Smit: Let's open that up. And it's simply a drag and drop environment. I say, "Oh I wanna go and trigger this batch every time my state value changes from the control load." And that's it. There's my rule for starting a batch. Okay, what context do I wanna add to this batch? Well let's add some attributes to this batch. I wanna know what is the context of the SKU and literally I go and drag the tag onto that attribute to add the context to it. What is the context of my work order number? Again, drag the work order from my tags or my inputs and drag that as context. So by adding more and more attributes, by adding more and more context to the data that I have available. And I can go on to add the quality check as well. Now the model needs to be able to execute live, no point in just building the model without me having the capability to execute these rules in runtime. So deploy it out. What that means is Flows engines will now starting to execute the model. We will backfill on the historical data if there is in the database and we already start to create these batch events for us. There we go. Sliced batches with information and that will give me the context of my different work orders that's now available for you.

22:51
Jeff Knepper: So now written into Flow's database are each of these events with the context from three different databases stored with each of them.

23:02
Leonard Smit: So let's slice it even more. Let's slice it per hour. So I'm gonna take my energy usage, slice it per hour and I'm also gonna slice it per the batch. So I'm gonna add more and more context as we go along. So I'm gonna slice it per the batch and I'm gonna give it context of the work order. So all of those lines that you saw Jeff drew on the PowerPoint of slicing all of this data, that's exactly what I've done here. Slicing it per my calendar, which will give me context of time, batches, hours, days, weeks, and I'm slicing it by my batch information as well. And again, deploy this out and Flow, the Flow engine will do all of this work in the backend. Okay, adding that context, saving it in the database, having that available for everybody to share.

23:46
Leonard Smit: Okay, now that's just a very simple little batch example, how we slice it, how we add the context to that and how we can get that information now sliced not only per the work order but then also per my hour and having that work order number available as well. Cool. We have a little bit extended the model as well just to show you a little bit of what we can do from potentially an OEE kind of example. So here I can see I've got an OEE example built out and I've got all the typical kind of KPIs that I track from an OEE perspective. I've got my schedule, I've got my available time, I've got all the production information. And you'll notice a little bit different in the model. Those guys are blue. The one that I've built is like this grey kind because this all comes from a template. All right, so we've templatized exactly how a line OEE should look. And we utilize that inside of our model here.

24:43
Jeff Knepper: And when we say we've templatized it, what we mean is as engineers, we've templatized it. Flow, has not told you how to define OEE. In fact, I promised Rick Pallotta that I wouldn't even say OEE today. But you get to define how you do calculations and KPIs according to what your organization has structured those rules and those expressions as, you're not forced to our definitions of them.

25:11
Leonard Smit: Now how can I use this model to even extend my KPI definitions? Well I've got four lines for the one, two, three and four. I know what is the total production per line for the hour, but now I wanna do a line roll up. So what is the total production for all four of the lines? Add it together. Okay. Now the nice thing about having a nice normalized model is I can utilize the model for Flow to go and automatically discover all the measures that I need to KPIs that I need to add together to get me to that point. So I can very simply go and say, okay, underneath production I would like a metric for total production and inside of my total production I'm gonna go and create a new hourly KPI and a calculation for that. This is gonna be my total. And inside here I can now define rules based on what is happening within my model definition.

26:06
Leonard Smit: So I can go and create a new collection of measures that I'm gonna filter within my model. And I'm gonna say, "You know what? I would like to know all the measures that's got a UOM within my model. And that UMM is gonna be units." Okay, so what am I doing? I'm searching the model inside here for anything that's got the unit of measure. So that I will go and search the model and by now the definition you'll see that guy's got units, it's gonna bring back all the measures that's got that associated with it. I can extend this obviously to now also go and search for anything in the model by its name. And again, it will go and filter the model and bring back all of those definitions for me. So I can easily do those type of roll-ups within the solution as well. I made a mistake with my spelling there. I'll fix that now.

27:00
Jeff Knepper: So the beauty of this is that as you move to different pieces of equipment or different processes that have different counts, maybe one side has four, the other side has seven, you're not hard coding these numbers in. Flow is finding that automatically for you based on the logic that you've built into Flow, identifying the correct number of measures or metrics and then aggregating them according to the rules of the collection. Lenny, for time.

27:27
Leonard Smit: Yes.

27:28
Jeff Knepper: I think we should talk about how we get information out of Flow.

27:32
Leonard Smit: 100%. So there's a few ways. What we can do is obviously we like Ignition, we play well, we like Perspective. It's a very good tool to create very rich dashboarding capability. So I just played around a little bit and we are introducing the first search engine for industrial data. We call it Floogle.

27:52
Jeff Knepper: It's Floogle.

27:54
Leonard Smit: Yes.

27:55
Jeff Knepper: Floogle.

27:57
Leonard Smit: I haven't heard about Floogle before. It is a information search site and this is a little Floogle doogle.

28:01
Jeff Knepper: Sure.

