Join a panel of Ignition community experts who helped the State of Indiana launch a Digital Transformation program for manufacturers quickly and simply. Energy data, manufacturing output, and other OT data can be collected and modeled in-plant, and efficiently published into cloud infrastructure and unsupervised AI for actionable insights with a pre-built “I4.0 in a Box” solution.

Transcript:

0:00
Travis Cox: All right. Good afternoon, everybody. How y'all doing today? Yeah, having a good time?

00:04 
Audience: Yeah.

00:05 
Travis Cox: All right. Welcome to our panel discussion. This is going to be good. We have a great panel up here today on “Drain The Data Lake - Model And Contextualize Your OT Data At The Edge.” So you guys know me. I'm Travis Cox, and I'll be introducing the panel here in just a moment. But I want to kind of set up sort of the state of where things are if you look at a Digital Transformation journey and why it's really important to look at contextualizing and modeling your data at the edge of the network. So most industrial organizations today that we talk to, they understand why they should implement IIoT solutions and why they should start their Digital Transformation journey, but they really struggle with the “How do I get started and what kind of solutions do I use?” There's a lot of noise out there, if you will, in the IoT world, especially with a lot of tools that are really primarily just IT-focused. So there's still a lot of question, a lot of doubt out there. And really, our message here is to kind of look at it from an OT level first, right? Looking at what we can do from that, how we can bring that up in a real meaningful way.

01:15 
Travis Cox: So the problem really is simple. There's a lot of people trying to solve these issues. They're typically not cost-effective. A lot of it, you see a lot of custom code being written out there. It's not scalable. It's very proprietary. A lot of nightmares in that and data inconsistencies that are there. A lot of stranded data, lack of data context, and we aim to really fix these kind of problems. So there is a new approach, though, of course, and0 we've been talking about this quite a bit, in that when we're getting data from our operations, we want to bring it up and model that data once and bring it up to every solution, every place. We want to look at that data going all the way up to the cloud. So we really want to democratize our data, and we're going to talk a lot about that here today with our panelists. We want to leverage platforms and look at basically using tools rather than coding on operating systems. It's really important to have tools that people can maintain going forward and to really kind of facilitate the cooperation between different departments, getting OT and IT to really work together within organizations and to kind of change that company culture that drive their company culture to cultivating change, to want to really accomplish these solutions in a meaningful way.

02:34 
Travis Cox: So we've got a really great panel here to kind of talk about some of the tools, some of the things that we're doing to make that happen. We have Benson Hougland here, who is Vice President of Opto 22, and really excited to have him here. Got Arlen Nipper, a man who needs no introduction. The king of MQTT, and he's CTO of Cirrus Link Solutions. We have Michael Manzi, the Practice Lead, Digital Manufacturing at FZ Industrial Tech. And we have Dan Stauft from SugarCreek. He is the Director of Operational Technology. So super happy to have you guys here. And Benson, we're going to start with you to talk about Opto 22 and also what you guys are doing to help with this modeling your data at the edge.

03:14
Benson Hougland: Terrific. So thank you for having me on the panel and with these esteemed guests as well. Yeah, my name is Benson from Opto 22, the obligatory Opto 22 slide. We've been around for a long time, nearly five decades. I've been with Opto for about 28 of those years. I'm responsible for product strategy at Opto. One of the things that really makes us kind of unique, particularly when you're talking about hardware manufacturers, is we all do it right here in California. Down in Temecula, California, about an hour north of San Diego, is a picture of the other factory there. Everything we make is designed, built, supported right from that factory in Temecula, which means that we're still shipping product. We are essentially a PLC to some degree, but we're much more than that, as those of you may be familiar with some of our products that we've been showing at this event. One of the things that has always kind of set us apart from other traditional PLC manufacturers, if you will, is we've always had a very distinctive design engineering philosophy of taking the notion of rugged OT-type systems like you would expect for something that might be in a plant floor or out on a remote asset, but combine it with technologies that are prevalent in the IT space. Now, that's not just for IT people or for OT. The idea is to try to pull these two technologies to better solve problems that exist, particularly in applications that are driven by this notion of Digital Transformation.

04:49 
Benson Hougland: Those two worlds must work together, and so we try to provide the tools that allow that to happen, and we primarily do that with our flagship products that we have today. The first is something called a groov EPIC. EPIC is an Edge Programmable Industrial Controller. Much more in a PLC, a lot of gateway functions. More on that later. Also, our groov RIO, which is a remote I/O unit. And something else called the groov RIO EMU. EMU is an energy monitoring unit. All of these things have come together in a very symbiotic relationship that we have with Cirrus Link. Arlen, friends for a couple of decades, tried to come up with an idea of how we could take some of these products from an OT perspective, combined with some technology on the IT side to really get people started with Digital Transformation, but do it right, right at the beginning. So part of that came into this evolving system that we put together. And part of what we're going to be talking about today is how we used modeling at the edge to solve a Digital Transformation problem for the manufacturers of the state of Indiana. More on that from Arlen.

06:00 
Benson Hougland: But indeed, what we did was we put together essentially a launch pack, a combination of hardware and software tools that can be placed inside a facility and immediately start to knock off some wins. Let's start with something simple. Let's start capturing energy data and start moving that information wherever it could be useful. We're gonna talk about where some of those places are coming up. So how are these deployed in a plant floor? This is kind of how it looks here. You can see we'll instrument a motor. We'll instrument a furnace, a pump, a press, whatever it might be, and also the whole building energy that is coming into a given plant to start bringing some visibility about energy use in manufacturing facilities. We take all that data, and we start to move it through these platforms coupled with the Ignition platform running on this CPU.

06:48
Benson Hougland: So indeed, in this case, it's not even acting as a PLC. It's acting as more of an IPC. So we're running full Ignition on this industrial device, quad-core, four gigs of RAM, lots of SSD on there, and we put it all in a nice little bundle and made it available for the state of Indiana manufacturers. There's a lot of technical information on this slide relative to some of the specifications of the box, but indeed it's a small Linux box. It's capable of running full Ignition or Ignition Edge. And we've been Onboard partners since the very beginning for running Ignition on our platforms, and indeed, it's all built-in and really nice to use.

07:29 
Benson Hougland: One of the things that makes the unit specific to this case and a lot of DT cases is it does have dual NICs, dual network interfaces. And the idea is to be able to separate the OT network from another network, maybe an IT network or some valid gateway network, so we can get the data where it needs to be quickly and do all this in a very cyber-secure way. But in doing so, you have to have the right tools. We're gonna talk about Ignition tools, but even at this level, the tools are meant to be used by folks in OT and IT. So, this isn't a foreign device on the network. IT knows how to manage this with the tools that they know how to use. DHCP, DNS, LDAP, I can run off a bunch of acronyms that all those tools are built in. So it's a quick deployment, gets you up and running very quickly. And that management interface is all web-based. So it's easy to use, it's easy to manage, it's easy to update, and so on.

08:24
Benson Hougland: And then, we have the interface right there for managing your Ignition instance that's running on the device. But again, the key thing here is that this is not only OT approved, and they understand this technology because it kind of looks like a PLC or an IPC, but it's also IT-approved again because the tools that are used to allow it to exist on a network are tools that IT is familiar with. So, in short, what we've really done here is give people an opportunity to get started quickly, get a quick win, get the data where it needs to be. We're gonna talk more about that in a minute. But then, once this platform is in place and it's all set up now, you can really start expanding. You can start utilizing all the power of Ignition running on this platform to start to connecting other systems within the plant floor, other PLCs, other devices, perhaps even other I/O signals.

09:15
Benson Hougland: Whatever it is, we now have a way to pull it all together and start using those powerful Ignition tools to model the data appropriately for the applications that will be consuming them. So, that's really a key aspect of this program, is to help people get started and be able to expand. So, very quickly, my last slide, this is just kind of an architecture view of how it might look in a given plant, where we have the OT side, where we're talking to PLCs that are largely unsecure out there. We'll put them behind the EPIC and make them secure and then start to model all that data, including I/O, put it all into Ignition, and start sending it up to a broker for it to be ingested by these applications you're going to learn more about. So there you go. Perfect.

09:58 
Arlen Nipper: Thanks, Benson.

10:00
Travis Cox: Thanks, Benson. All right. So, over to Arlen. Talk about more of the modeling aspect and how we can do that.

10:06 
Arlen Nipper: Everybody knows who I am, I think. So I'm going to skip over this slide. We are gonna leverage MQTT. So what this program is about, let's talk about draining the data lake, is that we had been doing a lot of different projects with Amazon. The state of Indiana had a lot of federal money that they needed to spend, right? And so, at the time, it was Pugal at AWS got with the state and said, “We can help you put together the program.” So the state of Indiana has over 8000 manufacturers. The state wanted to put together a program that could solve an initial problem. i.e. how is the state going to reduce their energy overhead? As a state, they've got to stay competitive. But also provide these manufacturers with a starting point for their adoption of Industry 4.0. So it wasn't this, "Oh, we're going to come in, we're going to put in a box that's going to monitor your energy, and then we're going to go away. In a year from now, somebody's going to walk around and say, why is that box in our office? And what does it do?" So, we wanted to give them a technology starter kit as well.

11:15
Arlen Nipper: As we know, no two manufacturing facilities are the same. So how can we put together a technology pack that could be installed in a day but flexible enough to grow across the factory? So I spent about two years … Where we started is we had four early adopter manufacturing companies. Not naively, but I said, "Okay, state is gonna buy Ignition for you. We're going to put it in your VPC or your onboard system.” So the mistake there was the customers were installing Ignition. They didn't really know how to do it. There wasn't somebody tasked to do that. So we kind of had to back up one step there. We got those four customers up and running, and then we started, "Well, how are we going to measure the incoming power?" Well, we knew we had to have that meter. And that's where I heard Benson. He had been doing a presentation. He said, "Oh, we've got the ability to measure KYZ, and we've got these new EMUs that measure three-phase power, and we've got an EPIC.”

12:26
Arlen Nipper: So, the next logical step was, what if we put Ignition on the Opto 22? We've got the energy monitoring units, we've got the KYZ. Now we can go in and target a customer very, very quickly. Not the whole plant, but at least the original goal, which was to get something in there and start measuring some energy. Now, the next part of the problem was we still had this notion of the data lake, right? While this was going on, Amazon was still looking at, well, we're going to send, pump all this stuff up into S3 buckets, and then from there, we'll try to feed that into some unsupervised AI, and maybe we can get some insights out of that. But that was going to become a manufacturer-by-manufacturer exercise.

13:16 
Arlen Nipper: And we wanted to be able, really, to scale this. We need to be able to go in and install the entire system in one day. That's the only way we're going to scale to 100, 400, 600 manufacturers in the state of Indiana. So from the notion of, “we're not going to go IT down, we're gonna build the models at the edge and not go into a data lake. We're gonna go into the models that SiteWise can give us through Amazon.” So now we can pre-configure a KYZ, two EMUs, have those UDTs ready, plug the box in, power it up, and point it to the MQTT broker in Amazon, and we're up and running. And we've got three power sources that we can start monitoring, and then we can scale from there. Because again, we wanna make sure that the manufacturer, the customer, understands Ignition. So what we're doing is going in with Discovery Days and saying, "Okay, here's what the state gave you. They gave you all of this. They bought it. But now, these are the tools that you've got in your factory, and these are how you can start expanding.” So Benson already mentioned this. We put together the launch pack. Now, although we're using this for the state of Indiana, this is available to everybody. This isn't relegated to just this program. This launch pack is put together, and Amazon has told me to tell all the integrators that if you find customers, then Amazon has funding to be able to put in this launch pack. And let's go ahead and take it forward.

14:54
Arlen Nipper: So, real quick, it was, “Keep It Simple, Sweetie,” in that, “How do you get started with Industry 4.0?” So, let the state start putting this journey together for you. You got a factory, and you got some machines, you got power. Okay, well, with the kit, you can monitor two of your larger machines, and you can monitor the KYZ input. So now we've at least got started, but you've got all the other protocols. So if I've got an Allen-Bradley PLC or a Modbus PLC, the customer can start bringing that in and start his journey for Digital Transformation. So this literally is the simplified drawing of what we're doing in the state. Is that where the goal is to be able to install the launch pack in a day, connect it into Amazon, and from there, we can go into SiteWise and into all the machine learning. So from there, I'm gonna turn it over to Mike.

15:49
Michael Manzi: Thank you, Arlen. I'm Mike Manzi with Feyen Zylstra. It's a mouthful. A lot of us just go by FZ. So, Feyen Zylstra was founded in 1980. We're a systems integrator. I like to think of as more of a solutions integrator. We have about 600 people, 100 million dollar company, 500 pole wire, 100 program PLCs. And I got about 10 or 15 in the Nerdery that do the reporting and the data collection and figure everything out in the analytics. I run that group. We have offices in Grand Rapids. That's where the home corporation is. I'm out of Cleveland myself with a couple of people also in Nashville and the Carolinas. My background a little bit. I was in the US Navy for six years. 90% of the boats I was on sank. They came back up. I was a nuclear mechanic on a sub for six years.

16:42
Michael Manzi: Stick around with me long enough, you'll hear that joke again.

16:46 
Michael Manzi: But then I pulled wires for a few years after that, and then I became an engineer. So I like to really think I bring a practical view to what the plant floor is doing.

16:55 
Michael Manzi: So even before this all happened, to some point last year, where I heard about this meeting outside of Detroit for Amazon. And that's where I got introduced to Arlen and Benson. And this box. But I was even thinking a year and a half ago, “There has to be this magical black box that I can just put on a machine, grab its data, and shoot it out to the cloud and start doing analytics on it”. It's just not that complicated. Why don't we have this yet? And so, I went to a meeting, met these guys, and here is this magical black box. I like this slide right here. “Your opinion is not my reality.”

17:29 
Michael Manzi: And another way I've heard this put is facts are not feelings. So, when you're running your corporation, you want to actually have the correct information to make the right decisions. And you start by getting that by bringing in your real data. Not manual data, not gut feelings. Your real data tells a story, and especially if it's verified and validated data. So the key to that is just how to get started because how do we even start? The big guys have been doing this for years. But the first thing, I was the global OT manager for both PPG Automotive and Kennametal for two large modernization projects, multimillion-dollar projects. You do not start off by buying a product. I'm saying that here. But we're telling you to buy this product. Right? But you don't. You have to start off with, what are we trying to solve? And from there, you create the business case, and then you bring in the right people for that question. 'Cause I don't know how many of you seen Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They put in all the information, and they asked the computer, what is the answer? And it said it was 42.

18:36
Michael Manzi: And they're like, "42? What do you mean?" You failed to ask the right question. I had to make another computer to ask the right question. So sometimes, you see an IT system come down to the OT layer, and it fails because it had no OT input. I go so far as to, “I want an operator in the room, I want the plant manager, I want quality, I want maintenance, I want engineering in the room.” And we're gonna sit down, and we're gonna talk about what are the things that we're trying to solve within this plant 'cause then we'll have a success story, everybody has buy-in, everybody is a part of it, and they feel like they want to move forward.

19:11
Michael Manzi: The last line on here is very important as well, and this is where I think the AWS box comes in handy. The hardest part is just get started, and the IoT, the promise of IoT is that it's really lowered the cost and time to entry. Doing this for decades, especially in the days of MES, like the early 2000s, maybe even the late '90s, you looked at Procter & Gamble, you looked at GE, you looked at all these major players that were going with MES systems. What happened to the small and medium manufacturers? They were still operating off of Excel spreadsheets, Access databases. And today, it really hasn't changed.

19:56
Michael Manzi: So 90% of business in the United States, or manufacturing in business, is small and medium manufacturers. A lot of companies target the larger ones 'cause those are the bigger paychecks. But you're missing the biggest opportunity, which is the 90% that are small and medium. But the small and medium can't afford infrastructure for these data systems. You're not gonna see them put in a $300,000 process control network with their own domain controllers and switches. You're lucky if they VLAN off a few things.

20:30 
Michael Manzi: So when we look at the AWS solution, this is a great example of public-private cooperation and collaboration. There is money by Amazon and money from the state of Indiana that essentially pays for this box to go in. This box requires very little infrastructure, and I believe it can also do cellular.

20:48 
Arlen Nipper: Yeah.

20:49
Michael Manzi: Yeah. So you don't even need a network. You can put this right on a machine, and it can send data right out. We like energy 'cause energy is a known data model. You know, voltage, current, power. I think we kinda know what we're looking at. There's other organizations out there right now that are developing data models. You look at CESMII, you look at an Omadi, the OPC Institute. So there's a body of work going in there that are looking at known processes and assets. You have a press. Here are the inputs and outputs you should be monitoring.

21:17
Michael Manzi: When I was at PPG and Kennametal, we would write playbooks. Here are the inputs, the outputs, here's the protocols, here's what... And you bring in all the experts to find out what is the system doing and what are the true KPIs we want out of it? So that we can get the correct analytics and knowledge from it. And that is not a trivial body of work. That would take anywhere from three months to two years to do, to go through all your assets and processes. So there's actually bodies out there right now doing that work, so I'm not gonna trivialize that work, but to be able to jump in with energy. And energy is real savings, too. When you look at facilities management, you could probably see a 20% savings in facilities management. Am I running my compressors too much? Do I need all those boilers on? Those are all questions that could be answered by monitoring your facilities management.

22:05
Michael Manzi: So what is the role of the SI?

22:05
Arlen Nipper: They can read it.

22:09 
Michael Manzi: They can?

22:09
Arlen Nipper: It's behind you.

22:09 
Michael Manzi: Good 'cause I can't read this. They say in your 40s, “You're either wearing glasses, or you're lying.” So the role of the SI is going to change. We are not gonna be the ones programming. You're seeing a lot of solutions come out now that are low code for a reason. We had all these great solutions. Great analytics package 15 years ago, GE Predix, fantastic. Take it to a customer, nobody knew how to use it. You had to have a Master's or a Ph.D. in analytics to be able to understand this thing. So you're looking at this new generation of software that is low code and easy to use. So what is the role of the SI? 'Cause we're not gonna be coding?

22:47
Michael Manzi: We serve now as mentors and educators, and we come in to try to you lead people through the process. So if a company is going through a modernization journey, it's probably their first one. It might be their second, and they'll really listen to you if it's their second. But as an SI, you've done this tens, dozens, maybe even 100 times for some of the older guys. Dan, you might have done it like what 200?

23:13
Dan Stauft: What are you trying to say?

23:17
Michael Manzi: I think it's pretty obvious.

23:19
Michael Manzi: So it's just the old adage is, “You wouldn't represent yourself in court.” So you bring Rockwell in to talk to you about a modernization journey ... Guess what you're gonna hear? The Rockwell modernization story. You're gonna hear GE, Emerson, any of them, and even Ignition. But Ignition is playing more of an IoT role. A lot of SIs, and particularly FZ, is product agnostic. We are a Premier Integrator with Ignition, but we're only gonna put Ignition into places that makes sense. We're not gonna set it up to fail. So we don't lead with the product. We figure out what the problem is, what the solution needs to be, and then pick the product. Quite often, that solution is Ignition. Sometimes it's not.

