On Customer Expectations

Since its launch, Ignition has been called “The New SCADA” and as it continues to be adopted in virtually every industry, it has firmly shifted expectations for price, connectivity, licensing, and more. Hear how, by being customizable instead of complex, Ignition is enabling customers to take the initiative to improve their own systems and create their own resources.

Transcript:

00:00
Keith Gamble 1: A few years ago, clients were really afraid of applications that had custom code and things that were custom. They weren't drag and drop out of the box and you're done. But as Ignition has evolved and the tools become easier to make scalable and customizable without making it complex, it's really driven clients to look for different types of solutions to solve problems that in the past they didn't really think they could solve. It's really driven them to create applications that are much more data focused, that are increasing the data they have access to, how they can manipulate it, how they can provide that to their operators on the floor to enhance their experience, where it's not so much focused on how is my machine doing? What is my machine doing? It's how can I improve what my machine is doing? How can I improve my operator efficiency and experience without having to build something custom complex and heavily unique to just this client?

01:05
Chris McLaughlin: Ignition is a very powerful software, and when our customers use it, we've noticed a change in from the softwares that we used to use. So you put in softwares 10 years ago and it was treated completely like a black box. They were afraid of it. They would ask us to change a single pump or modify the colors on one screen because they were afraid that they would either break it or that they just couldn't learn it, and you put Ignition in there and that changed everything. Companies are creating internal resources just to be able to edit and modify and add to their systems. One really cool example of this is we did a job for Electrolux and we put in an OEE system for multiple lines. Started using it, it was like 15 lines at the time. We went away for a couple months and when we came back they had added to like 10 more lines and they created a whole SCADA side of their solution that was just being used to figure out why that line was going down. And they're like, we solved all these problems, and they did it completely on their own, which is amazing compared to previous systems that we used to develop.

02:10
Bart Mans: So since we are giving those trainings based on applications that we make in-House, we really enable our customers to start working with Ignition as well. We give them a training and they're able to make small changes and such with old fashioned companies, they always put a password on the SCADA, HMI, or MES solution. Of course, we're putting some passwords on, but we are always sharing those passwords with our customers so they can enter it theirselves that enables them to continue with Ignition without us. I don't wanna get calls of customers who ask me to remove a button or move a button a few pixels to the left or to the right or change the color that are really easy things. And then I think customers need to be enabled that they can do that theirselves. And that's definitely what we focus on with those trainings.

02:53
Bart Mans: Customers can do the first easy steps theirselves. If they need assistance, please call us. We are happy to help. I don't wanna put extra costs at our customers for changing simple stuff that they can easily do theirselves. And that also enables us and our customers to create screens and do it as a test. And whenever they need to finalize it, they give the screen back to us and say, "Hey, AT automation, can you make this look professional?" And then we make it professional with nice code and nice UI, and that's how we really work together with our customers. So it's not working for the customer, but really working together.

03:27
Keith Gamble: Clients are also surprised at how easy things have become using Ignition. They'll come to us with a solution saying, "Hey, can we build this?" And they expect it to be some grandiose, giant complex project. And we're like, "Yeah, Ignition could do that pretty quickly. Of course we could do it." And they're really surprised how fast we can build new platforms and how fast we can enhance what they're trying to do. And what may have been an Excel spreadsheet that's been handbuilt and crafted over the last 10 years is replaced over the course of two months with a platform that makes it easy and gets a lot more data out of it as well.

04:00
J.C. Harrison: In the early years. And I think if you talk to a lot of the integrators who've adopted Ignition early, like we did, we spent a lot of times in the beginning just convincing people that this piece of software was real and the price point was so far underneath the competitors at that time. People didn't think it would give them what they needed it to be. And that was a very difficult thing to overcome in the beginning.

04:22
Julio Velasco: that, it was too low and they would say, you need to pump up your prices because they're gonna laugh at you. You know, they're not gonna take you serious because your prices are too. They're used to seeing these massive quotes where the software is almost 50% the cost of the whole project.

04:47
J.C. Harrison: Now, it has completely shifted. We don't have to explain what Ignition is anymore and the price points, It's interesting since Ignition came on the scene, there's a lot of other people out there building trying to build like software with similar price points. And so the end users now expect a less expensive system, one that can pivot with whatever change they wanna make, one that they can connect to their plant floor, to their MES systems, to their cloud systems, to their AI systems. They expect that. And so Ignition's right there with us when we do that.

05:20
Chris Taylor: The biggest impact we've really seen has been in manufacturing where we've done things like increasing productivity and provide information that people really weren't expecting.

05:30
Steven Downer: I think we're seeing a big impact from Ignition in terms of architecture and the way that software is deployed. We've seen definitely the edge architecture have an influence and a desire growing for the kind of features that that provides. We've also seen it go from a surprised, "It can do that?" to now having kind of an expectation for things like the interoperability and openness that Ignition provides with database connectivity, with open protocols, with scripting. And that's starting to become more of a norm or expectation in terms of licensing and cost. We're seeing that Ignition is having a big effect on the way things are priced and licenses are distributed, which, I think is a good thing.

06:22
Remus Pop: I joined Riveron and we started these intelligent manufacturing solutions practice with the idea that we would help customers kind of go through that same journey of deploying Ignition in their manufacturing environments. We'd learned a lot of lessons over the years of how to do Ignition at scale, how to do it effectively, efficiently, how to take advantage of all the tools that are at our disposal and really start to build enterprise solutions with Ignition. So the idea when we started the Intelligent Manufacturing Solutions practice was that we were going to take our background with Ignition, our framework that we had built and help customers that were starting that journey. With everything that's happening with Industry 4.0, I think we understand quite a bit that it comes down really to the effectiveness of the tools that you have. And so with Ignition as that tool and knowing what we do, we felt like we had a really strong position to help manufacturing customers fill a gap in the industry where we saw that there was a lack of understanding of shop floor. So yeah, it was, that was kind of the whole premise of the practice that we started and over the last three years has been super successful.

07:22
Steve Downer: We've also seen, that we've been able to provide features that are asked for and requested that there's never a technological barrier we can't overcome. Generally, whenever someone asks, "Can we do it?" The answer is always Yes, which I'm happy to give that answer to a customer and feel confident that I can do that.

07:43
Courtney Smith: When it comes to the customer, the platform is so customizable that whether we're creating as something as simple as an HMI to as complex as an enterprise or MES solution, there's really nothing that we can't deliver for our clients.

07:54
Steven Downer: Finally, I think the open operability of Ignition is becoming an expectation that protocols like OPC and MQTT and database connectivity are expected.