28:02
Leonard Smit: And if you see Travis, that's Travis by the way. He's celebrating his twentieth year at Inductive Automation. So if you do see him in the passage, just give him a pat on the back and congratulate him with twenty years at IA. But the point is, I can now search my model. All right, so I can search that Flow model for anything that's got bad in it as an example. So there we go. I've got my actual bad inputs. I've got my five minutely bad production figure, so I'm not searching it by tag name in the historian who can tell me what the tag name for the historian was for that point when we did the demo. Nobody knows. Nobody cares.

28:39
Leonard Smit: Of course we've now normalized this nice model where I can search thing by nice proper names. So click on that, it will pull the data from Flow's API and I can use trending capability within perspective to get my information available as well. I can also go and embed the entire Flow dashboard with this using iframe technology and I can have a complete dashboard that's been built within Flow with all my states and all my downtimes already capable as well or populated as well. One thing that we wanna do is also we need to be able to get human interaction into this. We talked about getting data from transactional data, time series data, but what about human factors? Now we do have the capability to go and do calculation or capturing of frames based on our batches.

29:26
Leonard Smit: In this case, well I wanna know this downtime, what was the state of the downtime? It was an electrical fault based on the electrical guys. So again, humans can go and enter the state classifications for us, but we can also go and add data just based on time. You've got a meter out in the field. It's not historicized, I don't know why it's not historicized as yet. But the point is, I can go and manually add that data in there and again, if I do change the value then it will go and do a full audit trail on that value. Flow will store that data point and we'll have a full history of who changed it, when was it changed, and by whom it was changed as well.

30:08
Jeff Knepper: Thank you. That was a lot to try to show, but I appreciate it. Hopefully you were following along and seeing if nothing else. The fact that this is a drag and drop tool that allows anyone with a little bit of experience to be able to build models. Lenny touched on a point and it's something that's really hit home to our team and that is that in an age where I'm building art using Midjourney, there are still operations and processes that do not have data historians. Worse yet, there's operations and processes that have data historians that have locked data away and made it almost impossible to get data out of or licensing models that are frankly a bit abusive. We do not like that. It actually keeps us from being able to do our job in helping build an information model. And so today I'm really pleased to present on behalf of our founder Graham Walton and the entire Flow team, a new product I'd like to introduce you to Timebase.

31:07
Jeff Knepper: Timebase is a completely free purpose-built industrial historian. We are opening up beta testing for it in two weeks and we are releasing Timebase on December the second. It is performant, it is secure and it is easy to get data out of. We're developing a trending tool currently that will I think change the way you trend information. And of course we have ensured that there is a full rest API to be able to pull the data out of and a licensing model that frankly lets you grab Timebase and install it, whether it's in Docker or in Windows and use it across an organization however you see fit. So if you could help us out and be beta testers, that would be wonderful. We'd love to get your experience with the UI. We'd love to be able to tweak the product. And with a December 2nd release date, it is coming up on us fast. So thank you everybody for coming in today. Our next action would be if you'd like to book a consult or see a live demo for yourself, we'd be happy to do so. You can scan the QR code to get more information about our solution. Yeah, I think we probably wanna end there, but our booth is right outside if you'd like to come ask us some questions, but please do not be late for the technical keynote that kicks off at 1 o'clock.

Whether you're new to Ignition or just want a refresher, this session is made for all. The Inductive Automation Training team covers all the basic knowledge and fundamental features you need to get started with Ignition.

Transcript:

00:01
Jayson Thorpe: Hello everyone, welcome to Learning Ignition Fundamentals. We're about to get started here. How about that keynote, huh? I wanna thank you all for joining us for this session.

00:13
Aryanna Brown: My name is Aryanna, I am a Tier Two Software Support Engineer Team Lead here at Inductive Automation. I've been working here for about three years, and if you have ever sought support with our software, you've most likely spoken to me or my team.

00:27
Jayson Thorpe: My name is Jayson, also called JT. I'm a technical trainer, I'm on the training team at Inductive Automation. I started out in support, but I'm in the training department now. If you've taken any of the core classes or any of the other training courses we offered at Inductive Automation, you may have met me before. And today, we are talking about Learning Ignition Fundamentals. So we're gonna be going over some pretty preliminary information on Ignition, what is it, how do you use it? Why do you use it? Pretty much those big three main questions. Summarize, Ignition is a platform, it's an application development platform for you to build, design your own industrial automation applications for SCADA, HMI, MES and more. Some of the cool things about it, it's cross-platform written in Java, so it's operating system agnostic, web-based deployment and modular design. We're gonna talk about that modular design here in a moment, and the web-based deployment as we go through our demonstration today.

01:28
Jayson Thorpe: Since its inception, Ignition has evolved quite a bit. We have four different editions of Ignition to choose from. We have our Standard Edition for most use cases, we have Ignition Edge, for edge of network devices, usually gathering data, forwarding it to a more centralized gateway. We have our Ignition Cloud Edition, if you need to leverage hosting your gateway in the Cloud, this is available through web-based marketplaces like Amazon Web Services, and then we have my favorite Ignition maker edition for your home automation personal non-commercial projects. Ignition's modular design, what does that mean? Modular design essentially means that all of the major functionality you may want out of your gateway comes with a respective module, this means that you can easily customize your installation, things like the two different visualization modules we have, Perspective Vision are each their own module. Things like tag history, SQL Bridge, what this means is that you can really customize. Oh, oh. Oh, well, that's our last slide for now, anyway.