23:58
Michael Manzi: So that's gonna be the role of the SI. It's gonna be more consultative, and there is an aspect at the machine level, there is a data cleansing aspect, and I'm not gonna minimize it. So there's a lot of... If everything was greenfield, it would be easy, but not everything's greenfield, so there's a lot of going in there and figuring out, "How do I get the KPIs out of the machines?" So there's actually bringing the data to the box in a contextualized way, and you think about standard tag naming conventions, asset models, basically turning an asset into an object. Once you can do that, it's all templatized, parameterized. You're actually seeing the real dream of what was S95 and S88. It's all modeled and parameterized.

24:43
Dan Stauft: That's me.

24:44 
Michael Manzi: That's you now.

24:46
Dan Stauft: See, just look for the food.

24:47 
Michael Manzi: That is true. You wanna do the last slide, too, though?

24:51 
Dan Stauft: Great. So, SugarCreek Packing. We are a large, privately held food manufacturer with manufacturing locations in three states. We call ourselves “the protein experts,” you see some examples of some of our products there. We were founded in bacon. We've expanded to a very large sous vide presence in the United States. We do a lot of formed patties, meatballs, some whole meat traditional cook systems. We are a co-developer and co-manufacturer, so you'll never see our brand name on anything, but we may have developed something like a venison sous vide that might have gone to Arby's, that you might see on a sandwich in Arby's. So we develop things and sell them to customers, and then we also do the traditional co-man where they come up and say, "Match this product," and we go.

25:52 
Dan Stauft: Oh, we've got five primary manufacturing sites, and we've got around 3000 employees. The big thing is we've quadrupled in size in the last 10 years. I joined the company nine years ago. We were doing about 300 million in sales. This year we're at 1.2 billion. We have been using Ignition for eight years, so we are not new to the program. We are based in Cincinnati, Ohio. So now the question you're gonna ask is, "What the hell is a company that's been using Ignition for eight years and based in Cincinnati got to do with an Indiana initiative for new manufacturers?"

26:31
Dan Stauft: Well, we have a large facility in Indiana, and I like free ****.

26:41
Dan Stauft: No, in reality, I was approached by Arlen. Arlen did a pitch on this at the ARC Conference in June. And I heard free in Indiana and raised my hand in the back. And part of the thing, as Arlen alluded, to is Discovery Day. So, whole idea of this is to get manufacturers introduced to Ignition, introduced to advanced analytics, and then on a regular basis. I think the cadence is supposed to be every six months or something like that.

27:09 
Dan Stauft: We're gonna get the companies that are involved together in Indianapolis, and they're gonna share their successes and their failures so they can learn from each other. So in talking to Arlen, again, I like free stuff, so I tried to convince him that, "Hey, if we got involved, we could kind of step ahead of the curve and show the other member companies what's possible." We just happen to have a very large facility in Cambridge City, in Indiana.

27:36 
Dan Stauft: This facility, if it was cut off from the rest of the company, is a $400 million facility by itself in annual sales. It was built in 2015. It has got Ignition everywhere. It's 420,000 square feet. It's a very large cook capacity. We've got six traditional cooking lines. We've got a 10-tank sous vide system. We do everything from meatballs to deli logs to American Airlines filet mignons. We do a lot of stuff. We've got a very large refrigeration system in it, and we've got a very large wastewater system. Again, everything's already connected on Ignition. So why do I need Benson's box? Well, we haven't used MQTT yet, and we haven't really delved into the cloud, and they're giving it to us for free. And they're giving us a box with an Ignition license on it that we can throw in another gateway.

28:29
Dan Stauft: So, what are we gonna do with it? Well, right out of the gate to kind of mirror what the intent of the Energy INsights program is, is we're going to take all of our already connected devices plus a couple new ones, and we're gonna use MQTT and shove them up into Mega AI and AWS and start getting a lot of data really fast. So at the next Discovery Day, hopefully, we'll be able to go up and go, "This is what we found. This is the improvement that we have." I don't think Arlen mentioned it, but the objective is an 8-10% reduction in energy usage just based on this.

29:11
Dan Stauft: So what are we gonna put out there? Well, we're gonna put 70 plus water meters, and they range from IO-Link smart devices to the old-school pulse devices say, "Why the hell do we need 70 water meters?" Well, this plant uses 500,000 gallons of water a day. So a little improvement on the water is a big improvement to the bottom line. And, oh, by the way, we're only allowed to use 500,000 gallons per day. So we're bouncing up against the regulation, environmental thing. So, that's where our biggest focus is gonna be water right out of the gate.

29:47
Dan Stauft: And then steam and gas that's already in place. The electrical's gonna be a little different because our power company doesn't want us to analyze the power we're using because we use a lot of power and they make a lot of money. So, they've got a 120-day lead time on getting us new meters that, and we've got two main feed meters to the plant. Those are getting upgraded to the latest and greatest technology in, I guess, four months. We have 12 or 10 switch gear locations that already have controllers. We're gonna put Modbus adapters on those.

30:28 
Dan Stauft: Again those, I think we got two of the 10, the other ones they're all back-ordered. And then we're gonna use Benson's box for the EMUs for the high-load equipment like refrigeration compressors. So what's the architecture gonna look like? It's gonna look kind of like this, which is a little bit more complex than I think the typical Energy INsights user. We're gonna take all of our existing meters that are going through data concentrators and feed into an Edge Tag Provider.

30:57
Dan Stauft: We're gonna combine them with the new Modbus addresses for the electric meters that are gonna go directly into the Edge provider. The EPIC. We're gonna use the EMUs, and we're gonna load up once we figure out which of the 10 switchgear is our problem child. We're gonna figure out what high-load devices are on that switchgear, and we're gonna daisy chain all of that using the groov EPIC. All of that's gonna feed up to an existing Ignition Gateway that has MQTT Transmitter, and we are going to set up on Monday the connection and hopefully, by Tuesday, I will have all of this, minus the stuff we don't have 100% on the cloud.

31:43 
Arlen Nipper: And also, Benson. Oh sorry, Dan, didn't you mention that you have the honor of having the highest penalty for power?

31:50
Dan Stauft: Yeah, well, there's that. Yeah, I guess for Hauser Energy, we set the record for power factor fines of over a million dollars. So that's another reason that they really don't want to upgrade their meter so we can figure out how to balance the load. But yeah.

32:06 
Arlen Nipper: That's quite literally a lot of bacon.

32:08 
Dan Stauft: It's a lot of bacon. Yeah.

32:11
Audience Member 1: Need little samples man...

32:12
Dan Stauft: Excuse me?

32:14 
Audience Member 1: Need some samples, man.

32:15 
Dan Stauft: Yeah, I can ship them to you.

32:17
Audience Member 1: Okay.

32:18
Travis Cox: All right. Well, thank you, guys, for going over the program here and all the details. We're gonna open up to questions now. If you guys have questions, just come over here to the microphones in the front, and don't be shy with all of those. While you guys are thinking about questions, I have a couple of questions I'll start with here. Arlen, you mentioned the speed at which these things can be put into place, and we've had some examples of real quick successes so far with the box.

32:45
Arlen Nipper: Yep.

32:46 
Travis Cox: Can you provide just some sort of idea of what this could look like if they had a brand new customer where they want to put this box in place?

32:52
Arlen Nipper: Well, typically, right now, the state has ... The factor of the future have some engineers that typically go out, do a site visit, just see what the setup of the facility is, then they'll come back, they'll configure up an Opto 22 box, and then either the state or FZ will schedule time with the customer, they go out, and I think FZ already has done a couple, it's one day.

33:18 
Michael Manzi: Right.

33:19 
Arlen Nipper: And they're even... I like the fact that FZ are giving us feedback on, "Hey, this wasn't quite set up right. But we'd like to get it, of course, to a half a day, and you've got data going in." Now, again, it's not the whole plant. It's just the incoming power, it's a couple of power meters, but we wanna make sure that we can go back to that customer and say, "Hey, we can pick up ... We noticed when we did the walk-through that you've got some Siemens power meters, you've got an Allen-Bradley PLC, you've got a Modbus PLC, you've got a Haas CNC machine that talks MTConnect." Well, we can start picking all that up. But that's where either the customer, we want them to self-learn that Ignition as much as possible or lean on some of the integrators but, hopefully, this will foster these small-to-medium manufacturers to be able to, like everybody has said, at least get started and grow from there.

34:19
Dan Stauft: The cool thing about the box as it comes from EMC2 is they've already done the site visit, they know what you're gonna get, so they've got the hardware connected, they've got the I/O cards installed, and they've also got all the UDTs set up, they've got the Ignition project pre-loaded, pre-configured, ready to go, and it's literally plug in, make a connection to the cloud and you're in business.

34:45
Benson Hougland: That's a good point. We did a lot of heavy lifting early on to try to identify what that data model would look like for energy use, and as we've already discussed, that tends to be relatively simple. You're working with current, you're working with voltages, and then, of course, we're deriving kilowatt hours and kilowatts, usage, and consumption. Model that data up, and so when you start thinking about, "Okay, are we gonna throw a bunch of watts and voltages up into the cloud?" No, we're gonna model it right at the device.

35:15
Benson Hougland: So now we take that data, and it's sent over through a UDT for an EMU or a KYZ meter, and now they can assign an asset to that particular UDT, and when it pops up, up into the AWS cloud for the Mega AI folks to start doing unsupervised AI, they're doing it with a real asset that was derived from the model that started right at the edge. And so having those templates done, and we put them on the [Ignition] Exchange so that anybody can download these templates that work with EMUs or RIOs connected to KYZ meters and get up and running very quick.

35:51
Arlen Nipper: Well, and that was the whole... This whole drain the swamp, drain the data lake notion, right? If we wouldn't have taken this tact for this solution, we would have been engaging them going up and doing all the custom stuff in the cloud that you would have to do to build the data model to get it into AI. Now that literally is completely gone. It went from ... The first project we did was 18 man-months of configuration and consulting fees and stuff like that. It literally has collapsed from 18 man-months to zero using this technique.

36:33
Michael Manzi: From our end, we're actually looking at our electricians being able to install this. We're not talking about a high level of ... I'm not gonna use this derogatively, but a high level of education or competency to put this in. We've lowered the technical capability to be able to install this. We're talking about having them, our electricians, driving around with a couple of them in the back of their truck as we're going to various factories and saying, "Hey, guess what? We got here. Do you want one?" So, yeah, it's much easier to use. Yep.

37:02
Dan Stauft: All pre-configured, right?

37:04
Michael Manzi: Yeah. And the closer you can get that UDT down to the actual PLC ... I mean, if you can actually program that UDT in the PLC, those data models will hold true throughout, and there's actually ... The body of work I talked about earlier is talking about having the same data model throughout the entire data stream.

37:23 
Arlen Nipper: Single source of truth.

37:24 
Michael Manzi: Single source of truth, everything, contextualized the same throughout the data flow.

37:28
Dan Stauft: So that's the part I'm most excited about. I've known Arlen for years, and he's been beating me about the face and neck about MQTT. And we never really found a use case for it. But this is an outstanding use case because, quite frankly, we're gonna blatantly use the hell out of the free AWS and Mega AI stuff we have because we're gonna be dumping production UDTs up that have OEE data, and have production rates, and have performance rates. We've got so many UDTs that are already set up. All of that's going up. And oh, by the way, since the same gateway that talks to Indiana talks to the other five plants, we're gonna shove all of them up too. So...

38:08
Michael Manzi: In the same way.

38:09
Dan Stauft: In the same way. Yeah. So within three weeks, I would expect every single UDT that means anything to us will be in the cloud.

38:20
Travis Cox: All right. We've got a couple of questions?

38:22
Audience Member 2: Yeah, how do I, as an integrator in Indiana, get some of my customers the information about this, or how would I get involved with them?

38:31
Arlen Nipper: There is a website, but please get a hold of me after this, and I will get you in touch with the ... Paul Mitchell runs the economic development for the state of Indiana, and he is the head guy in Indiana that's running this program.

38:46 
Audience Member 2: Okay, thank you.

38:47
Arlen Nipper: Yeah, contact me after this and I will get you that.

38:49
Audience Member 2: Okay.

38:50 
Travis Cox: It is really important. We'll iterate one more time that going forward, once this is in place, this is a starter kit. It's a foundational piece that allows to continue on and find other additional use cases.

39:01
Arlen Nipper: They get to keep it.

39:02
Travis Cox: You've got an energy use case right now, which is great, start with that, but then there's many others, as like Dan's looking and thinking about his systems, what he can get value out of going forward as well.

39:12
Audience Member 3: Okay, so ... It's great, you guys ...

39:16
Dan Stauft: Why you looking at me?

39:18
Audience Member 3: 'Cause the question is gonna come to you, Dan. So we've talked about the configuration, getting the data, getting into AWS, but as an end user, how are you going to get that data back into your system to take value from it? And as I'm assuming that you guys have already created the mobile application so that once the data gets to AWS, you have a Perspective screen that's coming back to?

39:45
Arlen Nipper: No, no.

39:46
Dan Stauft: No, it's all web-based. I'll defer to Arlen because we're not in it yet, but I know that the unsupervised AI takes place outside of Ignition completely. Once it goes up there, it's really … The intent is for the AI portion of it.

40:03 
Audience Member 3: So you're just gonna get an output. You're not... So if you wanna get that data back into your system...

40:07
Dan Stauft: Back into Ignition?

40:09
Audience Member 3: No, back ... Well, back into your on-prem Ignition.

40:14
Arlen Nipper: Well, right now, we are working with Mega AI to take the anomaly detections and get those back into ... So that they can build a model that we can use engines that subscribe to just that model and then be able to take that back in. But I think right now it's the notion of finding those anomalies and figuring out what data we're actually gonna feed back. So I look at it two ways. I think the unsupervised AI is gonna be cool at some point. But they say you can't fix it if you can't measure it, and the first thing I think these customers are gonna see is that "Oh my gosh, look at how much energy we're using," and that could be local display on the EPIC.

40:58
Audience Member 3: Yeah, I guess that was my question. Is there going to be ... The data that you're collecting, I get the idea of getting it to the anomaly detection, but how is Dan gonna take advantage of that data on-prem for his systems?

41:15
Arlen Nipper: We will get that. Like I said, when we figure out what that model looks like, so we can feed it back to Dan when we'll be able to do that. Now, to your point, Perspective or Vision or anything like that, that's what we're hoping either the integrator or the customer can go in there and say, "Okay, now I'm running Perspective in trial mode. I really like this. Okay, now I'm gonna enable this part of it." Because, again, trying to get this envelope of 50K, it's only Ignition base with [MQTT] Engine, Distributor, and Transmission, and then they can go in, and everything else is already on the groov, you can run it in trial mode, but then the customer would have to go in and say, "Okay, I wanna purchase Perspective," or whatever.

42:00
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so my thought to your question is we could ... 'Cause obviously, we've got Perspective, we've got everything. So the first case, because it's all web-based analytics that you can pull up in a web browser, so that means we can get to the web page and either scrape it or just show their web page in an Ignition client. Using the provided ...

42:24 
Benson Hougland: Everything's provided through Grafana dashboards that come right out of the AI system.

42:26
Travis Cox: But another important part about this is SiteWise. Thinking of that as an API, if you will, the data that's getting put in there, it's being ingested, is contextualized, if their models are there. It's stored long-term in time sharer’s database. It's easy to query. Mega AI happens to be doing that, doing the INsights, unsupervised AI. The results of that, going back to what they're working on, getting that back in the SiteWise means automatic, then back into us.

42:52|
Michael Manzi: And Mega AI is also working on ...

42:54 
Travis Cox: You wanna see a lot of that happen.

42:55
Michael Manzi: Yep. Mega AI is actually working on reporting dashboards. We've been working with them on what those need to look like. They're building to your typical OEE. If you think of ... To bring up another bad word like PTC ThingWorx, their MES capability is what you'll probably see within the next few months, or definitely not any further out than a year within Mega AI. Also, within the Opto box is full Ignition. So ...

43:21 
Audience Member 3: I guess to ask my question, so here's ... I tried to throw you a softball. You missed it. Well, here's the question. 

43:26
Benson Hougland: We can't get it back right now, so the answer, Arlen.

43:30
Benson Hougland: We're dancing.

43:30
Audience Member 3: You guys have the opportunity to, yes, send this to AWS. You also have the opportunity to send this to Hive, to send it to Chariot, to send the same data to another broker at the exact same time that the company could take advantage of. Correct?

43:44
Arlen Nipper: Yes.

43:44
Benson Hougland: Yep.

43:46
Audience Member 3: You could do it from Opto, you could do it from Ignition ...

43:47
Benson Hougland: We're doing it in our own facility where we like to eat our own dog food.

43:51
Audience Member 3: Yeah, that's all I was trying to get you...

43:52
Benson Hougland: We would put this exact same system into Opto, connect to our compressors, started to really get the data that we needed to understand how to stage those compressors properly to avoid demand charges. All that data is right there locally, and now it's up on being analyzed by AI at the same time.

44:08
Audience Member 3: Yeah, at the end of the day, this data belongs to Dan in your factory. You now have access to get that data on top of sending it to AWS.

44:18
Dan Stauft: Oh yeah, no doubt. No, we're gonna dashboard everything in Ignition, also, yeah.

44:21
Arlen Nipper: Absolutely.

44:22
Audience Member 3: Yeah, I could have sat down five minutes ago ...

44:25 
Dan Stauft: I thought ... I didn't understand your question. That ...

44:31 
Audience Member 4: That's too bad.

44:31
Dan Stauft: But for ... So to the point, for the Energy INsights consumer that is starting with the kit, you don't get Vision, you don't get Perspective, it's not included. So for that customer, all they get is the web-based trends and analytics, so I was speaking based on what the program capabilities were.

44:54
Audience Member 4: Also, as they said, the same data could go to Azure the same way it could go to any other consumer applications.

45:01
Benson Hougland: Right, exactly.

45:02
Arlen Nipper: There's money from AWS. That's the ...

45:04
Dan Stauft: Yeah, this is free. Did they mention that?

45:06 
Michael Manzi: You won't get the money from AWS to send it to Azure.

45:11
Travis Cox: Arlen, we have another question here.

45:13
Arlen Nipper: Yes, go ahead.

45:13
Audience Member 5: I have a quick question. I think you answered most of it, but you're doing energy, but what we want to do is to look at the sensors to have ... Read the vibration of the motors, whether it is compressors or filters or the water quality, those ... We want to read the values, although we want to have the analytics, but we don't want to ... We have a private cloud network, so we don't want to use any AWS. Is it possible to have, use your unit to read the vibration and then predict the conditional base?