02:39
Jayson Thorpe: What this means is you can really customize your gateway or your entire network of gateways depending on what you need different gateways to do. You're not paying for things that you don't need a certain gateway to do, only for the things that you do need. So for this demonstration, we're gonna be going and installing Ignition, getting started with it, we're gonna start designing pretty quickly here. But what we wanna show you is that anybody can go to inductiveautomation.com, download Ignition, install it, and get started designing in about five minutes. Here we are in Inductive Automation's website, and anywhere at the top right, you can go and download Ignition for your respective operating system. We however, today have the downloader or the installer already downloaded, so we're just gonna run it. And we're gonna go through a basic install, which means we're gonna go with all of the core modules here.

03:36
Jayson Thorpe: Now, I said that we can download Ignition and get started in about five minutes, which in the SCADA space is a very quick amount of time to download our application. Once we download the appli... Once we install Ignition, here we are just making a couple of decisions as we go, we are gonna go with just the typical default installation to include all of the core modules. One of the things we also decided was the service name and the port that Ignition is going to use. And here we are, the gateway is already starting up, and once the gateway is installed, we pick which edition we wanna run. And what we're about to see here in the web browser, right now, we're using Google Chrome, let's create our user and password. But what we have here, in a few minutes, we've installed Ignition and we're running our gateway. Here in the web browser we're looking at the Gateway web page, which is the interface to your Ignition installation. Since Ignition is cross-platform, written in Java, you can load this on to a Linux box or of course, Mac or Windows, have your gateway running in a server box in a closet somewhere, and anybody that's able to reach that gateway over your network, will be able to interface with the gateway web page that we're gonna see here.

05:02
Jayson Thorpe: Gateway started. We're gonna start from scratch, we're actually gonna end up loading up a gateway back up here in a moment. What we see here is the Gateway webpage. Anybody who, you may notice, a local host is what we're accessing. Otherwise, this would be the IP of the gateway. Anybody on our network that can hit the gateway host can access the gateway web page. And here on the home page where we start out is where we can download some of these software peripherals to run a designer and also our Vision and Perspective run times. Next stop on our... Oh, still on the home page, we have links to the user manual, links to our community and as the exchange of our forums, different ways to get started with Ignition and to learn more about it as you go. Thank you. Now we're gonna go to status page, where we do have to log in, and the status pages is where you can get a bird's eye view of your entire Ignition sub-system. We can see the status of how many connections we have, like database connections, our device connections, how many tags we have, and even performance metrics.

06:15
Jayson Thorpe: On the config tab, the last stop of our tour here, is where you go to change any of those settings that we're looking at over in status, if we need to add a new gateway connect or add a connection, like a gate network connection, your database connection, OPC device, all of that would be configured here. Now, you may notice that green banner at the very top. One of the things I mentioned earlier is Ignition's flexible licensing. That trial mode, timer counting down from two hours is built into the Ignition platform. Anybody can download Ignition and run their gateway on this two-hour trial license where all of the core modules are fully functioning and we can build our reports, build our notification pipelines, build all of our displays and our HMIs all on this trial license. And when that two-hour timer goes up, we just go back to the gateway and reset it. Now, what we're doing right now, Aryanna is about to restore a gateway back up, which is in our downloads folder. And we're doing this to basically set up a few preliminary environmental points for our project.

07:25
Jayson Thorpe: And while this is going, let's also install the designer launcher. Now, the reason we're uploading a gateway back up is like I said, we have some project resources already built, some data points in the form of tags. And as this designer launcher is installing, me and Aryanna are gonna switch places, hot potato, and she's gonna take you through the designer once it's fully installed.

07:55
Aryanna Brown: Thank you, JT. Once we have our gateway up and running, we'll take a quick little tour and I'll show you what we've got going on in this back up.

08:11
Jayson Thorpe: Now, one thing to know is during or right now, we're not pointing to any gateways, but right now we have our launcher local to our Gateway, but Aryanna is gonna go into what are the different options for anyone on your network that may need to use the designer.

08:31
Aryanna Brown: So now that we have restored our gateway back up, let's take a look at what's in it. If we head over to the status page, like JT just showed you, log in, we're gonna see that we have some tags. Some of these I've created, we have two device connections, two programmable device simulators, so that when we show our demonstration, we can get started right away with real live unique values. And then, we have a database connection, and that database connection is for us to show trends. And as you see here, the throughput is about 0.8 queries per second, so this will show you the status of your database connection, and right now, it's healthy. I also have a partially built project in this back up that we'll go ahead and take a look at closer in the designer. First, we're gonna wanna launch our designer launcher. Now that we have this open, we're gonna go ahead and add our designer. Now, notice we have two tabs, one is on your network and the other is manual. Manual will allow you to input your Gateway URL manually should it not appear under the on your network tab. The on your network tab is gonna show you all of the Gateways it recognizes on your current network.

09:52
Aryanna Brown: Right now, it's only ours, so we're gonna go ahead and select our Gateway. Once we've selected our Gateway, we're gonna go ahead and open our designer for this Gateway, which should list all of the projects that we have configured for this Gateway. Once we get this open, we'll take a quick tour of the designer, and then we'll get started in showing you a Vision client runtime application.