45:47
Benson Hougland: You bet. Yeah, any sensor we can tie into the EPIC system through the RIO.

45:53
Audience Member 5: Do you recommend any sensors, or we can go with VIE, or any of the sensors that we like?

45:57
Benson Hougland: Yeah ... Yeah, more traditional sensors. I'd like to know precisely what kind of sensor you might be using to confirm that it would connect to the EPIC, but in most cases, that's what we do. We're an I/O system and a control system, so.

46:08
Dan Stauft: Yeah, I'm gonna upset the inductive guys right now. There's a lot for vibration. Specifically, there's a lot of off-the-shelf systems that are dedicated 100% to predictive analytics for maintenance, and that might be easier than trying to create that from scratch in Ignition.

46:27
Travis Cox: With that being said, it would be incredibly easy though …

46:35
Travis Cox: To get that data into an Ignition in their private cloud. So they can do a lot of amazing things with that.

46:41 
Michael Manzi: We could have a whole session on the groov EPIC and its capabilities. It could be a remote access gateway. We can have a two-hour session just talking about the capabilities, but this is just one thing that it's doing.

46:51 
Dan Stauft: We could have an eight-hour session on when is it the right tool for the job and when is it not.

46:57 
Michael Manzi: I would just say it always is, right?

46:58
Audience Member 5: That's good. I'll connect with you later to discuss more. Thank you.

47:02
Arlen Nipper: Thank you.

47:04 
Travis Cox: Alright, well, we are out of time. I was going over every other session I've done, so I'll wrap this up, and I thank our panel very much for being here today.

47:13
Travis Cox: Okay, good job. Have a good rest of the conference. Don't miss the Build-a-Thon.

47:19 
Arlen Nipper: Don't miss the Build-a-Thon.

47:19 
Benson Hougland: If you wanna see EPIC in action.

This panel will bring together some of the Ignition community's most accomplished integrators to discuss how the industry has shifted over the past decade and what technologies and practices will be vital in the future. From IIoT-enabled hardware and cutting-edge security tools to eliminating paper from the plant floor, changes in the last 10 years have altered how integrators approach business and opened up new opportunities. But which areas still have room for refinement and innovation? Hear experienced professionals give their insight and answer your questions about the industry's past, present, and future.

Transcript:

00:03
Chris Fischer: Hello. And I wanna welcome all of you to the Industry Panel. We appreciate you being here. The theme of the panel today is going to be how integration has changed and where it's going. Of course, Inductive Automation grew out of integration roots, so we rely on you as much as you rely on Ignition. We've got some great panelists here, and I think we're in for an exciting discussion today. To introduce myself, I'm Chris Fischer, I am the Integrator Program Manager here at Inductive Automation, I enjoy working with integrators at all levels of the program, and I'm gonna be moderating today. Let's meet our panelists. Come on up fellas. To start with, Chris Taylor, he's the Managing Director at BIJC Limited, one of our Firebrand Award winners this year. Chris has worked with automated control systems in the power industry for ... Oh no, excuse me, and has been an advocate of Ignition since his first project in 2011. He has many years of experience as an engineer working with emergency power systems and with critical power systems for global banking, energy, and data centers. Before BIJC, Chris was the head of electrical and controls engineering for a wind turbine manufacturer.

01:37
Chris Fischer: Chris is a corporate member of the Institution of Power Engineers and a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Chris created BIJC in 2014 as an Ignition integrator, and since then has expanded the business to develop SCADA systems for manufacturing, food and beverage, and textiles. Welcome Chris. We've also got Mike Ficchi. He is a Senior Controls Engineer at Multi-Dimensional Integration or MDI. MDI serves customers in all industries, both domestically and internationally. Mike has been with MDI, implementing control system solutions for over 15 years, and supports the greater MDI team in solving customer needs utilizing Ignition and Sepasoft. Utilizing Ignition and Sepasoft since 2010, Mike and the MDI team have designed, architected, and implemented applications as simple as an alarming application for remote notifications to enterprise-wide SCADA/MES solutions for customers. Welcome Mike. Keith Gamble is a Software Engineering Manager for Barry-Wehmiller Design Group. Keith joined the Design Group, which is one of the largest systems integrators in the world, in 2019, bringing his drive and passion for software engineering with him. With nearly 10 years of software engineering experience in various industries, Keith brings a unique perspective to implementing SCADA and industrial solutions.

03:15
Chris Fischer: His skill set involves systems architecture and design, software engineering, and leading a team of engineers. His specialty on the Ignition platform is within Perspective development and developing software applications within the Ignition framework. When he's not at work, you can find Keith snowboarding, golfing, camping, or doing anything outdoor in beautiful Northern California. Welcome, Keith. And we also have Jeremiah Hannley. He's a Partner and CTO at Streamline Control. Jeremiah is a professional engineer with 15 years of experience in architecting and deploying best-in-class operational technology and industrial control systems for various industries, including energy, pipelines, refining, and electric utilities. He's helped organizations modernize process control networks, execute large-scale SCADA replacement projects, implement scalable data acquisition, and help with design.

04:17
Chris Fischer: He's a champion of using OT assets and data to help business achieve transformation through smart, agile, and cost-effective solutions. Most recently, he completed an award-winning control system modernization project for a large national pipeline company using Ignition. As a Partner and CTO of Streamline, he brings a wealth of knowledge, insight, and leadership to his organization and his clients. Also worth mentioning, Streamline Control also won a Firebrand Award this year. Welcome, Jeremiah. So of course, the Industry Panel is fairly conversational, we've got some questions we're gonna throw over to these guys, get their opinions, get their perspective, pun intended. So why don't we start going down the line with Chris. Question number one: What is a lesson or a success story from the past year that you'd like to share?

05:15
Chris Taylor: I think for our success story is the project that we've won the Firebrand for today. It was a leather manufacturer, we had some unique challenges for getting hides in and out of a fridge. You can see it in the Discovery Gallery, you can go and look at it. It wasn't really my project, it was part of my team, they've done a marvelous job and without Ignition, I don't think there's any other SCADA system that we could have used that would give us the connectivity that we required to do the job, so that's a real success for Ignition. The other thing that it did more than anything was that it allowed our customers to get data that was impossible to get beforehand, and he is using that data not only to produce a better product, with better quality, but he's also able to now quantify the quality of the product arriving at his facility, so he can now make better choices from his suppliers. And that was very important to him.

06:31
Chris Fischer: How about you, Mike?

06:35
Mike Ficchi: A success story for us recently, actually comes more in the form, not so much in the application itself, but rather as an integrator, finding ways to break down the barriers between customer and the other OEM products that they're purchasing that we are asked to connect through MES and SCADA using Ignition and Sepasoft.

07:05
Mike Ficchi: And finding a way, because of the way everybody looks at things differently and programs things differently is down to even the fact of talking different languages, because you've got OEMs coming in from other countries and trying to bridge that gap of, hey, we're trying to put together a site-wide or enterprise-wide solution, and I know you guys have your standard way of doing things, but finding a way to maybe alter, say your PLCs to include a UDT that might much easier implement into the greater ecosystem really is a win for everybody, including the customer and it's probably no surprise that there's quite some pretty stubborn OEMs out there that are not too excited to change their “standard code,” so finding a way to break down those barriers has been a pretty big win for a quite a large project that proper NDAs in place don't allow me to say too much about. So it's not necessarily application level, but really how do you bring the greater team together for the customer at the end of the day.

08:28 
Keith Gamble: Yeah, I think a good success story on our side was a project that I believe we actually have in the Discovery Gallery as well with a pharmaceutical life sciences company focused on cell and gene therapy, and this was a great opportunity for us to look into more emerging and advanced markets, and try to bring Ignition in. And Ignition was really ... To Chris's point with the leather manufacturing stuff, it was kind of the only answer in terms of being able to get the data you needed out of what you needed it for, and then provide it somewhere else.

09:06 
Keith Gamble: And so really seeing Ignition's capability ... Or sorry, being able to use Ignition to take a lot of data out of that equipment provided for business analytics, creating things like a Unified Namespace and really pushing into emerging and advanced technologies within that space has really been an eye-opening thing for us to show what we should be focusing on and the capabilities we have right in front of us that maybe we didn't see right there beforehand and how within graphs, grasp some of those more advanced and emerging technologies really are.

09:45 
Jeremiah Hannley: For Streamline as well we had a Firebrand project this year, and it was around a pipeline industry, which is a highly regulated and controlled environment, so it was successful for us because it wasn't just the replacement of a SCADA system with another SCADA system doing typical poll-response, it was a holistic rethink of how to architect a modern SCADA solution for a highly geographically distributed system that still has all the same problems that a SCADA system does through legacy communications, high latency VSAT networks, to be able to take that, replace the SCADA system, but also to expand the Ignition platform from the edge all the way up into the boardroom using Perspective or an instance of Perspective that now sits on the enterprise level of the organization that aggregates all this data from the SCADA system and then exposes it to enterprise users.

10:57
Jeremiah Hannley: If I was to propose a solution like that to some of my clients, even five years ago and say, “Hey, as a pipeline operator in the middle of Kansas, you can get on your phone, securely see a real-time pump status or a real-time value of a valve or a ping location,” I just don't think that anyone would believe it's possible, but it is. And it's something that we're kind of championing going forward.

11:29
Chris Fischer: Awesome. And how is the role of integrators changing? Just generally. Why don't you kick us off, Jeremiah?

11:38
Jeremiah Hannley: Sure. I think when I started in controls, I was a controls engineer, and integration was a division of an electrical engineering group or department, and integration was in many ways, configuring a point or a display element or configuring software that represents a process or something like that, but what we found is that it's growing beyond that. You don't just need a Ladder Logic program, or you need people that understand software, you need cybersecurity individuals in the solutioning, you need people that understand and can integrate and work with downstream applications that exist on the enterprise level. So the role of the integrator is no longer just providing an OT solution, it's a holistic process to enterprise development method really.

12:47
Keith Gamble: Yeah, I think the four of us even talked about it back there beforehand, talking about our previous experiences and our backgrounds, and something that's happening in the integrator space a lot is there are different perspectives, pun intended, I guess, coming from different industries and different workflows, from controls to software engineering or it's all kind of converging and pushing the industry forward a lot right now to all the points and the Firebrand projects and everything here, the software engineering aspects behind these projects is very new. The industrial space historically is kind of scared of software a little bit, it's a big, scary thing, but Ignition makes that open and visible. And so really I think the role is changing to not just focus on the controls and manufacturing side of things, but also it's opening up to enable more software consulting, software engineering and those rules. So I think that the industry is kind of widening out to include a much broader space of expertise to try and guide those projects forward.

13:56 
Mike Ficchi: Yeah, I can say in my experience, where I've started out to where I'm at now, is really as an integrator, you're also an educator, in terms of, especially today in a space where you do have IT/OT, IT on a production floor, those are two different levels that for years hadn't really talked to one another and don't really know each other's world. And so now they're being forced to communicate with each other, and we gotta try to help educate them on what each other ... What is important to each other and why. A traditional IT department who now may have to support some plant floor equipment because it's connected, and all of a sudden the network goes down. Hopefully you have some local client fallback or some edge panel in place, but there's times where that isn't the case, and submitting a IT ticket to the IT desk, and they'll get to it when they get to it, isn't exactly the acceptable thing these days, so there's an education as to what's important in both spaces.

15:19
Mike Ficchi: And on the flip side, you've got traditional manufacturing floor folks, controls engineers who they just need to get it running and the same thing, Oh, we gotta get IT involved, well, that's gonna take six months and half a million dollars, and I just wanna change this small thing on the floor. It's not the case, but it's hard getting folks out of that kind of traditional mindset. So education, it's educating the customer that in turn helps you be able to gain their business, gain their trust, and really gain that relationship.

16:01 
Chris Taylor: So I think as the other panelists have said, to put it succinctly, what's changed is the scope. When I first started, you were a controls engineer, you had a controls engineer business, you do PLCs, you might do an HMI. You might have a big screen somewhere, and pretty much it was just OT, but as soon as you start to have an Ignition license, things start to accelerate out and then you've got to grow with that scope. That's the biggest change for us. As my business has grown, we've had to employ new people with new skill sets to address the needs of our customers, which just the scope just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it's not a complaint; it's opportunities. Sometimes I must admit I do struggle to keep up, but I think that's the same for everybody. We all have a learning curve. So that's ... To answer the question, that is the biggest change, the scope.

17:06
Chris Fischer: Gotcha.

17:06
Keith Gamble: Can I make a comment?

17:08
Chris Fischer: Yeah, please.

17:09
Keith Gamble: Actually, it's about something Mike said and I've kind of been thinking about it, and I've preached this many times before I didn't think about it, but I know historically, and I think ... Do I try this or, Carl alluded to this earlier that IT was kind of this scary thing and Ignition came in to make IT more accessible. Like, IT wouldn't be as scary to interact with, but that's still a problem all the time right now, and I think as an integrator, it's our role often to be that bridge between IT and OT, to open up that communication, make ... Do the translation, obviously, the people on opposite sides of that spectrum are saying, “Why do different things to get the same result?” And I think our role is really important as a bridge of communication between those two environments on top of educating them, really just opening up that ability to communicate.

17:56
Chris Taylor: You're correct. You need people on your teams who can speak both languages and can talk to the people in the same room and just reassure them, everything is gonna be fine, we can do this and we're not gonna upset you, and you're gonna get the benefit from this. That's the key thing to selling this.

18:12 
Keith Gamble: Yep. That's all.

18:15 
Chris Fischer: Yeah. Okay. So are there new strides in MES, ERP, and SCADA integration, and if so, what role do you guys see Ignition playing there?

18:30
Chris Taylor: What strides? I've had this question and I thought about it. Ignition can play a huge role in this, and it's down to us as integrators to make sure that our customers were aware of the capabilities, because it's very difficult to stand in front of them and explain everything that it can do because there is so much that it can do. So we can play a part of ... Are there any new strides? Yes, it's multifaceted. There's all sorts of things that we can be doing. Cloud integration, especially, I'm very excited about the Ignition in the cloud as a service that we can access with my sales hat on, this is gonna be a great tool for demoing new projects and new ideas for DevOps, all sorts of things that we can do with that. Without spending a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money to produce something new. So thank you Team Steve. That's gonna be great. So I'm looking forward to that. So I think that is a new stride. I haven't seen that in any other SCADA manufacturers, so I'm looking forward to that.

20:00 
Mike Ficchi: I would say this a big stride is definition of MES. When we kind of first started diving into this at MDI, there was a lot of different ... A lot of people had different definitions of what MES was. Where is the line? What falls into the MES bucket? And I think year after year, we're seeing that it's kind of taken a more of a unified form amongst customers in different industries and using different platforms, I think is what kind of maybe clouded that. 'Cause you take a Rockwell or Wonderware and they have some stuff that's MES, but some stuff that's not MES and it's very cloudy, where Ignition and Sepasoft come in is they find a way to really kind of define those boundaries. And they make it as we ... You were saying earlier, you're gonna have folks and people who can get in the weeds, but also be able to talk in layman's terms to be able to, Sepasoft makes it very easy to be able to put that in layman's terms. To help define that. So that the customer walks outta that meeting and go, “Now I get it. And now I understand a little bit better what MES is to this integrator in this platform, and it can very clearly hit the goals that I'm trying to get to.” But I'd say that's a big stride in terms of unifying what the definition of MES actually is.

21:43 
Keith Gamble: I'd say probably the largest stride I can think of, and it's not exactly as new now, but is Perspective, right? MES, ERP, and even SCADA they are all about data. They're all data hungry, powerful tools, right? And that's where Perspective shines. It is an amazing tool for visualizing bulk data, for interacting with, creating, and reporting on large data sets, complex data, and making data much more accessible. I think it is really, Ignition's one of their best capabilities right now is how capable Perspective is at doing that and that's where it's leagues ahead of other competitors in those markets. Because as I mentioned before at the software side of it, those kinds of tools traditionally being developed by software engineers for those companies as opposed to Ignition is allowing software engineers to develop it in their platform and make it a little bit more tailored, a little bit more clear to each client what MES is to his point. But I think really Perspective and the rise of mobile-first and web integration is probably the most powerful thing right now in Ignition’s pocket for those tools.

23:04
Jeremiah Hannley: Yeah, I agree, I think Perspective is amazing with what you can do with it. I think the stride is really converging this all into a common ecosystem, a single-stack solution, but just really converging the OT layer and the IT layer. And the Ignition platform as we all know, it just enables that. It enables an enterprise user to have a Perspective dashboard off of the same data set. And then it enables a control room that has a very distinct fixed resolution display with abnormal state or ASM in mind on the HMI frontend. It has all that kind of built-in to really, to bridge all this, and then with the ServiceLink modules now, you can just start pushing this data up into the cloud and onto these other applications. So I think the stride in this space is the unification of the IT-OT environment, and Ignition just has all of that stuff built into it. You don't have to go to a different software package, you're not feeding information between this software or this software or this application or this data management group within your organization, it's pretty much an edge node and you can publish everything up right to control system, right up to the enterprise.

24:38
Keith Gamble: If I could comment on what you're saying with you're not having to share the data, I guess. To the benefit as well you can share the data, the data is exposed, it's available, you can put together a web dev endpoints to make data accessible, visible. So I think it's, to your point, it's fantastic, you don't have to do that. But then the same, in the other hand, it's impressive that you can do that, right?

24:58
Jeremiah Hannley: Yeah.

25:00
Keith Gamble: You're not locked to, oh, I can't get this data 'cause it's in some binary encoded format, I gotta buy their connector tool to go do these things. And no, it's just your data. Do what you want with it man. Like here you go, and I think that's ...

25:13
Jeremiah Hannley: It's really a single-stack solution to do that, to allow all your applications downstream and even on the control side or the enterprise side to integrate into it. So from an end user perspective it's fantastic, 'cause I just know one piece of software to manage.

25:30 
Chris Fischer: Before we throw it to the audience, I wanna get your thoughts quickly about ... What would you like to see more of from Ignition and the Ignition community? Anybody?

25:40
Keith Gamble: I think something that, once again, we talked about this kind of beforehand and we all agreed, we wanna see more of basically everything that was announced a couple hours ago, right?

25:53 
Keith Gamble: But that exact same list of things we're all sitting there like, “Oh, thank you. Of course, yes. Let's do that, right?” There are a couple of things that didn't get touched on, and that's what I know that people are kind of biting their breath waiting, but like tags, existing as a configuration item in the gateway file system. Things that really enable CICD and automation and version control and that wide sweeping array of developer efficiency tools and life cycle tools. I think that's what we're looking to see the most of right now, it's where we're adding some of the most power to our applications and maximizing development efficiency, and that's where you guys are, you're putting your eggs in that basket. So it works for us, but I think that's one of the most important growth areas right now for the platform.

26:41 
Chris Taylor: And for us, for our company, we're finding ... We're learning more and more about CSS having some form of CSS editor inside the Perspective Module. That would be fantastic. So we can do more of that rather than annoying everybody and doing CSS injection.

27:02 
Jeremiah Hannley: For Streamline, I would say we do a lot of like Ignition Edge deployments, where we're managing thousands of edge nodes for clients, so I think just improvements around enterprise licensing for Edge would be fantastic, like a single license applied to many edge nodes would be great.

27:28 
Mike Ficchi: 8.3.

27:28
Keith Gamble: Good answer.

27:29
Chris Fischer: Short and sweet.

27:30
Mike Ficchi: Right?

27:30 
Keith Gamble: I think another thing too that ... This is a comment that was kind of mentioned when Ignition Cloud [Edition] was being talked about, was the comment of the cloud connector modules or whatever, that will manifest itself as title-wise, but being able to talk to modern software development tools, MongoDB, or Redis cache being able to take web-based content and provide it to the web in Perspective. I think that's something that, yeah, you can technically do a lot of those things now when you dig further into scripting and then you run into some more advanced problems with memory leaks and all that fun stuff, but I think really digging deep into that cloud side paired with the power of Perspective, I think that's a really exciting area to watch grow as well.

28:18
Jeremiah Hannley: Yeah, you're really gonna take the platform outside of a control system and expose it to the enterprise and build dashboards, and you build applications now. We use Perspective, it's like a little application engine where we just have some scripts and have a little mobile device showing a specific data set targeted to a specific group of users, so ... Absolutely.

28:44 
Keith Gamble: Yeah, that's actually one of the most, the best use cases to watch grow as well is traditional SCADA systems, if you're building something in Vision as an example, you may have 40 screens with a very wide amount of tags, thousands of tags, and maybe a couple hundred lines of code is gonna spread throughout, but Perspective opens up that opportunity, but also to the projects that are maybe four screens, 100 tags, and 20,000 lines of code, that just really automatically builds itself as an application development framework that the industrial space is comfortable with. That's the use you guys are doing, same here, it's one of the most powerful spots.

29:25 
Jeremiah Hannley: Absolutely. Yeah.

29:27
Chris Fischer: Well, with that, why don't we take some questions from your peers and colleagues. We've got some microphones floating around, it looks like we got one right over here.

29:44
Audience Member 1: From a software development standpoint, I've heard some MongoDB stuff from you guys. What do you just think about microservices and how should Ignition developers start thinking microservices level, and start doing very small apps because now we're talking about SDKs and how SDKs could be customized, but we as, not end users, but the supporters for customers are we ... If we're writing heavy code, should we start looking into microservices? And is that a good option for us?

30:15
Keith Gamble: I think I'd say it needs to ... Ignition needs to continue to grow into the direction of better supporting the microservice architecture, but it also needs to not. In that it needs to be able to be a one-stop shop to put everything. It needs to be able to hold all the pieces. But there are going to be applications developed that you're gonna take your architecture and you're gonna split out your architecture like crazy, where you have scaling Perspective frontends, you have a dedicated tag, when dedicated database interactions, dedicated, separate different entities to do all of that. I think the tool has to do both, and if you are going to continue to take further into the software engineering space with Ignition, you're gonna have to know both as well, you're gonna have to understand how the gateway network communicates and operates.

31:05 
Keith Gamble: How you're moving data around, how you can be optimal and efficient there. I think both sides of it are a bit of a requirement, but I also think that both are gonna continue to have to grow together and parallel.

31:22
Audience Member 2: Okay. Hey guys. As integrators, I've got a quick question. How do you all approach selling Ignition to potential customers that don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles, and additionally, on top of that, in industries such as water and wastewater, where SCADA systems are hard spec. Do you all make any attempt to work with engineering firms or the end users to get Ignition spec into the job beforehand?

31:50 
Jeremiah Hannley: Can I jump on this?

31:54
Chris Fischer: Yeah.

31:54
Jeremiah Hannley: The question is, is like, how do you inject Ignition into organizations?

32:02
Audience Member 2: Pretty much, yeah.

32:08
Jeremiah Hannley: So at Streamline, we do a lot of work around, say, MQTT, and we use Ignition, not necessarily as a SCADA platform, we call it a real-time ... A real-time engine, really, right? So we have systems where we have edge nodes talking MQTT basically converting Modbus into Sparkplug, pushing it up into a really a central Ignition instance to expose that information, even as OPC UA to another SCADA platform, and that just gives the client or the end user kind of some exposure onto the technology as a whole.

32:48
Jeremiah Hannley: And shows you how modular it is, and within those projects we often like go, “Well, we're gonna purchase a Perspective license and now we're going to have some dashboards and visualization around the monitoring of the network infrastructure as an example.” And then that gives organizations like a comfort and eagerness into it, and I find that the more they get their hands on it, the more they're like, “Yeah, this is a direction we wanna go,” so it's just like, you can start ... And you can start these really small use cases and then use Ignition at a cost-effective rate, and then build out upon that.

33:32
Mike Ficchi: Just to build on that. I classify it as small wins, it is a small win, you get a customer who's got a problem they need to solve, and it may not be the most ideal use case for Ignition, but you can find a way ... It's Ignition, you can find a way to get into anything at a very small cost, and even if it's at the level of put ... Like you said, put an edge, an edge node out there, and now you give the maintenance manager the ability to pull up something that's happening out on the floor on a machine that is their prize machine, you just made their day and they can ... Now, now they do the sell right, they go to the ops manager and show him what's going on, and all of a sudden ... “Oh, that's awesome. Can we do this? Can it do that?” And before you know it, it's ... No pun intended, we're in California, it's like, wildfire, and it just spreads.

34:39
Keith Gamble: Insensitive, man.

34:41 
Mike Ficchi: Well, I'm sorry.

34:42
Keith Gamble: I think a comment there is that's the beauty of the licensing model man, the fact that if you ... Let's say I need a very simple application to just look at some tags in an Allen-Bradley PLC and based off of a tag changing and a completely different sub-system that I can't get these two PLCs to connect for whatever reason, I just have a simple script, move it across. What that license is, a core license, and I'm pretty sure it comes with the OPC UA and the basic driver, so there you go, you got core license and you've got a project on your hands, you'd be amazed how little you need sometimes to get running with Ignition, and that's probably the easiest way to get it in places where cost is a concern and you just start with little pieces, little wins.

35:28
Chris Taylor: That's exactly what we would do. If you can get your foot in the door and you've got just a small project, for everything you do, give a little bit of value added, something new, something that they haven't thought of, but something that is gonna give them information that they didn't have before, or control of something, or view of something, or some new data that you've merged, two bits of information to produce new data, data that they didn't have before. And they will love that. They will love it, they will use it and then they'll say, “Okay, can we have this, can we have that?” Of course, you've gotta control your scope creep because it always happens, but that's the way to get more people involved and to get the customer engaged.

36:17
Mike Ficchi: If you can make someone's life easier, they're gonna ... They're gonna champion it for you, if you can.

36:23 
Chris Taylor: Yeah, and that's what you need is a champion.

36:27
Chris Fischer: Right. Awesome, anybody else?

36:30 
Audience Member 3: Yeah. Jim Montague from Control Magazine. I was just wondering, as all the web-based SCADA gets more dynamic and takes on control tasks and things, is there any cybersecurity lessons learned or specific best practices the panelists could share for people who aren't as far along the learning curve?

36:49 
Keith Gamble: Yeah, right out the gate, don't even make SSL a consideration, just jump straight to HTTPS, use secure certificates, there's like ... There's some things that ... I mean, they're optional for a reason, right, but there's a good recommendation. Right? I think there's a ton from a cybersecurity standpoint that could be focused on within the tool, there's conversations during the Developer Panel about stuff like using your IdP and security of their versus like 2FA, and there's all these different options, and it's a very wide sweeping area I think in the, I don't remember exactly what it is called [Ignition Security Hardening Guide]. However, on the knowledge-based articles, there is a document talking about cybersecurity best practices and hardening an Ignition system that goes through a lot of those recommendations, talks about why SSL ... What the benefit of certificates is why, how to avoid things like a full text password floating through the Internet on accident. So I think that's a really good resource to just look at and take a checkpoint of where you are right now, and look at those things and say, “Okay, what am I gonna have to do to get there?” And then on the way, you're gonna find other pieces that you didn't even know were there that are gonna really help harden that environment.

38:06
Chris Taylor: Yeah, we use the hardening guide every time we have a new deployment. One of the steps we do is go through the hardening guide every time, we know what it is, but we go through it every time just to make sure we don't miss anything. Simple things, if you've got PCs or PanelViews with USB ports, turn them off. You don't need them. It's great having security on your OT network or whatever it is, but someone can still walk in with the USB stick and just plug it in and you wanna stop that.

38:41
Keith Gamble: That's it. There's a comment right there for Travis and team, we're all looking at that hardening guide, like it's our rule book, so you gotta make sure it's up to date all the time, 'cause we looked at it last week and we'll look at it next week, so something new pops up. It's almost interesting, I'm sure that those articles are primarily written as they write it now and focus and then we'll write another one next time, but it almost seems there could be a benefit of having something that's a continually updated version of something like that in such a space that's constantly changing.

39:10
Keith Gamble: And another side comment, he mentioned the USB thing, when we think about it. Okay, well I guess we’re plugging Perspective here again, but really mobile devices, mobile devices are a good opportunity to increase your cybersecurity practices because they can often be really locked down and you can use Perspective and Android, Apple or whatever, but ... I'll give the thumbs up to Apple in some regards, and the device is so locked down, if you use a Perspective HMI on an iPad from a security standpoint, there's not much the person can do with it, other than use it as an HMI. It's really great for locking down and that's available on all kinds of different ways, but embracing mobile devices can be an easy way to leverage the cybersecurity efforts of the massive companies that have thousands of people focused on it all day, you can leverage what they've already done.

40:03
Jeremiah Hannley: I think also, you mentioned following the hardening guide as a best practice, but just also following best practices for your industry around network segmentation, ensuring indirection, if you're passing data through the DMZ into the enterprise, just kind of like holistically looking at the solution and then ensuring that that's, that you comply with whatever industry you're working in.

40:34
Chris Fischer: Got time for a couple more. Anybody else? No. Alright, well, I wanna get your perspective on one other topic, we've been dealing with ... Everybody has been dealing with supply-chain issues, obviously, I wanna hear a little bit about what you guys have been doing to circumnavigate that and has Ignition played a part in those issues?

41:04 
Chris Fischer: You want to kick us off Jeremiah?

41:04
Jeremiah Hannley: Sure, so how do we manage the supply-chain issue? I usually just write really mean emails to my vendors, but ... And then call 'em and be like, “Hey, anything you can do?” No.

41:18
Jeremiah Hannley: Yeah, because Ignition is not hardware-dependent. We internally do everything and basically in virtual machines or Docker containers or so forth, so when we execute projects now we spin that all up, it's all virtualized, and then we have simulator engines, some tool sets that we built internally to basically mock the data set for the systems we're building and then build the visualization in front of that, so by the time the hardware comes in, we're basically pushing the configuration down to the hardware, running it through the formal acceptance testing and then moving into the next phase of the project.

42:00
Keith Gamble: Yeah, I agree with a lot of that, and I was just gonna say, containerization is key there, man, that's one of the best ways to help rapidly improve that, but I guess another piece that you can think about is, okay, Ignition can run anywhere, right? You can really minimize the requirement of the actual physical onsite hardware by leveraging the cloud, Ignition Cloud [Edition] that we keep talking about. You can put some of the heavy lifting up there and you can just make sure there is a fairly lightweight, but robust data collection system at the bottom right, you can have a Raspberry … Maybe not a Raspberry Pi but you could have a Raspberry Pi collecting all the data at the edge, pushing everything through a store and forward, and then from a supply-chain standpoint, you didn't have to go get a several-thousand-dollar rack server that's gonna take forever to show up, you could get something that you can pick up at Best Buy, and then leverage the cloud that when you reach out to your cloud provider and have, you spin up a VM, they're probably not going to let supply-chain shortages affect you. They're gonna have enough space and help you get that kind of stuff going, and I think really leveraging the ability for Ignition to run on anything pretty much is probably one of the ways to work past that.

43:19 
Mike Ficchi: I think it's just more the same, we're all kind of dealing with the same thing, and like you said ...

43:23 
Jeremiah Hannley: Nasty emails.

43:26
Mike Ficchi: Nasty emails.

43:28 
Chris Taylor: Or planning, you need to plan and I'm fortunate, most of our projects have quite long leading time, so we can plan, but you need to be flexible because I don't know why, but some suppliers don't always tell the truth about their delivery dates, and you just have to be flexible in what components you're using, especially with PLCs at the moment, they're very tricky to get a hold of, you might get most of it, but you, the one bit that you need, doesn't turn up, so flexibility and of course Ignition helps there because ... Good array of drivers, so you can mix and match if you need to.

44:07
Mike Ficchi: I mean, to that point, I mean, transparency. I mean you gotta be honest with your customer and not try to promise something because everyone's dealing with it, that's the reality of it is, is you're going into a project and you're a small piece. Guess what, the mechanical contractor is dealing with the same thing, the electrical contractor is dealing with the same thing, so just being transparent with your customer, it may hurt in the moment, but it'll be appreciated long-term for sure.

44:35 
Keith Gamble: And then as a last minute fail-safe, you can come to a conference like this, find your sales rep in person, and then tell them, they can't ignore you in person, they can ignore an email or a call, but if you're looking them in the eyes, they're gonna have to say something.

44:49 
Jeremiah Hannley: That's true.

44:51 
Chris Fischer: So watch out sales reps. Alright. Well, with that, we are at time. I wanna thank our panelists today, Jeremiah, Keith, Mike, and Chris. I also wanna thank you guys, have a great afternoon, enjoy the rest of ICC.

It takes coordination to revamp processes or upgrade machinery, but it’s a far more complicated task to establish change all the way from the plant floor to the C-suite. While the necessary Digital Transformation of manual operations may look different across a variety of industries, the critical benefits of increased stability, flexibility, and security remain consistent. Hear from a panel of industry thought leaders and experts as they explore how enterprise-wide solutions have led their companies to a new level of growth and answer your questions about large-scale Digital Transformation.

Transcript:
00:00
Announcer: Welcome to the Industry Panel. Please give a round of applause to Inductive Automation's Chief Strategy Officer, Don Pearson.

00:23
Don Pearson: Well, welcome everyone to the Industry Panel. The theme of the panel this year is “Exploring Digital Transformation,” which happens to be, I think, a very relevant topic. We have some wonderful guests, panelists today to discuss that. They'll be answering your questions. I have a bunch of questions of my own, but if we don't get to my questions 'cause you guys have them ahead of time, we'll just take your questions higher priority. I've already been introduced, so I'm not gonna introduce myself again, but I will be the moderator for this panel, so I think what I would like to do now is since we don't have any panelists yet, let's ask them to come up and join us here.

01:26
Don Pearson: I think what I'm gonna do is read through the bios first, and then I'm gonna come back around, and I will give each of you an opportunity to say a couple of words, a couple of minutes, or something about yourself in relation to the topic, to the company you work for, to the things you work on, things like that. That sound okay to everyone?

01:47
Dan Stauft: Yes.

01:48
Don Pearson: Okay, and then I'm gonna make a noble effort to try and get to as many questions and spread it around to... I won't expect everyone to answer every question, but if I ask you a question and you wanna add something to it, just jump in and add it and we'll just kinda take it from there. There are also people with mics around somewhere, right? Upstairs, downstairs, so yes, thank you. So I definitely wanna have you have the mics available since we are gonna... We do this panel virtually. We wanna make sure we get the questions on the recording also. Alright, first, starting at the far end first with Dan Stauft. He's Director of Operational Technology at SugarCreek. Dan spent 21 years in advanced automotive manufacturing engineering and management with GM, and Toyota, and Nissan. Then about 10 years ago, he joined SugarCreek. It's a private label manufacturer, and he joined them to help spearhead their Digital Transformation. Over the last decade, SugarCreek has grown from Excel and paper-based reporting to implementing a world-class Ignition-based SCADA and MES solution. In fact, in 2017, SugarCreek was awarded the Firebrand Award. I think if it's okay with you folks, I might shorten some of these wonderful bios that you all put together for me, okay? Just gonna kind of do it on the fly here. But there's a whole lot more about Dan. He's an amazing person, okay.

03:21 
Don Pearson: Keith Weerts, Chief Technical Officer, Blentech Corporation. Keith Weerts started as a process engineer and a manager working for multinational chemical companies, regularly interacting with the research staff to design processes, products, and applications for sale to food, pharmaceutical, and personal care industries. Later as the Business Development Manager for… Keith worked with Ph.D. researchers to turn their ideas into business opportunities. Major accomplishments include systems for remediating mines and recovery of copper from printed circuit board manufacturers. He's been focused on automation for 25 years, and I think I'll stop there. And let's welcome Keith.

04:16
Don Pearson: Ravi, you are gonna have to really forgive me for not pronouncing your last name. I'll give it a shot, Ravi Subramanyan.

04:23 
Ravi Subramanyan: You got it.

04:23 
Don Pearson: Okay. Director of Industry Solutions for Manufacturing at HiveMQ. Ravi is a Director of Industry Solutions for Manufacturing at HiveMQ. His expertise covers smart manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and IoT in industries such as mining, O&G, industrial automation, automotive, and fleet management. As a products management leader, he has extensive experience delivering high-quality products and services that have generated revenues and cost savings of over 10 billion for companies such as HiveMQ, Parker Hamlin, GE Digital, Motorola, and others. So please welcome Ravi.

05:05 
Don Pearson: And Remus Pop is the Senior Partner Solution Architect with Amazon Web Services. Remus is a recognized industry expert in Industry 4.0 and Digital Transformation, with a long background in manufacturing that spans automotive, aviation, and battery. Remus has helped companies design strategies, deploy and scale smart factory projects across the globe. In his current role as Senior Partner Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services, he continues to help companies understand the value of technology and how to take advantage of cloud services to make that value a reality. Please welcome Remus.

05:47
Don Pearson: Next is Craig Resnick, he's Vice President, Consulting, ARC Advisory Group. I actually asked Craig to sit in sort of late in the game because he did double duty, he just finished a panel next door, but I said you can probably add something to this one, so I appreciate him joining us. He has 35 years experience in sales, marketing, product development, and project management in the industrial market, and gained that experience with major suppliers of PLCs, process control systems, power transmission equipment, and field devices. Craig has been with ARC since 1999. Please welcome Craig Resnick.