10:23
Jayson Thorpe: Now Aryanna, how many designer sessions can we be running concurrently from the same Gateway?

10:27
Aryanna Brown: You can run as many as you'd like. As long as you can connect to it through your network, both I and JT can be working on the same project at the same time, if we'd like.

10:38
Jayson Thorpe: All right, I'm just gonna sign in here.

10:45
Aryanna Brown: Perfect. Now, we only have one project on this gateway, but you can create projects for each device, each substation, whichever you prefer. Now that we have our designer open, it is so pretty. Look at it. The possibilities are endless. If we head to the top left-hand corner, you'll notice our project browser, this is gonna list our various modules that can be configurable within the designer, such as our reporting module, which will auto-generate PDF reports to email, saving a directory, even print. We also have our visualization modules, Vision Perspective, scripting, any module that is configurable in the designer. Under that, you'll see we have our tag browser. In our tag browser, we have two tabs, one is tags, the other is UDT definitions with a drop down above it, to select our tag provider. UDT definitions provide a single structure of tags that map to unique data points in your server or device. If you notice we have one for compressor and one for sensor.

11:57
Aryanna Brown: Now, earlier, I mentioned our programmable device simulators, those are coming from a dairy. So these sensor UDTs are representing a refrigerator, humidity and temperature. If we head over to the tags tab, you'll see that we have real-time instances of these definitions. So we have one for each of our compressors and each of our sensors. Now that we've taken a quick little tour, I'm gonna go ahead and launch a Vision client runtime application to show you guys what operators or end users would typically see. While that's loading, I'm just gonna go ahead and show you guys. I've created a template here, notice that it says sensor three, I've only created one of these, this is a resource that we can use to dynamically create multiple instances for a given device or data type. We're gonna go ahead and log in just as operators or end users would. And this is our overview page. Notice that we have those sensor, three of our sensor templates in our overview page.

13:18
Aryanna Brown: Now, I did not create three different sensor templates, I created one and then parameterized them so that I can put in sensor one, sensor two, sensor three to give me those unique real-time values for each of those sensors. With this functionality, that means we can also read and write to and from these UDTs, and we can switch back and forth and see the unique values that these UDTs give us. Now we're gonna head over to our alarms page and let you check out some alarms. Oh, oh. We don't see any alarms. That's okay, let's head back to our designer and we're gonna configure an alarm on our UDT definition so that it takes on every single real-time instance. Now that we're in our UDT definition, we're gonna head to our sensor UDT, down to our humidity tag. Once we're in our humidity tag, we're gonna go down to alarms and add a brand new alarm, we're gonna give it a fun name, like humidity high alarm. Once we've given it a fun name, we're gonna modify the display path. Now, the display path is how it will be displayed in an alarm status table, an alarm journal table, it's exactly as described, how you would like it to display for that instance of the alarm.

14:50
Aryanna Brown: We're going to be using Ignition's expression language to dynamically create these display paths so that they are unique to each of their instances and alarms. Once we hit apply, we're gonna go down and let it know when we'd like the alarm to go active. Given that this is humidity, let's go ahead and make it 95. Once we hit Apply and Okay, you'll notice that we get alarms for each of our sensors. Look under the display path, we have this sensor one, sensor two and sensor three, I only had to configure that once and it dynamically created my display paths. Now, if you head back to the designer, you'll notice under our tags tab, each of our real-time instances for these sensors have the alarming icon showing that there is an alarm configured for each of these tags. Now we're gonna head back to our runtime application and take a look at some tag history. Oh, no. Same issue. That's okay. Just the way we modified a global resource to show you how we can get alarms, we're gonna now modify a project resource to get our tag history displayed.

16:16
Aryanna Brown: We're gonna head over to our history window, and if you notice on the left-hand side in that tag browser, there's this little clock looking icon, that means that history has been configured on these tags and they are currently storing tag history. So we're gonna go ahead and just drag and drop both of them on to our easy chart component, and now we have some values. Now, it is not... Oh, let's go ahead and take a look at it in the client. That was very quick. Easily deployable. Now it's not expected that operators be able to drag and drop. If you look here, if we get rid of this, they can no longer add them back, so we're gonna head to the designer and add a component so that operators can have the same functionality in their project client runtime that we have in our designer.

17:11
Aryanna Brown: We have a tag browse tree component that we're going to be using, and it is exactly as described. It's gonna allow us to browse our tags within our runtime application, so we do not need access to our designer tag browser. We're gonna make it pretty and formatted. And then, once we've done that, we're gonna modify the Tag Tree mode. Now, this is important because the Tag Tree mode will just differentiate between real-time tag paths and historical tag paths. Historical tag paths are tag paths that have been historized for tags that are currently storing history or have stored history. Now that we've changed that to Historical tag paths, operators can only select tags that have history. So we're gonna go ahead and hit save and watch this automatically deploy to our client. And if we get rid of our tag pens, our operators can easily drag and drop tag history onto their chart. Now, that I've gone through Vision and a client runtime application and showing you how to visualize that, JT is going to show you how to build a similar application in our Perspective module.