06:24 
Don Pearson: Jean-Paul Moniz, Technical Services Coordinator, Cameco Fuel Engineering. Jean-Paul Moniz is a 20-plus-year veteran of the factory automation industry. He currently holds the position of Technical Services Coordinator for Cameco's Cobourg facility. He's been leading and implementing factory automation projects his entire career, with experience in aerospace, automotive, and nuclear. Jean-Paul's relentless drive for process efficiency and technology application to solve end-users’ problems makes him wake up in the morning. Hey, I like that, Jean-Paul Moniz. And stay awake in the afternoon, I hope too. Anyway, welcome, Jean-Paul Moniz.

07:13 
Don Pearson: Nathan Elmore is a Senior Manager, Warehouse Controls, Walmart Inc. Nathan works for Walmart as the Senior Manager for warehouse controls that primarily focus on Ignition. Nathan oversees integrating Ignition across Walmart’s supply chain. Prior to Walmart, he previously worked in supply chain, automotive, and food industries as a controls engineer. So please welcome Nathan Elmore.

07:43
Don Pearson: So I think what I'd like to do, we'll leave this light up for a while here, so you can sort of see the people here also in the back 'cause we can remember their names then, but Dan, I said I was gonna come back to you and give you an opportunity to share a little bit about maybe the transformation at SugarCreek, maybe your overall background as it relates to today's topic, and maybe I'll ask everybody, since we have a large panel here and I wanna get to questions, just take a couple, three minutes to give us that kind of introduction, and then we're just gonna come down the line, they'll going to you next. Okay?

08:17 
Dan Stauft: Perfect.

08:18
Don Pearson: Dan.

08:18 
Dan Stauft: Hi. Happy to be here. I spent my first 21 years of my career in automotive for GM, Toyota, and Nissan, and the automotive industry is very data-intensive, and they are lightyears ahead of most manufacturing. Especially in food and bev when it comes to Digital Transformations per se. When I joined SugarCreek in 2013, I was tasked with coming up with, at the time, what was going to be a “machine data collection system.” And we stumbled across Inductive Automation, actually from the recommendation of a Wonderware salesman because we didn't wanna pay Wonderware as much, they said that maybe we could try Inductive Automation 'cause it was this “cheap little start-up” in California. So eight years ago, we got our first gateway. We are 100% internal integrators. We do not use external controls engineers. We don't use anybody external. We built the whole thing in-house. I've got a team of four people that do all the Ignition development for our company that this year is on track to do 1.2 billion in sales from five manufacturing facilities. Don's been through one of our plants, and I think he'll attest. We do everything with Ignition.

09:39
Don Pearson: Thanks Dan. Go.

09:43
Keith Weerts: So I've been in automation for about 25 years now, and one of the things that I think almost anybody who's been an integrator understands is that you can tell your customers, "I've got all this data I can collect for you. All you have to do is use it." And then they get this blank look on their face, and they say, "Yeah, go ahead and collect it." And after you collect a gigabit, two gigabits every year, and for 20 years, they never look at the data. So I finally got fed up with it, and I said, "Well, we need a way to help them see the data. When they see the data, they'll appreciate the data." And that's where I got involved with Ignition because it was the best platform for helping them see it. Fast forward to now, the company I work with is called Blentech, we make food manufacturing equipment, and we supply the automation system for our equipment, and we also supply is a visualization system that is basically a hybrid environment where we transfer the data up into the cloud and then we give them cloud access to their data, so they can see their data, but we put a lot of work into it.

10:46
Keith Weerts: We build platforms that allow them to see their data in a much more meaningful way. It's not always easily accepted. That's probably some of the things we'll talk about today, is people are very resistant to you looking at their data, but we don't share it, we're very careful about how we handle our customer's data, but still, it's not an easy thing to do. Thanks.

11:07 
Don Pearson: Thanks Keith. Ravi.

11:11
Ravi Subramanyan: Yeah, thank you for the opportunity, Ravi Subramanyan. I've been in the industry for about 22 years or so, over the past eight years or so, I've been with industrial automation. I worked at GE Digital, and GE started this, coined the term “industrial IoT” and started a Predix platform through which they wanted to move assets to the cloud. That's where I got my initiation into Inductive and Ignition because GE had a HMI/SCADA product and there's a new kid on the block called Inductive and Ignition. They have like this cool solution. So I started looking at it, and over the years, I've spent time with a mining OEM, for example. Trying to create a predictive modeling for their remote operations so they know exactly when to replace them. I know you spent some time in mining, so I would love to get your opinion on that. Like supply-chain optimization. That's typically like a very common use case for data because you have different ERP systems coming together, and over time, they speak different languages.

12:19
Ravi Subramanyan: It's important to bring it all together so people get a single pane of glass when it comes to looking at supply chain and how is it, how to ensure that you know where your parts are, and how you can fulfill the orders. In today's day and age, after COVID, it's become more and more important because there's a lot of strain on supply chain, so I go back to the days that I start doing that. And smart operations and smart manufacturing. That's another area I spent time in. More recently, in the last six months, I joined HiveMQ. HiveMQ offers an enterprise MQTT broker, and we've started having some conversations with Inductive. Looking forward to working with them. So basically, connecting OT assets to IT assets either on the enterprise or the cloud, to be able to do remote monitoring, for example, or to be able to prepare the data for your advanced use cases like AI, ML, and so on and so forth. So I'm looking forward to participating in this panel. Don, Thank you.

13:24
Don Pearson: Thanks, Ravi. Remus.

13:24 
Remus Pop: So like Dan, I spent a large majority of my career in an automotive plant or another. I think I've also been on this stage in a lot of different roles throughout the year, so it's pretty interesting to be on this stage in one month and do a new gig I have now with AWS. So it's a pretty exciting time, and I think, obviously, with what Travis and Kevin just showed, that it shows that there's a lot of interest from the cloud providers, specifically AWS, and what's happening in this space. Throughout my career, I've held a couple of different roles, both as an integrator, an end user, and now, kinda a little bit of both. So I'm excited to share some of that knowledge and some of the experiences that we've gone through, but yeah. My background, pretty heavy in controls automation like most people here. That's where I started my career and just migrated through the multiple different steps of where that career path can take you.

14:15 
Don Pearson: Thanks, Remus. Craig.

14:17 
Craig Resnick: Hello there. I started out, started in the DCS industry, then went to the PLC, pack industry, went into motion control, went into sensors, and then after about 20 years of doing that, I decided, "Why don't I try this thing called being an industry analyst?" So I figured I'd try it for a few months, and then 20 years later, it's still going on. Well, what we do is we work with really three kinds of clients at ARC Advisory Group. One is the people that certainly do the manufacturing and that ranges from clients in aerospace and automotive, so heavy discrete all the way through the Aramcos, and Shells, and Chevrons in heavy process. So we're working with them and trying to help them along with their Digital Transformation strategy. At the same time, we work with all the vendors, and I'd say probably... We can't say we work with every person in the planet that manufactures, but we certainly can say we probably work with everybody that supplies solutions to the manufacturing and processing industry.

15:18 
Craig Resnick: Again, helping them with knowing market sizes, shares, trends and helping them through their strategic planning and product strategy for what the world needs as far as products and solutions. And then the third type of client we work with are the financial analysts. It's the equity analysts that are on the quarterly calls with the CEOs that participate in industrials and helping them formulate when they wanna talk about, for example, Digital Transformation. They wanna know who are some of the leaders in that space and what are they doing? And if they're devoting two cents EPS to Digital Transformation, is that a worthwhile investment or not? So we kinda look at it from all three sides. We just finished doing a Digital Transformation trends presentation a few minutes ago, so I look forward to working with the esteemed panel here and Don so.

16:11 
Don Pearson: Thanks, Craig. Jean-Paul.

16:14
Jean-Paul Moniz: So it's Jean-Paul Moniz. I work for Cameco Fuel Manufacturing. Sorry, not Engineering. But we're a Canadian supplier of CANDU fuel bundles for the Canadian nuclear industry. We supply the… I think it's the North America's largest reactor fleet in Bruce Power. And so I've been an active Ignition user since about day one. 2010 was, I think when we first bought, talking with Melanie, I think we're customer number 100, but we have two manufacturing facilities to manufacture CANDU fuel. We're full stack Ignition and Sepasoft in both plants with an enterprise broker. Tomorrow we're doing a presentation with 4IR on “Git Serious” and deploying Ignition up in the cloud for dev and QA environments. A lot of our work right now is focused on finishing off our MES implementation for full-stack traceability on our manufacturing components and then also working towards that single pane of glass view for frontline and line users.

17:25 
Don Pearson: Good, thanks for being here. Nathan.

17:29
Nathan Elmore: Yeah, thank you for Inductive Automation for having me. Yeah, I've worked in a couple of different industries. Currently, at Walmart, in supply chain, I've worked in automotive and food as well. What we work on at Walmart is specifically giving more visibility into our buildings on the back-end of our warehousing and supply chain, even providing that at the associate level and then all the way up to the CEO level, where we're working and moving our information from the warehouse to make it actual data into the cloud formation and an enterprise solution.

18:01 
Don Pearson: Good. Thanks. I think this group can probably see from the introductions here that we probably have a few people who could answer some questions you may have. I'm gonna open with one and then I can... It's kind of bright up there, so I can’t actually see everybody, so you'll have to then see if... Raise your hand or something and grab a mic and then say something if I don't see your hand. I can't see hands up there, but I think I could probably see them down here. But I'll start with just a general... And everyone doesn't have to answer this, but some of you probably there will be an answer to it. What really got you started on, if you could call it a "Digital Transformation journey," what was it that got you, your company, your organization, started on that journey? Or if it happens to be you personally or professionally. What got you started on that? So Dan.

18:51
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so as I said earlier, my whole career in automotive was data-driven, and that was kind of how I thought all manufacturing was. I had no idea that I was spoiled rotten in the automotive industry. And when I joined SugarCreek, we have some really, really cool technology on the floor in islands. For example, we've got these slicers that have vision systems on them that adjust bacon thickness to get the right weight after a microwave oven. And great technology. They were plugged into the ethernet, and they were talking to nothing.

19:25
Dan Stauft: So there was absolutely no data being used at these amazing million-and-a-half-dollar machines. And when I looked around the company, I noticed that that was pretty much the norm. We had a ton of great equipment that wasn't talking. So when I pulled the trigger on trying to replicate it at an automotive assembly plant, I did it using the Ignition trial. I downloaded the trial. I'd never used Ignition before. My background was simplicity in Wonderware. And I modeled a microwave oven line that's a high-volume, pre-cooked bacon facility just to prove what it could do. I had the Sepasoft MES components in it, and I basically walked up to the owner... I'm lucky. The owner of my company, there's only one guy. He's the single stockholder. So if he likes something, it gets ramrodded, basically, through the process.

20:24
Dan Stauft: So I showed him this one area of one of our six plants, and I said, "This is what I can give you, and this is the price tag that it's gonna be." And John nodded his head. The PO was written within two hours of “corporate approval,” which is... It would've taken me probably two years at General Motors to get something like that through. And we implemented it based on pain points. The first line that we went full throttle on was a problem child line, and we fixed the problems. And as we rolled this out, we also rolled in a corporate continuous improvement team because data by itself doesn't fix it. If you suck and you connect the machines, they just show that you suck.

21:08
Dan Stauft: And if you don't do anything, then you continue to suck, but now everybody knows you suck in real time.

21:15
Ravi Subramanyan: But at least you know that you suck.

21:24
Dan Stauft: So data doesn't do anything by itself. You need to bring in a culture of continuous improvement, and you need to have a strategy for what you're gonna do with the data, and we were lacking that. Luckily, we hired a couple of other guys from outside of SugarCreek that were used to that environment. Toyota-type guys in ConAgra. And we built a corporate continuous improvement team. And every single plant, within six months of putting Ignition online, we had at least a 50% OEE improvement. Every one of our plants has more than doubled as we've progressed. Right now, we're at the point where to get gains are requiring engineering resources because all the low-hanging fruit is gone. And we've got... Everybody in our company is 100% focused on Ignition, empowered workers on the floor. It's completely changed the culture of the company.

22:19 
Don Pearson: Cool. So thanks. Anybody else wanna comment on it? Yeah, Ravi.

22:21
Ravi Subramanyan: I can talk to it from an OEM perspective. Like talking to companies and other customers that are on this journey. So, obviously, we talk to companies about their Digital Transformation journey, factory modernization, how they would like to do it, what sort of technologies they want to use. Pre-COVID, it would obviously have taken a long time for them to take the move. I think COVID, in some ways, yes, it was negative in a lot of ways, but at least from a Digital Transformation perspective, it really made people wake up. You know what? We are losing money. Supply chains are strained. Regulatory compliance needs are hitting over the roof, and we are still managing things with paper. At least we should digitize it so we can actually automate some of our processes, make sure we're able to handle some of the near-term needs. That's really helped companies just jump ship and get into it.

23:16
Ravi Subramanyan: One thing that Dan mentioned, which was really important, is the culture, right? Prior to this, the reason why the Digital Transformation initiatives were stalled is because the company culture wasn't quite there. They didn't see the need to do it. "If it ain't broken, let's not fix it" was the attitude that a lot of people showed around different industries, but now, they realize that if they don't do it, they don't have a future. So the culture, that created a cultural transformation, which made Digital Transformation much easier because when it comes top-down, it really is something that people will adopt. So I just wanted to add that perspective.

23:54 
Don Pearson: That's a good perspective. Someone else? Yeah, go ahead, Jean, jump in.

23:58 
Jean-Paul Moniz: I think from my perspective, I like to... To me, I kinda hate the word “Digital Transformation” because, from my perspective, it's more of a Digital Evolution. You know what I mean? You sit there... And we've spent the last 15 years automating our processes, and so with the goal of automation. But then, as technology evolves and as new use cases show up after you go through the automation of the process, and then you're sitting there looking for your next gain, whether it's through continuous improvement or other means or whatnot. You're looking for the next opportunity to sit there and find an advantage and whatnot. And to me, I look at it with the lens of evolution. Some of the things that we're doing now, we couldn't do 20 years ago, but then I sit there and look back, like Dan, I spent some time in automotive too, and we were doing aisle in-line vehicle sequencing back in the early 2000s. So to me, I look at it as more as an evolution and sort of technology adoption. And then I sort of throw on the lens of technology adoption curves, and that sort of explains how we have some of this disparity in the industry where you have some industry leaders out there doing all the right things. And then you got a lot of laggards out there that are sitting there just trying to figure out what to do.

25:15 
Don Pearson: Sure. Anybody else wanna make any comment on that? Craig?

25:19 
Craig Resnick: Well, it's interesting because when it comes to being technology leaders and laggards, when we work with clients, we're very involved with the old path initiative for Open Process, use like Open Process Control. And ExxonMobil wants to take a leadership position, but when we work with the other oil companies, everybody wants to be number two, but they're afraid to be number one because they want somebody else to kinda be that pioneer, make the mistakes, and then they'll learn from it. And one of the things that we try to advise clients with this whole... And then I agree with the Digital Evolution, of course, and the Digital Transformation. What we try to advise is you can't be this timid because sometimes what inaction does is you're like the deer in the headlights, and you get run over. And you think you're being careful, but you're not.

26:15
Craig Resnick: The idea is you really need to look at these technologies. And when companies kinda get resistant, we say, "Okay, let's start with a clean sheet of paper. Let's do the low-hanging fruit strategy. Forget the... Let's not talk about I4.0 or IoT. What's your problem?" The problem is, "Okay, we have unscheduled downtime on this line." "Okay. What can we do to rectify that? Is it something... Can we do a better job of as far as predicting failure of an asset? Can we do a better job as far as being able to schedule maintenance? Can we do a better job of making sure the right material is in the plant at the right time?" So now it's more of a scheduled maintenance downtime to fix something rather than now screwing up your entire production. So what we try to say is instead of getting all wrapped up around the axle with the buzzwords, and I guess as the analysts, we're guilty as anybody of acronyms and trying to confuse people with buzzwords, but let's focus in on, "Okay, what's your issue?" "My issue is my OEE is off by 2%. What can I do to raise my OEE?" And do those block and tackle things. And then all of a sudden, they've started to progress on their Digital Evolution or Digital Transformation, and they don't even realize it.

27:27
Ravi Subramanyan: Right.

27:27
Dan Stauft: Yeah.

27:27 
Don Pearson: A good point.

27:29 
Remus Pop: I think I can tie in a little bit to what both Craig and Ravi said. I remember sitting on a pitch last year before I joined AWS talking to a client that was looking to do an OEE project, and he asked me the question, "What's my ROI gonna be if I implement OEE?" And I looked at him a little silly, and I said, "Well, that's entirely up to you. We can give you all the best tools and data in the world, but if you don't teach your..." Like what Ravi said, “If you don't teach the culture in the organization how to use that data and the business how to benefit from that data, it kinda falls flat.” So I think there's been a lot of discussion around that, like Craig said, with the buzzwords and everything, but, ultimately, we're trying to deliver business value. And as long as we keep focused on the problems that we're trying to solve, I think that's the right way to go about it.

28:10
Don Pearson: Sure. So I'm gonna look out here and see if there is somebody ready to ask a question that has a microphone in their hand. Is that true? If not, you can go ahead and raise your hand, and we'll bring you a microphone. And I'll ask another one. It may be the case that Digital Transformation has a lot of different terms that could be applied to it, to your point that you just made, Jean-Paul. So in your particular industry, do you see unique challenges? I don't know. Keith, when you look at Blentech, did you see unique challenges to get on some sort of an evolution/transformation journey, particular to your industry?

28:55 
Keith Weerts: Well, I don't know if it's particular to the food industry, but I think every industry is difficult. I don't know, but the food industry seems to be fairly slow-progressing compared to the mining industry, the oil and gas industry is very fast to adopt things. Food industry was difficult. I have been working with the food industry off and on for 20 years, and I felt like it's just like moving through molasses.

29:22 
Keith Weerts: And so it's finally... We're finally making progress. And I think, like you said, with COVID, that did make a difference. What we sell nowadays is not so much machines, it's capacity. And so when we can go to people and say, "Listen, we can increase your capacity by helping you with your data. Look at your data. You can actually… don't have to buy a machine from us, buy capacity from us." And that's a mindset that takes a while to teach, but once you get that message across, it becomes a lot easier sale. Then they begin to trust you. There's an awful lot of trust that you have to build with customers when you're working with this type of data. They need to know that you're responsible, that you're taking care with their data, that you're not just trying to sell them on another whiz-bang tool. There is a lot of faith that needs to be built. It's different when you're within a company. Although Dan had to do the same thing, he had to convince his owner that they were committed to this. And we have to do it with our customers out in the wild and can show them that we're reliable partners.

30:27
Don Pearson: Okay. Good point.

30:28
Dan Stauft: I’m dovetailing with that.

30:30 
Don Pearson: What's that?

30:32 
Dan Stauft: Our biggest challenge. I'm gonna dovetail on that because he dragged me into this.

30:35
Dan Stauft: So I'm gonna go.

30:36 
Keith Weerts: Easy, easy.

30:37
Dan Stauft: Alright, I'm gonna go.

30:39 
Dan Stauft: The easy part was getting John to say, "Yes, I want it." And saying, "Go forth and prosper." The harder thing was the actual implementation because the food, especially... We're a meat packer. It's not a glorified job. If you look at automotive industry, they've got the highest-skilled workforce, probably outside of some of the other tech fields, but we don't have rocket scientists slinging pork bellies around a plant. So getting them on board... Because if you don't have the plant floor engaged in the data, in the problem-solving activities, you're not gonna get anywhere. The CEO can't do it. He's not gonna go down and train somebody on how to use a Multivac or a Blentech or something like that. So you have to get the people on the floor. And our challenge was convincing them that we weren't going to use the data to beat 'em up.

31:31
Dan Stauft: The first thing we did is we put these huge dashboards up that showed them where they were, and their reaction, from the Plant Manager down, was, "Oh, shit" because the numbers weren't good. But we had to teach them, "We don't have a target number. We just want you to get better. And we're gonna use your input to allow us to identify the opportunities to get better." And I'll give you an example where we had a 40% improvement on the line like that. We set theoretical maximums for our OEE targets, and that was, basically, whatever the bottleneck on a line was. As fast as it could run, that was our theoretical maximum for a given product. And we're running this line that's packaging meatballs, and we were running it at six cycles a minute, where the machine was capable at 10 cycles a minute. We went down to the floor, and we asked the operator why we're running at six cycles a minute. He goes, "Well, we always run it at six cycles a minute." Like, "Well, can you try to turning it up to 10?" And they're like, "Sure. Turn it up to 10." Boom! Step increase.

32:31 
Don Pearson: Okay.

32:33
Ravi Subramanyan: This is how we've been doing it forever, we just do it.

32:36 
Dan Stauft: That's correct. It's amazing when you get people thinking outside of their comfort zone what they've always been told. We blew all our bill of materials away because they were all wrong because they were based on tribal knowledge that was incorrect.

32:50
Don Pearson: Yeah, thanks. So back over... You started to say something, Nathan, in terms of unique to your industry and challenges.

32:56 
Nathan Elmore: Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be unique to my industry at all, but the hardware exactly that we had in the buildings and thing pre-determined before the Digital Transformation really occurred was, what do we do with that hardware, that technology that's no longer useful because it's not giving us information that we need? Or do we scrap it at that cost, or do we pay to upgrade and update it to actually get that Digital Transformation? To really root it out and then move forward was one of the biggest things that we had to work through.

33:25
Don Pearson: Well, that's good. Thank you. Anybody else wanna comment on that?

33:29
Ravi Subramanyan: I just wanted to comment on the food industry. What I've seen is that, at least with some of the customers that we see, there is a heavy need for innovation because... Be it the packaging or the content. Because today's consumers, they want to consume more healthy food. Healthy food or healthy drinks. And so they're very conscious on the ingredients and the calorie count or the content and things like that. So given that, I think there is a need to innovate on packaging, innovate on how quickly you can bring some of those products. And you have those nimble, new manufacturers that come in with that whole digital mindset, if you will, that can turn things around so quickly. So the big players need to actually be able to change themselves quickly, to change their lines to be able to meet the demand.

34:16
Don Pearson: Sure.

34:17 
Ravi Subramanyan: So it will be easier for them.

34:19
Don Pearson: So I wanted... Anyone else wanna comment on that before I move on to the next question?

34:22 
Craig Resnick: It's culture.

34:23
Don Pearson: Culture, yeah.

34:24
Craig Resnick: We'll go into plants, and you'll have an operator that'll tell us, "Listen, if we're doing an OEE project, for example, if you put it up on display and it shows how bad I am, I'm gonna lose my job. So, therefore, I don't want it visible." You need is the top-down has to be, "We're not here to measure you as you are today. We're trying to measure you where we can get you, where you can evolve to. You're part of the solution. You're not part of the problem." And the idea is, is that if you work with people on the ground rather than just a memo to say that some... That we're gonna be putting in the system, speak with the people first, get their opinion, and ask them for input because now you've empowered them. You've now... Now they're part of that solution, and they feel like the solution is gonna help them produce better, not that this is just gonna be some measuring stick as an excuse to get rid of people.

35:15
Don Pearson: Sure. Good point.

35:18
Keith Weerts: Just wanted to...

35:18
Don Pearson: Keith you wanted to say something else.

35:19
Keith Weerts: I don't know if you've noticed in our conversation, none of us are saying anything about how difficult it is to move the data.

35:25
Don Pearson: Right.

35:26 
Keith Weerts: It's simple to move the data. It's getting them to use the data.

35:30 
Keith Weerts: And that is the challenge that I think we all face.

35:34 
Don Pearson: Sure.

35:34
Ravi Subramanyan: Exactly.

35:36
Don Pearson: So tangential question to the one that you mentioned earlier about the change due to COVID having an impact on maybe motivating people to move faster on some of these initiatives, if you will, for either evolution or transformation whatever. So on the downside of that, obviously, there's things going on in the world that make supply chain a challenge. It's not just coming back together nicely. So how do you deal with that piece of it as regards continuing to move forward when you gotta have hardware? You gotta have stuff to make it work. Anybody? First comment on that? Yeah, go ahead.

36:10
Nathan Elmore: I can go ahead. I would say being proactive as being key, especially on the hardware front. We've seen lead times up to 13 months. And especially during COVID, you're having to pivot and be so adaptable so quickly that it's really hard to actually do. And then also you have the actual integration installation. There's huge demand in our industry of supply chain for all of the things that we were doing. We really had to work on the labor market as well, which was a huge issue because how do you supply the people to actually do the Digital Transformation?

36:44
Don Pearson: So have... Is it getting any better? The 13-month may be extreme. Is there something happening that makes you positive or negative or just the same in terms of optimism on that?

36:57
Nathan Elmore: I think it's a hit or miss. There's areas that's definitely gotten better. We're not seeing lead times like that and things, but there's definitely areas where it's still just as bad. So we still have to be just as proactive as we were two years ago.

37:09
Don Pearson: Okay, thanks. Yeah.

37:10
Remus Pop: One of the interesting things that has happened is the wide influx of these new hardware solutions to provide the typical type of data we would expect from a PLC, or a DCS, or SCADA system. I think, obviously, it's seen out here. I've seen a couple of vendors, but I think one of the very interesting things, and I think it's a lot of it driven by COVID and the supply-chain problem, is there's now a tremendous number of options you have to gather data from equipment. Typically, if you were to ask me two years ago, I would have said the goal and the focus is always gonna be to get as much data directly out of the controller as we possibly can. I think what COVID did, and what some of the other things did, is that now we wanna go for a little bit faster, a little bit quicker wins to get to that level of visibility that we would normally get. And we're willing to sacrifice some of the data to get to some meaningful KPIs. We want metrics that we can start to improve on to bridge the gap.

37:58
Remus Pop: And I think when we see that, obviously. And I think the supply-chain shortage definitely impacts that with just the wide variety of hardware options that are now available to help us get there.

38:08
Don Pearson: Thanks, Remus. Yes, Ravi.

38:12 
Ravi Subramanyan: So what we've noticed is prior to COVID, I think especially in pharma, I think supply chain, they felt was pretty strong because they knew exactly what the demand was, and who the suppliers they had to work with, what are the different pieces of information they needed. There were like supply-chain islands, as I saw it, where they're just concerned about their chain of command, and they were very well versed with that. With COVID, all these things got tossed. And I think it's not just a primary supply, everybody was gone. So when that happens, you have to have a global view of your data because, obviously, in this world, nothing comes from one location. There is so many repercussions to the thing that you're producing that has like different parts of the world that needs to come together.

39:02
Ravi Subramanyan: So the globalization of supply chain is what has really started post-COVID, and for that to happen, you're obviously a machine data from your DCS control system needs to come together along with like your supply-chain data, maybe your shipping information or other pieces of information that are part of your supply chain, all that needs to come together to give you that full picture, not only at a local level but at a global level as well. And that has really helped our companies to transform themselves quickly and be able to meet the supply of the demand.

39:34
Don Pearson: Dan.

39:35
Dan Stauft: Quick example this is one of the things that, to us, COVID was actually kinda helped us... When I say us, I mean the OT team. We've been at war with our controls engineers, who are in a different department, 'cause we did Ignition backwards than most people. We went full-blown SCADA/MES and didn't even think about doing HMIs. But we're trying to get after we see how easy it is where we can go to our controls group and say, "Well, why don't we just start doing Ignition HMIs." They're like, "Rockwell, Rockwell, Rockwell." So earlier this year, we had this huge project, and one of the lead controls engineers comes up to me, and he goes, "Man, we can't get PanelViews." I was like, "Huh." He goes, "Do you know if we have any old PanelViews laying around?" I was like, "Let me tell you something Rick. What we can do is we can get four IP69s, 17-inch panels, running Ignition Edge for the price of one PanelView, and we can get them tomorrow." And he's like, "I don't know. It's a hard..." So we're getting them… COVID is kind of forcing them out of their comfort zone, which we're like, “Yay,” but...

40:50
Keith Weerts: Okay, I have to add to that too because as an OEM, we're building panels for people all the time, and we have to tell them anymore, “You can't have Allen Bradley.” We're down to the only Allen Bradley part in our panel is a PLC, and that's going pretty soon too.

41:08
Don Pearson: Wow.

41:08
Ravi Subramanyan: It was interesting. I was at the IMTS last week in Chicago. And the people that... The big players are the ones that had big supply-chain issues. The nimble players, they said, "Hey, we have supply for the next six months. Just bring it on. Tell me what you want." Right, so somehow they have been able to figure out and take care of the supply chain. It's the big ones that are like Rockwells that are having issues.

41:30
Don Pearson: Yes, go ahead.

41:32 
Jean-Paul Moniz: I mean, to hit on what Dan said, sometimes I think... And I was gonna sit there and talk about sort of IT/OT convergence, but I think some of that lies at the foot of OT people, and I've been one of them. We migrated off of PanelView HMIs a long time ago and exclusively use Ignition as our HMI, so we just use plain Jane Windows, touch screen, or whatever. But it's using those type of tools to sit there and mitigate issues like this, and sometimes I think the OT group has a responsibility to sit there and say, "Get the concrete shoes off and starting thinking a little bit more forward or whatever." And some people sit there and say, "Oh, the performance isn't there." Or whatever, and it's like, I used to think the same thing until we sat there into the whole manufacturing line and put it on Ignition. I was like, wait a minute, this things, we haven't had an issue with it, and I would sit there and say, “Five years.”

42:28
Don Pearson: Thanks. Craig.

42:32
Craig Resnick: Well, I think what also happened during the pandemic is we would have people that would say that the pre-pandemic, but this data is not leaving the plant, like you'd be in the process control room, and this data stays here. And then when that workforce wasn't in the plant, and that workforce is at home, now they need remote licenses, and all of a sudden they're breaking all the rules for allowing remote data to be at least monitored outside the plant and sometimes even controlled outside the plant. And that's something we would never have seen without the pandemic. The other thing we've seen is that people would say, “You need to have that industrially hardened PanelView,” for example, something that's NEMA IEC rated for shock and vibration, dust, water, moisture, and then all of a sudden you see people walking around with their iPads looking at... Which obviously isn't gonna quite survive the vibration and the shock and what have you from that you're gonna have certainly from an industrially hardened device, and they found that maybe this $1,500 iPad, if it breaks, I'll just buy another one. Instead of buying one that I got to amortize over 10 years, and all of a sudden, it's still running like an 8086 microprocessor because it hasn't been paid for yet and running Windows 2000 or something along the...

43:52 
Don Pearson: Yeah.

43:52
Craig Resnick: So that's what has changed, is the ability to get data outside the plant that wouldn't have happened before and use more commercially available devices rather than industrial devices.

44:04
Don Pearson: Sure. You wanna add to that?

44:05
Jean-Paul Moniz: I mean, he's bringing up a great point too. And especially in the OT space, we've been used to hardware platforms that have 20-year life cycles. And if there's anything that COVID has done, it has shown us that that's not happening anymore, you take a look at, you know, I'll point the Rockwell or whatever product catalogs that... Forget Silver series. They're just gone, like sorry, you're not seeing them anymore. And that's the way the industry is going. You're gonna see a lot of these life cycles shorten up or whatever, and you're gonna design for something that, if you're lucky, hopefully, you'll have a five-year useful life... Technology is changing quick, so I think the best thing you can do is sit there and strategize about what your architectures look like and what you're using, so you can sit there and insulate yourself from that and just swap out components at will.

44:57 
Don Pearson: Sure, good point. We have a question here. Go ahead.

45:01 
Audience Member 1: Hi. As a systems integrator, the other thing that happened with COVID is kind of the great carousel and the great exit. So you guys are talking about a culture of resistance. I'm actually not seeing that so much. More of what I'm seeing is I'm walking into plants, and they don't know what they don't know what they don't know. All that brain knowledge is gone, and now I'm walking in, and people don't even know what they need to be looking for. So could you guys speak to that some? Thank you.

45:35
Dan Stauft: I think the issue from that perspective is, I think that's a good thing 'cause it got rid of the guys that didn't wanna change. Seriously, I think...

45:48 
Dan Stauft: The people that fight the most are the people that are ingrained in their ways, and they're like, "We've always done it this way, and we make money." Well, we can try it a new way and make more money. "Well, we've always done it this way, and we make money."

46:00
Ravi Subramanyan: If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

46:01 
Dan Stauft: Yeah, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. So we actually had some, I wouldn't call it forced retirements, but some of our elder workforce no longer works there, and we're getting a lot less pushback from the younger workforce. From a workforce perspective, I'm old. I'm 53.

46:23 
Keith Weerts: Hey, hey, take it easy.

46:26 
Dan Stauft: But you look at the younger workforce. They're used to technology. I didn't grow up with cell phones. I had a rotary phone. It's easier to sell technical solutions to generations that grew up with the technology that's similar to what we're implementing.

46:45 
Don Pearson: Sure. Anyone else want to comment on that? Remus first and then Ravi.

46:47
Remus Pop: I think, to answer the question, I think just focus on the problem. I think what we've talked about a lot here is they obviously have approached you to solve a problem that they're having. I think one of the things we talk a lot about at Amazon is we're customer obsessed. Just be customer obsessed, find out what that problem is that they're trying to solve, and help them solve it. I think if you start there, I think you will naturally see a progression of strategy and other problems that will come up. Once you solve one there is another one, and another one, and another one. So I think just following that methodology will get you a pretty good strategy.

47:16
Don Pearson: Cool, Ravi, your thoughts.

47:19
Ravi Subramanyan: One of the other factors that's, in my opinion, accelerated Digital Transformation is aging workforce. Either forcibly led to retire or just retired. So a lot of the knowledge, the tribal knowledge of the processes and the machines, is going with them. So Digital Transformation is necessary to capture some of that information that they have in their minds and give it to the younger workforce so they know exactly what to do. If this happens, you do this, or if that happens, do this, that kind of a thing. And Digital Transformation, IIoT, AR/VR technology. The augmented reality, virtual reality technologies can help the workers in the factory floor do things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

48:04
Don Pearson: That's a good point. Yes, Jean.

48:08 
Jean-Paul Moniz: Yeah, I mean, just to hit on that exact issue. I have a friend of mine that's an executive as a contract manufacturer for consumer goods, and they went through exactly that when COVID hit. And so they made the hard choice to sit there and lay off their workforce, and because their market just went straight down, and when they had to sit there and flex back up, and they went to the workforce, they found out, hey, they're not there anymore. And so now we're sitting there trying to run and operate with a whole bunch of brand new workforce and, to your point, a lot of that old school mentality of having the knowledge hidden back in the back corners and not having it, whether it's documented properly or whatever, is a big issue for a lot of manufacturers right now. And so, to be able... Using the lens of Digital Transformation or whatever you want to use. To Ravi's point, being able to sort of cook in the books what you actually do in the digital systems and provide those tool sets to your workforce to enable them to sit there and do what they need to do to help you be successful. I mean, to me, that's the future.

49:15
Jean-Paul Moniz: When I sit there and make commentary about being able to enable our frontline workforce, that's what it's all about. You sit there, and you take a look at five to ten years out and understand what transformations are going to happen with the workforce alone and what their expectations are going to be. And this old game of go ask Joe in the back because he knows where you need to hit it with a hammer or how to tap dance around the equipment. Those days are gone, right?

49:44
Don Pearson: Yeah, that's a good point. Just we have one more question over there. Question over there, go ahead.

49:50
Audience Member 2: Jean-Paul, you mentioned about the five to ten year looking ahead. Question for the group, what are you excited about for Digital Transformation next two, five, ten years?

50:01 
Jean-Paul Moniz: Sorry, can you say that again? I didn't hear the sort of the...

50:03 
Don Pearson: Go ahead and repeat the question.

50:04 
Audience Member 2: I was just going to say, what are you excited about for Digital Transformation in the next two, five to ten years?

50:12
Jean-Paul Moniz: There's actually a whole bunch of stuff that I'm excited about. The first thing is about just merging the disparate sources. If I sit there and take a lens of an industrial mill rate mechanic, or an electrician, or a frontline worker, it's being able to sit there and amalgamate all their information in the one spot. And stop people from having to go over here, go over there to get their information. And then taking that idea and evolving on top of it, using the technologies of mixed reality, AR, and whatnot, being able to give that immersive experience to extend the functionality of digital technologies for those people to sit there and sort of help them get to solutions quicker, better, faster. You know what I mean? So if I'm an industrial mill rate mechanic and I got called because my line's down, I mean, we've already done the OEE thing, and we already know where the problems are. Now I need to go and fix it. Like at the end of the day, lines go down. You still got to fix them. So how do I get to quicker return and uptime and whatnot?

51:21
Jean-Paul Moniz: And so if this is a mechanic that didn't have the experience of installing the line or the training from the OEM or whatever it may be. How do I get them the information they need to be able to sit there and diagnose the equipment as quick and fast as they can?

51:35
Don Pearson: We've got another question here. Go ahead.

51:38
Audience Member 3: Is this on? Yep. So, Dan, this is from you. This is interesting. You said some of the things you did, and I appreciate your honesty and transparency. As a solution provider. This is Aaron Bolshaw from SafetyChain Software. We often enable real-time data visibility and then trending out of the box. But we get a client that disbelieves what they see in the data. So in your...

52:01
Dan Stauft: Surely not...

52:02 
Audience Member 3: That's putting it nicely. They disbelieve... That can't be right. We're running this the absolute best we can, and they truly believe that. So my question is, can you comment on the ways that you showed your team how to use the data for continuous improvement, were there some tactics that you used? Was there some things that you could do that were... That sort of led the horse to water?