18:31
Jayson Thorpe: Thank you, Aryanna. So quickly, we've seen how we can manage our tags or manage the tags that are giving us the data from our devices using UDTs, make a change in one place. We see that change populate out to all of our instances. The UDTs that are giving us the real-time tag values are actually pointed to our PLCs. We made an update to one of the interfaces of our Vision client as well, and we deployed that instantaneously. And now, we're gonna go and do something similar in our other visualization module Perspective. For that, we just got word that our organization has bought some new motors. We bought some new hardware. It's installed. We have those connected through our OPC server. We're getting values from our motors in the form of tags through our OPC server. What we're gonna do here is go and design a UDT to match the motor structure in our OPC server. So we're gonna make a new data type.

19:29
Aryanna Brown: Oops, gotta go to that tab.

19:31
Jayson Thorpe: Ah, there we go.

19:33
Jayson Thorpe: In the UDT definitions tab, we're gonna create a new UDT. We're gonna call this motor and we do need to give it a parameter so that we can take the addresses for the PLCs or registers for each individual data point, tell it which motor we want to view, and we are able to redirect our OPC item paths across our server. What you see Aryanna doing here now is browsing our OPC server looking directly onto our devices for the different data points. You'll see we have at least eight different motors. All of these have an identical structure of the same two tags. This is why we're building a UDT, so that we don't have to build a new set of tags for each individual motor. We're just gonna add two of those into our UDT and then using our parameter for the motor number and Ignition's expression language, we're gonna plug in the parameter in place of that motor number to create a dynamic OPC address. Excellent. Now, we have our UDT defined. We have the two data points for every motor we're gonna want to view. And now we need to create our real-time instances, which we can do quickly with one of my favorite names in Ignition, the Instance Creation Wizard. We just have to tell it which UDT we would like to create instances of, give it a base name and pattern for the name and the parameters. When through, check that name tag name pattern.

21:13
Aryanna Brown: Oh, thank you.

21:13
Jayson Thorpe: Whew.

21:16
Jayson Thorpe: Very nice. Now, as soon as we hit Okay, we're gonna see eight instances of our motors. And using that parameter, each one is actually giving us a different value from our devices. Awesome. Now, we have the data actually coming into our system. In order to display this data, we wanna go to Perspective and start building some displays and interfaces. We're gonna build a view to not only show us information for each one of our motors, but also to be able to change the state of that motor to be able to turn it on off. So we're making a new view called motor view. We are gonna use a flex container, which in Perspective, one of the main considerations is the different sizes of screens that your sessions will be run on. What devices are your operators gonna be using? Perspective is chockfull of different layout options to be able to gracefully display your session on different device, specifically different screen sizes. And the flex container handles scaling of the components pretty nicely.

22:24
Jayson Thorpe: Now, so that we know which motor we are viewing, we're gonna add a label component here. And once again, using Ignition's expression language, which very easily can let you take different values from across your system to generate a single value, that's really where the expression language strength lies. In this case that one value we want to generate is just a string of text.

22:50
Aryanna Brown: We forgot to create a parameter.

22:52
Jayson Thorpe: Yes, we did. In order for this label to dynamically display, we do need a parameter just like our UDT definitions. There we go. Very nice. And after this label, we're gonna go and... Well, let's finish configuring this label here first. Now, since we've added the parameter, we can easily go and browse any of the properties across this view of all the components. Right now, the one we want is that motor number parameter. Just so this view is a little bit more interesting to look at, we're gonna go into the symbol factory, which is a library of scaled vector graphic images built into Ignition for us to use in our projects here. We have a simple motor four that looks pretty nice, but now we need to get the components to not only see the value of some of our motor tags, but also to be able to control the state of them. We have an HOA tag that we're gonna use to turn our motors on and off. So we're gonna grab a multi-state button for that, which lets us view and send out a read or... Sorry, a write to a tag.

24:02
Jayson Thorpe: So we're gonna go and use that parameter to once again set up an indirect binding, this time directly to any of our motor tags. Once we switch out the motor number with our dynamic parameter and make this binding bidirectional so that we can not only get that value and see it, but also send a signal back to the tag from this component. We need the same binding on this other property to indicate a value. So we're just copying the binding, pasting that real quick. And let's go into preview mode in the designer and turn on read and write mode. And let's see that motor one HOA tag change value now. Excellent. And all we have to do is change the value of that parameter to point to a different motor, but I think we've proven the point. Now let's get an LED display to actually see how much current's running through our amp or through our motors. And then, we're gonna go and quickly get this displayed over into our session. For this LED display component, we just have to once again bind to any of our tags using our parameter, we can dynamically redirect our view instances.

25:23
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Now, we have all of the information for our motors displayed. We're gonna go and create one more view, and we're gonna load that up with a few different displays to show to our users depending on the size of the screen they're viewing our session on. We're using a Breakpoint Container here. Remember I said Perspective's all about displaying your session on different screen sizes. The Breakpoint Container has two Subcon Containers. One will display when we're beneath a certain width, width being the container or the size of the screen being displayed on. And for the small view for when our operators are on their mobile devices, we're gonna use a carousel component for this. Carousel component, we've all seen it's equivalent on various webpages. Something that just takes an image or a set of cards can swipe them horizontally.

26:23
Jayson Thorpe: We're gonna load up this carousel component with different instances of our motor view. You can see here Aryanna is just telling our carousel, which view we want to embed, setting a unique value for that parameter. And just like that, we have four instances of four of our motor devices coming in through our OPC server. And now, we have to build out the large view. What are the users gonna see when they're on a, when they're viewing our session on a monitor or a wide screen. For that, we have a tab container. Tab container also has multiple sub-containers that can display on demand. For this tab container, we're just gonna deep select this container here, and we have two views in the learning Ignition fundamentals folder that we pre-built for this demonstration. And we're just taking those views and embedding them directly into this tab container. And then here, Aryanna is just adding more views. She's gonna name those tabs something useful. And then, we're gonna go and get this view right into our session as a webpage.

27:50
Jayson Thorpe: All right. So, I don't know if anybody's been timing me, but how long has it taken us since we started building our UDT? 10 minutes? Maybe maybe about 13. We're about to take all of that work and get it all in front of the people that need to see it. All of our operators running our session. So, let's see. Oh, view can't do...

28:08
Aryanna Brown: The tab containers.

28:08
Jayson Thorpe: That itself?

28:09
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. I'm not sure, it's embedded.

28:14
Jayson Thorpe: Delete that?

28:15
Aryanna Brown: Yeah. Okay. Here. And drag and drop.

28:22
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:35
Aryanna Brown: Well, we may need to only have alarms stick.

28:38
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, but deep select it.

28:39
Aryanna Brown: I do.

28:40
Jayson Thorpe: Let's try one more time. Interesting.

28:45
Aryanna Brown: I think it's the view itself.

28:47
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. Oh, I see.

28:48
Aryanna Brown: Yeah.

28:49
Jayson Thorpe: It did drop it inside itself. Okay, cool. So delete it from there.

28:52
Aryanna Brown: Oh, there it is.

28:55
Jayson Thorpe: There we go.

28:55
Aryanna Brown: There we go. There we go.

28:57
Jayson Thorpe: Now when we go to the Tab Container, perfect. There we go.

29:00
Aryanna Brown: Okay.

29:02
Jayson Thorpe: All right. Slight setback happens to the best of us. Now, let's go to our page configuration. We have all these different views, all of the different displays built, but not all of these are gonna appear in our session. This is where we manage which pages are accessible in our session, which pages are exposed via URL in our session, and what pages are navigable too. Here we're just taking our homepage, that forward slash root URL, pointing it to the overview view that we just built. As soon as we save our project and launch our session we'll see the fruits of our labor here. Here we see the large screen version where we can switch back and forth between alarms and history. And we're gonna use the developer tools in Chrome just to simulate a smaller screen here where we not only see the small view that we built with all of our motors, but can you go make that a little bit smaller again and show off that flex container doing its work.

30:03
Jayson Thorpe: Notice how when we're narrower, the Flex Container is scaling up and down for us. These are just a couple of options in Perspective to handle graceful layout scaling for different types of devices. And that does end our demonstration for today. We're about to take questions here, but we didn't even get a chance to look at, take a deep dive into that is of the reporting module, alarm notifications, things that not only get realtime data in front of people that need to see it, but also that historical data, things like reports, calculations, MES downtimes, but also getting that historical and aggregated data in front of those who need to see it as well. Thank you.

30:51
Aryanna Brown: That concludes our session. Thank you for coming.

31:01
Jayson Thorpe: And now we do have a microphone walking around the room if there are any questions. We have 15 minutes for questions, everyone. Yes. Right down here.

31:09
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision...

31:10
Jayson Thorpe: Sorry. We will ask you to wait for the microphone because we are streaming or this will be... It's either being viewed live. It is.

31:19
Audience Member 1: What's the difference between Vision and Perspective?

31:22
Jayson Thorpe: Biggest difference is one, the Vision client's gonna run as a Java client in kind of the more client-host relationship. The biggest difference with Perspective is different screen sizes. You run Perspective session in a web browser, any device that can get online, access a web browser can run a Perspective session. This is not the case with Vision.

31:45
Aryanna Brown: They also run separately. Perspective runs on the gateway whereas Vision clients will run on the machine that they're launched from.

31:53
Jayson Thorpe: True. Any other questions? I know everyone's all hyped on 8.3...

32:00
Aryanna Brown: I know.

32:02
Jayson Thorpe: From that keynote. Yeah. In the back in the middle.

32:09
Audience Member 2: I saw on the 8.3 feature keynote, Rockwell and Siemens S7 I/O drivers. What are the other standard drivers that are included?

32:24
Jayson Thorpe: Let's go. Well, you know what? You can come talk to us after. I mean, we could show you on the Gateway right now. Actually, let's do that. Let's show you. Well, one of the things is different, the drivers that come standard on the gateway are for Siemens, Allen-Bradley, even Legacy versions of both of those different ones here we can see the drivers that just come standard on fresh out of the box install, but different vendors make different drivers as well. So there are very few devices that you're not able to connect to directly. But even if you can't, the fact that Ignition acts as an OPC server means that whatever OPC server you do have connected to those devices, Ignition's gonna still connect to that.