52:23 
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so the initial... That continuous improvement project we did, we were making a product for a very large retailer, Costco, that we were failing to hit our metrics, so we went in, and we were gonna fix... We're central office. We're here to help. We're gonna flash down to the plant. We're gonna fix all their problems and etcetera. So when we first put OEE on that line, I wanna say it was running like 28%, and the plant manager goes, "No way in hell, we're running better than that because we're within 5% of our standard." "Your standard is wrong." "No, it's not. That's what it was," And we got the same pushback.

53:03
Dan Stauft: So we said, “Well, give us the best operators you have for that line, so we can teach them how to problem-solve, or we can teach them how to react to the data, and then at the end of the day, hopefully, we'll prove you wrong.” And we were able to basically double the bill of material rate on that line within I wanna say it was four weeks. So as soon as you do the first line and you prove the data is real regardless of what the preconceived notions are of what the data should be, you turn from a push process, where, “We're from central office, and we're here to help,” to a pull process, “I have a problem with another line, can you guys do what you did on that line over on this line?” So as soon as that coin flips you’re golden, as soon as you can prove by giving them value that the data and the processes work. That's the key I believe.

54:04 
Don Pearson: It's a good point. Christine, you have a question. We have back there. Go ahead and stand up and speak.

54:11
Audience Member 4: So it's been my experience that when you talk about Digital Transformation to a company, it really depends to whom we are speaking to. Maybe if you're speaking to a line manager, they just want a notification if a part is in defect, and if you speak to the CEO, you would like to see how that translates to maybe preventing a mega recall, and this sort of ties to what Remus mentioned about the ROI. A lot of small and mid-sized companies, since their profit margin is small, they really aren't sure what's the ROI for data transformation. So my question is, how do you find the correct data transformation problem, and how do you sort of prove ROI? Thanks.

54:48
Don Pearson: You wanna take a shot at that?

54:48
Remus Pop: Yeah, I could start. I think the first thing you have to do is measure the process before and after. I think as a manufacturer, whether you're a small mom-and-pop or a large enterprise, you generally know the cost of goods to build your product. I think if you can see that the data is showing you the more product you build, then the more money you make. So I think having measurables along that process is the way to measure your ROI. Without data, you can't do anything. So that kinda drives the idea behind the Digital Transformation, and to the different levels of the organization, you have to almost model a persona for who you're showing the data to. I think one of the key tenets of what we're talking about with Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 is the idea that we have to deliver the information to the people that can act upon it the fastest. So a line operator, that might be downtime issues or fault metrics or something like that. A maintenance person is gonna be something different than a line supervisor, than a team leader, than a CEO, than a COO. Everybody has different metrics that they're looking for, so I think you have to work that into your solution, is the idea that the persona matters.

55:56
Don Pearson: Go.

55:57
Ravi Subramanyan: Yeah, if I can just add to that. Right, so in the… Identifying the problem is absolutely key, like Remus mentioned. Like, for example, in mining. If your operations… If you have like a downtime that is not predicted, unplanned downtime if you will, it's gonna cost you a million dollars per day to fix it, then obviously that's the ROI. Or, in the oil and gas industry, the safety of your worker there, you want to reduce the number of deaths by one or something. That is an ROI. So those are tangible ROIs. Identifying those things and working towards that is the way you can convince management that this is something that you want to do and adopt it enterprise-wide.

56:35
Don Pearson: Thank you. We got one more question from out there, and then I'm gonna ask a final question. Where is the one? Up over there? Okay, go ahead.

56:43
Audience Member 5: Hey, Don, it’s J.C. I've got a question. You mentioned roadblocks, like the aging workforce, that maybe went away during COVID. As we look, all of us are transforming all of the stuff that we're transforming. How do we ensure that we don't become the next roadblock?

57:04
Keith Weerts: Who is that for?

57:04 
Don Pearson: What's that?

57:06
Keith Weerts: Who is that question for?

57:07
Don Pearson: Well, why don't you… You opened your mouth Keith. Why don't you take it, okay?

57:11
Ravi Subramanyan: You open your mouth then you get the question.

57:12
Don Pearson: I think it's for you.

57:13 
Keith Weerts: There is… You're right, it's very easy to become that roadblock, but there's so much potential with this data that it just seems to be almost limitless what you can do with it, and it really requires listening and talking to the customer and hearing what they're asking for. And seeing beyond what they're asking for because you gotta remember that they can only see as far as their glasses will let them see. So we have to keep ahead of them always and just keep on helping them see what can be, and it's just been amazing. You can just do so much more when you have this data that you couldn't do before, and I especially look at it from the cloud-based approach where we were talking about digital twins and some of the presentations earlier. Boy, you can't believe what we can do with digital twins. What we'll be able to do to predict and help people produce food at a faster rate in a world that's gonna be short of food very soon is a very important thing.

58:14 
Don Pearson: Good point. Yes, Jean-Paul.

58:17
Jean-Paul Moniz: I think the biggest thing, especially for this group and internally, 'cause you sat there and said, and we're the ones sitting there doing the transformation, and whatnot, and then I think I'll pull it from the keynote this morning. There is one thing that I caught on was getting out of the way, getting out of our own way sort of thing. And where I go with that is implementing solutions that keep us aligned with the forward direction instead of implementing solutions that are proprietary or locked off in a corner that nobody understands. You sit there and say, "How does the next generation come through?" Well, they come through understanding common technologies and common platforms. Right?

58:58
Don Pearson: Yeah.

59:00 
Jean-Paul Moniz: And so to me, the answer is, keep it simple and don't do complicated black boxes.

59:08
Don Pearson: To my final question. We only have a couple of minutes left, so, I'm not expecting everyone to answer, but this is called the Ignition Community Conference. So this is a little biased question here, but whether you call it Digital Transformation or Digital Evolution or whatever the term is. How has Ignition, if you can think what stands out the most, how has Ignition helped you to progress in that journey that maybe might not have been as easy to do or even possible to do with other technologies? Dan, you got your hand up first. So, I'll let you say it first.

59:40
Dan Stauft: We could not have possibly done everything that we've done on a different platform. If it would have even been possible, it would’ve required multiple platforms with multiple different programming skill sets to enable us to get where we're at because we're not just doing MES. We're doing app development. We're doing the web dev stuff. It's got nothing to do with the original scope of our project. We just do it because we can. I don't think there's anything else like it on the market.

01:00:12
Don Pearson: Okay. Anybody else? Yeah, go ahead. We’ll start on this end. Go ahead, Nathan.

01:00:15 
Nathan Elmore: Yeah, I'd have to say the universal platform and the unlimited licenses is absolutely key. Working a network as big as ours, we've had to go and work with so many integrators, so many different types of equipment and communication and everything like that, that the universal platform has been absolutely essential. And then, to really accomplish a Digital Transformation, other platforms that we had used had limitations of how many people or what could be done. And now we can give it to everybody in the network. Everybody from the lowest level all the way up to the CEO.

01:00:47 
Don Pearson: That's great. Appreciate that. Okay, Ravi, your answer.

01:00:49 
Ravi Subramanyan: It was well put in the keynote. It's not just about a SCADA system. It's about a digital journey. It's about a digital platform that Ignition provides. That allows people to develop applications to develop solutions that will help the customer. So Ignition has provided the platform that allows people to think outside the box and solve problems that in the past could not be solved.

01:01:13 
Don Pearson: Cool.

01:01:14
Remus Pop: I think too...

01:01:15
Don Pearson: Yes.

01:01:15
Remus Pop: I'll be really quick. For me, it was the barrier to entry. It removed that barrier. I didn't have to spend $100,000 on a software product to begin doing Digital Transformation. It was there, it was free to download, and you could just get it.

01:01:29 
Don Pearson: Any others? Anything you wanted to say, Keith, and then I'll go to you Jean-Paul.

01:01:34
Keith Weerts: I will tell you that’s how I got into Ignition. So, in 2010, like a lot of the other people in here, it was easy to do. I was battling Rockwell Historian, couldn't stand it, and I found this tool, and I said, "Wow! This is great." And it didn't take me any money to try it out. And then I went to the customer and said, "You should do this." And they said, "Yeah, we'll do it." And that was it. It was so easy to get started, just like Dan had with his management.

01:02:00 
Dan Stauft: So why don’t you at Blentech have PanelViews on them that we've got?

01:02:03 
Keith Weerts: Because I didn't join them until 2007.

01:02:05 
Don Pearson: So that's good. Keith, I appreciate it. I just wanna say a shout-out to our CEO, Steve Hechtman who wanted something that was easy, fun, and affordable. So you found that to be true. That's good. Alright, anybody else? Yeah. Jean-Paul, you had your hand up.

01:02:19 
Jean-Paul Moniz: I think it's more of the same. When I started looking at Ignition in 2010, we were sitting there doing really stupid things. I'll date myself, but we were pulling, using DDE to do OEE calculations in Excel and whatnot. But when we came across Ignition and saw what it could do, I quickly developed an OEE app, and that sold it right then and there. There hasn't been an application that we haven't come across that we can't do in Ignition. And then, I remember when Steve came out with it. Maybe I don't know, four years ago or whatever. About the whole not so much... We're not a SCADA platform, we’re an application development platform. And that's the way I look at it. SCADA is probably the last use case on our list.

01:03:03 
Don Pearson: On your list. Yeah. Any final statements at all? We've come to the end of our time. And I say that let's give an acknowledgement to our panel for a great discussion.

01:03:20 
Don Pearson: So, thanks to all of you. I believe that concludes... You can sort of punch out now and head over to... I think we're heading over to our offices for some food trucks. And let's have a beer. Thanks for a great day.

01:03:39 
Announcer: That ends our conference sessions for the day. Dinner will be hosted this evening at Inductive Automation…

Often, the difference between what you need to know to walk across that stage and get your diploma, degree, certificate, or credential is vastly different from what you need to know to be successful in your first entry-level position. Curriculum and program development happen in vastly different ways, from four-year colleges and universities to technical colleges, to community/junior colleges. How we, as an industry, communicate to address what we are seeing in the field is imperative to providing the engineer of tomorrow with the appropriate skill sets to encourage success. That conversation starts with industry and academia coming together to discuss the topics important to the ever-changing landscape of industrial technology. Join David Grussenmeyer, University Engagement Manager at Inductive Automation, for a panel discussion composed of four faculty members from different educational institutions and learn how their efforts to collaborate with Industry are changing the educational landscape for our workforce of tomorrow.

Transcript:

00:00
David: Alright. Welcome everyone to the virtual ICC X: Xperience and Xplore. This is the Education and Industry Panel: Preparing the Workforce of the Future. My name is David Grussenmeyer. I'm the Industry and Education Engagement Manager here at Inductive Automation, and I'll be your moderator for this session. This session brings together four faculty members from different academic institutions to discuss education in the automation industry through their different programs. We have Josh Hamilton from Conestoga College, Eugene Li from the University of Waterloo, Saeed Farahani from Cleveland State University, and Jeff Rankinen from Pennsylvania College of Technology. This will be a panel discussion in which I'll be leading our guest with some questions over the next 35 minutes or so, and we'll have a follow up Q&A afterwards that will last for about 10 minutes. With all that being said, I would like for our panelists to provide introductions, if each of you can give your title, your academic institution you're representing, and a brief overview of the program that you work with, I think that'll give our audience a good start to the session. Josh, why don't you go ahead and take us away?

01:12
Josh: Absolutely. Hi, I'm Josh Hamilton, thanks David. I am the Coordinator and Professor, the Electro-Mechanical and Automation Maintenance Program at Conestoga College in Ontario, Canada. Our program focuses on mechatronic skill sets at the skilled trades level, so really bringing up that holistic approach to industrial automation equipment, how we develop the skilled trades workers of the future and bring them into the new age technologies. Our graduates graduate with four years of trade school completed with lots of knowledge on robots and PLCs. So we're excited to be a part of this discussion.

01:48
David: Awesome. Perfect. Eugene, why don't you go ahead and go next.

01:51
Eugene: Yeah. Thanks, David. So my name is Eugene Li, I'm an Instructor at the University of Waterloo and the head of our engineering teaching staff group. So the program I'm attached to is the Mechatronics Program. So in our department, we had the Mechanical and Mechatronics Programs, which I'm involved in both, but specifically I get involved in all of the stuff through teaching our fourth-year mechatronics technical electives. So in that kind of realm we teach the students about Industry 4.0 and how they can apply their Mechatronics degrees to that field. We have undergraduate, graduate programs of which we are producing our next generation of mechanical mechatronics engineers.

02:34
David: Awesome. Saeed?

02:37
Saeed: Yeah. Thank you, David. My name is Saeed Farahani. I'm Assistant Professor at Mechanical Engineering Department of Cleveland State University, Ohio, USA. And basically I'm doing research and offering courses relevant to smart manufacturing, particularly my research and educational activities around two basically tracks of hybrid manufacturing and network manufacturing systems.

03:15 
David: Great. And bring us home, Jeff.

03:19
Jeff: Okay. I'm Jeff Rankinen. I teach at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. I'm an Associate Professor, and I teach from the first year all the way to the fourth-year courses. We have a special course in automation engineering robotics. We have another one in mechatronics, another one in robotics and automation. And so in particular, I've been teaching a course in automation concepts, which is a capstone course for bleeding-edge technology. So that's where the Ignition comes in and I've been learning a lot from 4.0 Solutions, technology such as MQTT, Unified Namespace, and so yeah excited to be here. Thanks, David.

04:06 
David: Awesome. Thanks everyone. Let's go ahead and let's bring this in more like a discussion for us. Let's go ahead and get this started. So let's open up the panel with a bit about how industry is supporting curriculum development. I'm sure that each of your institutions have various relationships with different companies. What type of support have you received and how does that influence the curriculum in your program? Why don't we go ahead and start with Josh.

04:37
Josh: Awesome. Thanks, David. Yeah, industry is really invaluable when it comes to what we do as part of our program. Our program does have co-op components to it, so we have students going in and out, working with different industrial partners. So we see kind of that industrial influence from our industrial partners in all sorts of areas, whether it be components, hardware, things that they're looking at, new technologies that they're bringing in and really how do we better develop and support them in the future with everything from bottom-up technologies. So whether it's shop-floor specific, all the way up to state MES systems, advanced robotics.

05:15
Josh: So having our students be able to play in and out of those fields has been really, really integral to what we're trying to do. And having those conversations with our industrial partners and different supports that we receive. There's obviously the financial supports, we love those as well, but really it's that ideas the concepts, the things that they're doing to make their companies better are really benefit us in the educational space.

05:46
David: Awesome. Saeed, why don't you go ahead and follow us?

05:50
Saeed: Well, yeah. So beside those common engineering tools that we all will see in every academic institutions. I'm recently seeing more basically support from industry that are offering more specific and real-world engineering tools, particularly such as, Inductive Automation and Ignition, so that is great instead of seeing those like, as I said, very typical engineering tools such as like SolidWorks or MATLAB. We are seeing more specific software and engineering tools. Also, I'm seeing good support from industry by donating or borrowing or putting equipment as a consignment or their hardware. So it's good. So the support is not only limited to the software and basically modeling tools. Also, we are seeing some support by providing equipment and hardware.

06:56
Saeed: Also, I'm seeing basically some interesting industry in being engaged in mutual research and educational activity. Again, Inductive Automation is a good example of such, kind of companies that at least in my case, we have worked with them also in research and education. And I think that brought new opportunity for us in terms of updating our course content and also motivating students for learning because they realize that they can see the relevance of the conventional or basically or classical content to new technologies to real-world engineering problems and also, such kind of experience will help them to better find job in future and find better position in the future.

08:00
Jeff: Yeah. Good. Yeah. At Penn College we get tremendous support. Well in Inductive Automation of course with the University Engagement [Program]. That was probably when I was transitioned or basically asked to teach this Automation Concepts class. David was able to offer this licenses and then 'cause that's been great. Canary Labs, we have licenses from Canary Lab for their historian, Tatsoft has given us licenses. Cogent DataHub recently gave us licenses. Probably gonna hit up HighByte as well. So I think that's gonna round out most of the software. I think for our advanced Industry 4.0 offerings. And as far as internships, we have a company MDI Advantage, David probably is familiar with that company I think. They're one of the top Ignition retailers or users. We have multiple students in summer co-op jobs. I mean, after one year of two semesters, right? Since we teach a lot of the technology in the first year, MDI Advantage has taken some of our students to work on Amazon warehouse projects. Not so much really advanced automation but they're, our students are getting internships after just two semesters, which is really cool. They're getting that on-the-job experience.

09:29 
Jeff: So yeah, we have tremendous support from industry, and I think industry with the high need for our graduates, they're seeing the reason why they need to partner with us, so we can again attract students and then give them the relevant knowledge.

09:45
Eugene: I think that's really cool. We've seen a similar thing at the University of Waterloo, like my colleagues here. We've got, we've had very generous financial support and software support and hardware. But I think the thing that to me is the most valuable is the time that the engineers have spent with us from industry. You know, sometimes when we get into research problems, we'll think about things, we'll think about the scope of it, but then when they come back and they tell us about their problems and they tell us about the scale of their problems and about how many hundreds of thousands of units or just the size of the problem and the magnification of such things, it really hits home. And our students, they... For some reason, when I tell them the same thing, they don't ever listen. But when someone else from another company has been doing it and says it, like, "Oh yeah, this guy really knows what he's talking about."

10:40
David: Right, it always comes that way.

10:45
David: Well, it seems that partnership or the influence of surrounding industries can affect the development of curriculum and particularly what concepts are focused on more. I think this brings up a conversation around depth versus breadth. Can each of you touch on this concept and perhaps how the surrounding industries or the employers of your region influence your decision on depth versus breadth when it comes to particular topics in your programs? Let's start with Saeed on this one.

11:15
Saeed: Yeah. So, to me, I think the importance of depth or breadth depends on the major that we are introducing those new concept or engineering tool as a part of that. For example, I'm introducing Ignition as a part of Mechanical Engineering Program, so and to Mechanical Engineering students. So I think in this scenario the breadth of the topic is more important than the depths of that, because it is less likely that a mechanical engineer works as a system integrator and exactly implement this software in any industry environment. But knowing about all the potential of this software and the capabilities of this software will enable mechanical engineers to take the most advantage of these features in their future role, which is working as a product designer or manufacturing engineers. So that's why, but maybe when you are introducing this software to computer engineers, maybe the depths of the information that you provide them is more important because there is a high chance that they work exactly in this field and they want to implement that directly in their future role. So that's it. Yeah. I guess.

12:54
Jeff: Yeah. Good, good. Yeah. Okay. Well, for us at Penn College, we have an advisory committee that's made up of roughly 25 industry people and lots of alumni, students have graduated, been out four or five years, and then they serve on our advisory committee. And, it's made up primarily of companies within a two-hour radius, which is for practical reasons, it's hard to bring in people for our in-person meeting, which we have, so one of the companies first quality, for example, Allen-Bradley equipment is primary. So that heavily influenced our Rockwell Automation, which we have. So, but on the other hand, companies like Inductive Automation, they give us a bigger, a broader scope of what's the big picture.