33:06
Audience Member 2: Very good. Thank you.

33:10
Audience Member 3: JT, I don't see a module for MQTT.

33:15
Jayson Thorpe: MQTT is a separate module. That one is available as a few different modules. We have the...

33:22
Aryanna Brown: Engine distributor and the broker. We also have the transmission. So if you are looking for those modules, you're definitely gonna have to go to a Cirrus Link. And they're technically a third party module, but we work very closely with them. So they won't be available to you on the actual Inductive Automation website, but we will help you support it.

33:44
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah.

33:46
Audience Member 4: How many active or consecutive sessions can you have? Is there a difference between Vision and Perspective? What's the payload? How heavy is it against the Gateway?

34:00
Aryanna Brown: So Vision, like I said earlier, that they're gonna be ran on the machines that they're launched from. So truthfully, if you have kind of a heavier project that's gonna be more intense, you have to make sure each machine that is launching that application for Vision can handle that. In Perspective though, it's in a web browser, so since it runs on the Gateway, if there are performance type issues, it's dependent on your gateway and the specs of the machine that your gateway is hosted on and what you gave your gateway. So truthfully, it's kind of endless. You can give it as many resources as you want, as long as your machine can handle it, go crazy.

34:40
Jayson Thorpe: The key is that the license, the Ignition license is never gonna limit you on how many databases you can connect to how many devices or OPC servers or how many concurrent runtimes of Vision or Perspective or designers. You can have as many going of all of those as you want in any combination. The license is never gonna restrict that for you. Yes, thank you.

35:02
Audience Member 5: If you're new to Ignition, where would you suggest you start to get in to get a good introduction and learn about the system?

35:09
Aryanna Brown: This is a great question.

35:11
Jayson Thorpe: We have... Well, sorry, you say I'll show.

35:14
Aryanna Brown: I'm glad you were going to it right away because I'm sure we were thinking the same thing. Inductive University, it is a great, great tool. New hires use it with us just to get them started. So I highly, highly recommend it to get you guys started as well.

35:33
Jayson Thorpe: So yeah, you can download it really quickly and get started with it really quickly and using this free library of video tutorials, you don't even have to log in to watch all of these, but if you log in, you can take challenges and build towards a credential here in the Inductive University. But essentially, this is almost a whole course on getting started with Ignition and being able to do some really cool stuff with it without even having to open the user manual or even attending a class. And all of this is for free, Inductive University. Yes. Down. Yeah. I see you.

36:02
Audience Member 6: Yeah. So you showed a toolbox earlier with like check boxes and then the carousel.

36:08
Jayson Thorpe: Oh. Yeah.

36:09
Audience Member 6: Can advanced users make their own, like software developers? Can they make their own controls and visualizations?

36:16
Aryanna Brown: Oh, like components?

36:17
Audience Member 6: Yes.

36:19
Aryanna Brown: I don't believe so.

36:22
Jayson Thorpe: And I've seen some pretty interesting things done with Java Swing, but that's like as a Java developer.

36:28
Aryanna Brown: I would think if you created your own module at that point you could do whatever with it. But I don't believe you can create your own components. We do allow, if you search through our forums and our community third party resources to allow to get in there and kind of modify what you can but not necessarily create components from scratch.

36:50
Jayson Thorpe: Those people that, some folks that do have that skillset to develop modules, if a lot of folks share those modules with each other on the Ignition Exchange, there's a lot of free user made resources here. And a lot of stuff that we've put out actually via Inductive Automation has put some stuff really cool modules on here. Anything from modules to project resources, a lot of that is done by other folks and the community is really great about sharing and caring.

37:21
Audience Member 6: Okay. Thank you.

37:22
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah, absolutely. And then, oh, over there and then this gentleman right here.

37:26
Audience Member 7: On the Inductive University, is there a way to monitor the process of people that you have assigned to go there to learn?

37:36
Jayson Thorpe: I think you can track this on your user portal through your organization portal. Yes. Cool. So that is trackable on your organization's portal.

37:47
Audience Member 8: I think users almost do.

37:48
Jayson Thorpe: Oh, okay. Cool. Thank you.

37:51
Audience Member 9: So, speaking of the Exchange, the project you guys just showed, is that on the Exchange for download, or we're gonna check out later?

37:58
Aryanna Brown: It is not.

38:00
Jayson Thorpe: No, but that's not a bad idea actually. Maybe we'll have to see if...

38:02
Audience Member 9: Maybe kind of study it, kind of get better understanding.

38:04
Jayson Thorpe: Yeah. That's not a bad idea. One thing you can do though, let's see, if we go and start a new project, if we went to go and create a new project right now, there are template projects included in the Gateway as well. So, you can just, for example, like Vision tab Nav, that's gonna create a project with some tab navigation already built in Vision, Perspective has similar ones. So you can actually just write a white out of the box installation, get some prebuilt resources to start playing around with some kind of like what we did here.

38:36
Audience Member 9: Brilliant. All right. Thank you.

38:38
Jayson Thorpe: You're very welcome. Oh, down here. Thank you.

38:46
Audience Member 10: So when you were showing the changing parameters and how easy that was, on a qualified system for like life sciences, is all of that audit trail, is everything on your audit trail that you make changes to just to ensure that once you're on a qualified system, anything that changes, you can go back and...

39:05
Aryanna Brown: Yes. So, we have an audit log. Now, not everything is logged in that audit log as of right now. But if you head to our manual page, it will list everything that is and you will at least be able to see who went into the project and how they changed it. If they changed the project, it will say like, project modification and who it was, it may not necessarily tell you exactly what it is they did. But anything that's more gateway scoped, it will tell you. So, if they wrote to a tag, if they modified a tag, if they actually modified the tag, it'll tell you that. Things that are more project resource-based, it doesn't, it's kind of hit or miss on what it will actually log right now.

39:46
Jayson Thorpe: The designer doesn't really track exact changes to like, in every individual component, but you will be able to see who logged in, who did save any changes. And even with scripting built in throughout and some extension functions or sorry, system functions people set up their own logging pretty effortlessly through the scripting that's already built into Ignition as as well.

40:06
Aryanna Brown: There's a scripting function to write to our audit log.

40:10
Jayson Thorpe: Exactly. So anything that that audit log doesn't cover, you can probably cook something up as well to make sure it does. Back there in the back.

40:19
Audience Member 11: Yeah. Is there a cross reference browser for your graphics and tags and everything?

40:22
Jayson Thorpe: A cross reference browser? I'm not sure what you mean by that.

40:26
Audience Member 11: Finding out where your templates are used.

40:29
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so like a find and replace type? Yeah, we do. We have a find and replace tool within the designer. And you can put in like a keyword of what you're looking for and it'll pop up and list everything that, whether it's a property binding, a component of you, a window name.

40:45
Jayson Thorpe: Script.

40:46
Aryanna Brown: Script as long as you kind of know a keyword, it'll try to find it within your project. So yes.

40:54
Jayson Thorpe: And that's one of those things that every couple versions there is something new to make managing the various moving pieces of your projects a lot easier. That's not necessarily new, but every couple versions there's something that lets you find things in your projects a little easier.

41:12
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:16
Audience Member 12: So with 8.3 coming out pretty soon beta, will there be videos posted on university that kind of goes over the new features to kind of get a start on learning that stuff? Like the drawing tools for instance?

41:27
Jayson Thorpe: Not right when it's released, but we absolutely are going to start you know, coming from the training department, we wanna be able to teach people. People are gonna wanna know how to use it. We want to teach people how to use it. We absolutely are gonna be building resources to learn Ignition 8.3 as soon as we can.

41:43
Aryanna Brown: It may not be immediately available, but.

41:44
Audience Member 12: Okay. That's fine. Will the docs be a good place to start to kind of see that stuff kind of comes...

41:49
Jayson Thorpe: Absolutely.

41:49
Audience Member 12: Through later on to just get that information as soon as possible?

41:52
Aryanna Brown: Absolutely. Yes.

41:52
Audience Member 12: Okay. Perfect. Thank you.

41:53
Aryanna Brown: Yes.

41:57
Jayson Thorpe: One more.

41:58
Audience Member 13: I saw that you had to log in when you launch each of the individuals, if you are tied to Active Directory LDAP, can you configure it so that it's gonna take the user who's logged into that machine?

42:10
Aryanna Brown: Oh, so that it automatically, yeah, like Windows authentication type thing? Yeah.

42:15
Jayson Thorpe: Indeed.

42:20
Aryanna Brown: Any other questions?

42:22
Jayson Thorpe: If you are raising... Oh, down here in front.

42:23
Aryanna Brown: Oh, all right.

42:27
Jayson Thorpe: We would like for the mic just so it's available in the recording.

42:31
Audience Member 14: You kind of touched on the driver support, but do you guys support OPC, all the flavors like DA, A&C Alarms and Events, all those different versions? And then on top of that bus protocols, like is there a means in which to get PROFIBUS, PROFINET, fieldbus? There was some talk earlier about HARP through a third party, but...

42:47
Aryanna Brown: I'm not entirely too sure, but I can find out for you if you come talk to me...

42:51
Audience Member 14: All right.

42:51
Aryanna Brown: After the session.

42:55
Jayson Thorpe: Start in the back.

42:56
Audience Member 15: My question's around managing users and role capabilities. Currently we have single sign-on integrated with Azure Active Directory, and the way to manage that is inside of Azure. We make a user a member of a group and that gives, is that the only way to assign privileges and access to inside Ignition? Or are there other ways?

43:21
Jayson Thorpe: So typically, when you do use a service like that, as an identity provider or I guess a user source, there's usually options for like a hybrid management where you, if the permissions allow, potentially make a change to the user in the gateway and then that would update the source of truth. That as an option for most config for most implementations of user sources like that. All right. If you're raising your hand, and we don't see you, wave it around, please. All right. Well, thank you so much everyone. We will be here if you wanna talk to us at all. Thank you. We won't keep you here anymore.

44:05
Aryanna Brown: Good job. Good job, dude.

44:06
Jayson Thorpe: Right back at you.