13:42
Jeff: So there's other equipment besides obviously Allen-Bradley, you got your Opto 22 PLCs that are more open architecture and kind of have a different philosophy, Phoenix Contact. So we try to keep both very specific knowledge on, because obviously the market share is still held for the most part by Rockwell Automation and Allen-Bradley and Siemens. But we're also, looking at the future, what's coming down the road? We know, Inductive Automation Ignition is one of the fastest SCADA packages being... In terms of growth. So, we wanna make sure we identify that as well. But, so we try to do both, respond to local industry as well as, try to give general architectural type big-picture diagrams to our students. So.

14:35
Josh: Yeah, it's Jeff hit nail on the head there. I mean it's one of those things where you really wanna see what that region has to offer in terms of what's out there. I teach in a two-year program, so our program doesn't have the ability to go depth as much as I want to, in a lot of things. So we are very heavy breadth of things to teach, where we, our focus is a lot on different PLC brands. So our students will come back from a co-op or an internship, maybe work at a company that teaches XPLC, so their entire second year can then be taught on Siemens PLCs or Opto 22s, or Allen-Bradley, whatever they want. So we allow them to diversify in their second year to what they're seeing in terms of that.

15:24
Josh: So our industry partners love that ability of their students to leverage what they learned in their co-op and internships, and then come back with that knowledge. And then we use the Ignition packages to really showcase that breadth of knowledge from everything from HMI, simple basic Vision instruction, all the way up to Jython coding, right? So we can go anywhere in between with that, and just give them those spoonfuls, those little tastes of what's out there so that it really gets their mouth wet and they really get excited about what's gonna, what can happen, and how can they implement that. And I think that's really what's driving a big change, is when you teach students to be excited about what's out there and learn it themselves, you don't necessarily need to teach the depth. They'll find the depth, they'll go into those deep waters themselves. You just gotta get them excited about where those deep waters can really go.

16:21
Eugene: I think that's really interesting because I'm at the University of Waterloo and Josh is in Conestoga College. So regional wise, we're in the same, I think we're within like 25-minute drive from one another. But for our students, because we have a co-op program, which the students start right away and they go to take jobs outside of our region quite a bit. So it's almost, in my opinion that we're doing a disservice to our students if we go too far in depth in one thing. I think that we really need to have that breadth so that they can go anywhere, get any job, just like Josh was saying, and get all those experiences and bring it back. I understand, the Canadian perspective is a little bit different than the ones in the US but, I think that for all of us, we're really trying to create a global engineer that can thrive anywhere, really.

17:12
David: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And I know that's a conversation that I have constantly with professors and whatnot when I'm talking about using Ignition in curriculum, and I'm saying, “Hey, I'm not telling you to not use anything else,” because you need that skillset, right? You're not gonna see just Ignition out there. You're gonna see other SCADA systems, other HMI systems, and you need that global skill package, like you said. Awesome. So let's shift gears just a little bit. And let's talk about emerging technologies. Industry 4.0 is all the buzz, and we have smart manufacturing, predictive maintenance, leveraging AI and machine learning technologies. How do these emerging technologies affect the education front? What do you think is, when do you think it's appropriate to adopt these new technologies into curriculum? And perhaps you can talk a little bit about that process. Let's start off with Josh.

18:10
Josh: Yeah, it's a great topic. Everybody loves talking about the Industry 4.0, the emerging technology stuff. It's definitely a challenge, in my world, where I am, again, teaching a two-year program, I have to really be able to cover those basics, and really get them to understand the fundamentals. But I think it would be a disservice to those students to not introduced some of these concepts, whether or not, again, you get to do a full on projects or explore all the topics. I think it, there is some really key areas where you can, you see kind of these emerging technologies that have some legs to them a little bit, right? For us, we're talking predictive maintenance, right? Predictive maintenance has been around for a while, but predictive maintenance with adding AI and machine learning, different technologies, predictive maintenance using digital twins where we can see how things are looking that way. From a maintenance perspective, there's some huge advantages to that.

19:09
Josh: And I think the key is to make sure that we don't overwhelm students with buzzwords and concepts and ideas, and we really give them the good fundamentals and then give them those branches of, this is where this comes in, this is where that comes in. And really give them that, those, the holistic approach and the holistic idea of where these buzzwords came out of, and really leveraging our industry partners to showcase that, right? We don't have to necessarily show it in school, in lab, but really, this is what this manufacturer's doing. This is where we're seeing these kind of technologies.

19:43
Jeff: Yeah. Good. Yeah. And for us at Penn College again the course I was asked to teach, the Automation Concepts a couple of years ago, I started looking at what material... What was the bleeding edge? And I came across the 4.0 Solutions with Walker Reynolds. And we've been sort of... I guess our approach has sort of been an augmentation-type process where you take existing equipment 'cause most companies are not gonna rip and tear 30-year-old equipment that works. So we take their approach of we're trying to augment we, our traditional fundamentals as Josh says we have to teach that. But we also try to attach gateways for MQTT so you can take OPC UA, convert to MQTT, go to a broker and then they can see the idea of the Unified Namespace. And I'm actually trying to get that integrated within our first year. So I also teach a first-year course in software tools and we're just gonna try to incorporate some Ignition because we teach all for basic PLC. And so it's a nice follow-up to add it onto a SCADA system like Ignition.

21:01
Jeff: So I think that's gonna work well for us. But yeah. And then I got a shout-out to 4.0 Solutions. There's something called a MES Bootcamp where most of you know, MES is kind of a complex layer in automation and the last, this Automation Concept course, 14 students actually got complimentary access to that MES Bootcamp. And that's really most of the material I was gonna cover anyway. Probably 70% was Ignition and doing some MES and machine learning. And so I'm excited that for tomorrow's the first day, now, I told the students that it's a lot of materials like drinking from a fire hose but we'll see how it goes. It's experimental, but this course I'm teaching it's great because it is meant to be on the bleeding edge. So the students understand that. So they're the test pilots so to speak to see how well this 4.0 Solutions training is gonna mix well or not with a normal credit course. So I'm hoping that, for great things. We'll see how it goes.

22:05
Eugene: Jeff, I'm really happy to hear you say that and how you do that because I do it in a very similar ways. So I want, it's nice to know that I'm not alone in doing that. In the course that I teach for example I started off by telling the students we're gonna move towards building in Industry 4.0 industrial IoT device but to know that you have to know how to integrate with everything else exists because like you said, no one's gonna wanna rip up their $10 million or $20 million factory or whatever, right? So I think that that's kind of how I've gotten around it. I motivate the students with, "Oh, here's the carrot that you're gonna get at the end but to get there we have to step through all this other stuff that you might see as old. But for us, we know it's fundamental." We try to do that more in our fourth-year courses where the students have a little bit more tolerance so to speak to the unknown but that's, I'm glad I'm not alone there.

23:03
Jeff: Okay, good to hear me too. I'm glad I'm not alone either.

23:09
Saeed: Wow. Great. Yeah, as everybody said, we will definitely see their influence of this new technological advancement in education and in our teaching material but I would like to talk a little bit also about the barrier of adapting these new technology in academic environment. One of the main barriers is the lack of lab facility relevant to such kind of new technology because in theory we can talk about all this technology but if we have specific lab facility that let the student to basically practice and experiment this new technology and have a feeling of that, that would have a great influence on the level of the learning and transferring this concept and basically getting away from those buzzwords saying that, "Okay, this is the real application of this technology."

24:16
Saeed: The good news is that I'm seeing that academic institution started building such kind of lab facilities. I heard about a couple of lab facilities with the name of smart factories, smart foundries. But so far it was limited to like big universities. And I would like to see that more in other universities like even college-level institution. And this is something that definitely needs industry support because not all the universities have enough resources to build such kind of updated lab facilities.

25:00
David: Absolutely. Great points there. Really great points. And that's something that when I talked to each and every one of you when we first first started communicating that was a big thing with Inductive Automation’s Education Engagement Program is that we want to support you. We want to take some cost off of your table and we want to be able to provide our licensing to the colleges for educational use cases. And I know that that's a lot harder with hardware especially with the supply-chain issues that we've been having. But there are still are those companies out there that see the quality, the ROI on providing that kind of equipment even if it's just to loan out to universities or whatnot for a time period, being able to get people up and running on those is... On those technologies is great. And it helps with that price issue, right? It helps with that budget issue. Awesome. Yeah.

26:08
Saeed: That's great.

26:08
David: So now with these emerging technologies, we're gonna kind of piggyback and follow up on that question. Sometimes these don't fit nicely into the curriculum for traditional programs like Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering but these are concepts and technologies that they will probably see out in the field and I know I think Saeed talked a little about this how... I've seen a bit more of some non-traditional disciplines out there, such as emerging such as Mechatronics and other kind of programs that are kind of a blend of a few different programs to give exposure to a lot of different concepts. How have your academic institutions approached this, or how have you tackled this inside the classroom? And that could be just showing a SCADA system to an ME major or to somebody that might not see it all the time. Right? Let's go ahead and let's start with Saeed on this one.

27:14
Saeed: Okay, sure. Yeah. I guess in short term it's a bit hard to offer new programs, new degree by combining several majors together and perfectly adopting this new technology because it's lots of work developing a new program. But in a short term we can, instead of using basically offering new program, we can update the content of our current curriculum and our teaching material for different courses. For example, particularly about myself last semester I was basically offering manufacturing systems engineering. It's not one of the new courses, it's a kind of classic course in manufacturing engineering. But I basically specify a couple of sessions on special topics and cover talking about Industry 4.0. And I introduced Ignition as a part of that, and I gave them a small project to build a HMI system using the demo data that you are offering in your website. And I receive a very positive feedback from students, they love knowing and learning a new topic and a new tool, as a part of a traditional course, so maybe in a short term that would be a good approach. Instead of totally offering new programs, new degrees, we can update and revise our content.

29:03
David: Awesome. Eugene, you want to kind of jump in on after that one?

29:05
Eugene: Yeah. I think the more I realize this, the more I... The more I see this, the more I realize that I'm very spoiled. I'm very lucky here. So at the University of Waterloo, we have an entire undergraduate program in Mechatronics Engineering. So that gives me the home to have these courses to offer for these courses that are mechatronic space, and they allow us for interdisciplinary overlap. But you know what? It wasn't always this way. Our first graduating class of Mechatronics was in 2008. So we've had traditional programs of Mechanical-Electronic Engineering, and kind of the way that we approached that back then, and to an extent now still, is that we allow students to have Mechatronics option. So if you're a current... Oh, sorry about that. If you are a current student at Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo... I apologize for that. Then you can go through with your Mechanical Engineering degree and you get a specialization in Mechatronics. So by doing that specialization, your third and fourth year, your courses are geared towards mechatronic-based ones, whereas your first and second year, your fundamental, heat transfer, fundamental fluids and everything, but then those ones gives you that chance to really dig into it.

30:23
David: Awesome. Josh, you wanna...

30:26
Josh: Yeah, absolutely. So my program's a little bit unique here in that when we develop electromechanical and automation maintenance, we looked at it from a need of the industry partners, right? So our approach was very different in that we're trades-based, so we have skilled trades there. In Ontario and Canada, we have very specific trades requirements. To be an electrician, you have to perform this much on-job training and this much in schooling and blah, blah, blah. What we took was the idea of what an industry partner would need for a holistic maintenance approach. So, somebody who could do the electrical and do the mechanical and do the programming and do all those supports, we took that and made a program around that. So we actually, our program's about five years old, so relatively new.

31:17
Josh: We combined two trade certificates together, so our students are able to kind of graduate with these two trade certificates. We weren't able to make a unique one because it is government-run. So we've added those together, and then we've layered in these technologies like robotics and PLCs. We're the only trades program in Canada that offers robotics training to a trade... Skilled trades level. There's nobody else that does it. We also offer 30-plus weeks of PLC programming in two years, which is a tremendous amount of PLC programming. We do Vision and several systems. All kinds of really cool stuff that these, that maintenance person going into a highly automated facility will need. And so that's where we take a little bit of a different approach from the engineering side, from my colleagues here, and we roped in a little bit differently on how we can support industry. And our program has been blowing up like crazy, which is great to see. So we're really hoping to leverage that with the government so that they can make some changes on their side to properly recognize some of these new, these emerging things that are happening out in the workforce.

32:18
David: Awesome.

32:23 
Jeff: Yep. At Penn College, again, I'm spoiled, like Eugene and Josh in the sense that we sort of build our programs based on industry need, our advisory committee. So our AER program, which is a two plus two, so students in the electrical technologies, the electronics, we have a robotics automation two-year, and there's almost nearly, almost any technical program can actually transfer into our AER program. And so that gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility. But again, we really do the same way we look at industry need and we build these programs based on need in the direction.

33:05
Jeff: Now we have our traditional BEE, which it's much more difficult to put in some of these new technologies, but where they still get it, 'cause everybody in the first two semesters, they're all the same. So that's why I feel it's important to get Ignition and SCADA and some PLCs in the first year. So if we have BEE students, they'll have at least some fundamentals because most of our employment job offers are in the automation field. And every semester we have room for 237 companies to come in and it's always full. So we have to figure out how to accommodate all these companies. So we just have nowhere near the graduates to meet demand. So and we're just trying to do the best we can, but we know the more traditional BEE students will probably end up in automation jobs, so we wanna make sure they have some fundamentals of PLCs and automation.

34:00
David: Awesome. Sounds like you don't have a problem with placement for students, for graduates, right?

34:05
Jeff: Nope. Definitely not.

34:07 
David: That's a great...

34:08
Jeff: And a matter of fact, for my own professional development, I did kind of cave a little bit. I'll be doing some work for MDI Advantage, they wanna do some Ignition, they wanna have some Vision projects, they want to convert to Perspective. So they've gonna hire me to do some of that work remotely. Yeah. But...

34:25 
David: See, yeah, even you, you're getting in on the work too.

34:29
Jeff: It's a great interface though, because now I can also help identify students that they can do the same thing, you know? So I'm more of leading the way, not so much. So, yeah, I'll get outta the way if a student wants to do the work, but that's gonna be my new role as I guess to try to funnel students to some companies if that's the case.

34:50
David: Awesome. Awesome. Well I think we got enough time for one more topic. So let's jump into here and let's wrap it up after this. So several of these emerging technologies build upon concepts that were, so to speak, cutting-edge technologies a few years prior. That could be five years, seven years, 10 years prior. If those technologies are building on the previous ones, how does the education approach pushing that curriculum down to first, second, or third-year courses, rather than trying to cover all the concepts in the student's first or final courses? Maybe some of you can speak to that. I know that it's been a whirlwind probably for the last 10 or 15 years in the industry in terms of technology. So I was thinking that this might be a good concept to cover. Jeff, you wanna start us off?

35:43
Jeff: Sure. We, and I mentioned what we do already in all years, whole semesters, but we actually, actually push it down even to the 10th, 11th, and 12th grade, high school secondary levels because we have a program called PC NOW where we actually offer free tuition, or free... It doesn't put no cost to high school students that want to take our first-semester courses. And one of those courses is we call the Introduction Engineering Technology. It has a unit on PLCs. So we're actually trying to reach all levels, even our Digital Electronics class where we use traditional dual inline package. We're actually introducing PLC concepts to teach logic, so we're trying to, as much as possible, get some of the newer technologies down earlier in the educational process.

36:41
David: Great. Great. Yeah, Saeed, do you wanna jump in?

36:44 
Saeed: Well, yeah, so again, talking from the perspective of a classical, you know Mechanical Engineering Department, in such kind of environment, this is a bit challenging to push down this new concept and new topics into first year, second year because the challenges that, what are the content that we are going to remove and replace with this new content? We cannot imagine mechanical engineers that doesn't know enough about static/dynamic vibration control, old mission design. So, and those levels, courses are full with these mandatory courses. That's why, again, the only solution that so far was there, and I take the advantage of that, is to basically offer some special topics as a part of those classical courses and introduce students to this new concept in the early academic year. So that is the thing, but maybe for sure gradually when we see that need in industry and we can basically push towards updating, renovating their whole basically curriculum and maybe a little bit reducing those classical content and finding some space for this new content.

38:24
Eugene: Yeah, I think that's a really clever way to do things, Saeed. We've been trying to do similar things to that regard. So for example, if you're taking classic controls course, right? We teach some fundamentals of like a PID controller, but then at the end we add those special topics for us. Like, “Oh, here's an advanced one to kind of pique your interest.” Oftentimes we'll do that with no associate grades attached to it or bonus marks or something that the stakes are low for the student so then they can engage with the curiosity. And over time, as something becomes more prominent and some other technologies start to fade away, we shift that focus. So I think that that's a challenge that we all faced with very heavy curriculums and picking that space is always hard.

39:12
Josh: Yeah. Eugene, you're definitely right there. I mean, it's one of those things where when we try to... You can only fit so many hours in, or else we overload the students and they go, they walk out the door, and that's never what we want to do. So we've done a few different things. We've done a little bit like what Jeff mentioned about down pushing into other courses. So we actually offer dual-credit courses to high school students where they can come in and take PLCs. We have an Introduction to Mechatronics, an Introduction to Robotics course so they can take those and get exemptions from some of our college-level classes. We've also started really pushing down the microcredential idea where we are offering things like Ignition, Advanced Industrial Concepts, Advanced PLCs, as an additional course to what we offer. So, we'll introduce these ideas and introduce these concepts and I'll build a demo out of using Ignition, and so the students can see what it's all about.

40:10
Josh: And if they want to learn more, we definitely try to give them those avenues to explore. And I find that really valuable, so we don't lose them as much as I'd love to put everything in my program, there's only so many hours in a day and I'm only allowed to teach so many hours. So, as long as we can continue to drive that passion, that excitement about what industry gives them, I think that's the key point for me, is to give them whatever appetite we can, there's microcredentials, dual credit, night classes. I've even done stuff on the weekends when I just get excited myself and I'm like, "Hey, let's just do a webinar together," and just come watch me play around with Ignition for a little while. There's some really crazy stuff that we do just because it's who we are. It's that passion drive that we build in what we do every day.

40:56
David: Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome guys. Well, I always appreciate talking to each and every one of you individually and to get you all together in a room and to talk education has been a great pleasure. So I really appreciate your guys' time today. I think we're gonna head into the Q&A session. And like I said, we'll have about 10 minutes in Q&A to wrap up. And then if anybody has any follow-up questions that they don't get answered during that time, they can always contact me and I can put you in contact with one of our speakers. Thank you everyone. I really appreciate your time today.

41:34
Eugene: Yep. Thank you, David.

41:36
Saeed: Thank you.

41:36 
Jeff: Thank you.

41:37
Saeed: Thank you everyone.

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