Resolve To Increase Industrial Efficiency With Ignition

Speakers

Travis Cox

Chief Technology Evangelist

Inductive Automation

Gopinath PS

Deputy Managing Director

BASE Automation

Frank Costa

Manager

Sandalwood Engineering & Ergonomics

Will 2026 be the year that your industrial organization finally achieves the sky-high level of efficiency you’ve been dreaming about? Roadblocks such as legacy systems and fragmented data may have stood in your way before, but the pathway to exceptional results starts with Inductive Automation's Ignition platform.

Join us for our upcoming webinar, where we’ll show you how Ignition software provides new ways to unlock efficiency across your entire enterprise. In this hour-long session, you will learn how Ignition helps you make major improvements, including:

• Simple, secure, and scalable architectures
• Accelerated development and deployment
• Enhanced operational control & reduced downtime
• Data-driven decision-making

Don't let inefficiency hold you back and don’t miss this valuable webinar!

Transcript: 

00:00
Travis Cox: Hello, everybody, and welcome to our webinar. It's called Resolve to Increase Industrial Efficiency with Ignition. So today we're going to examine how Ignition can help increase efficiency in different aspects of your organization. Thank you so much for joining us here today. My name is Travis Cox. I'm the chief technology evangelist here at Inductive Automation, and I work very closely with end users and integrators to help them build their projects, to solve challenges, and to explore the art of the possible with Ignition. I've got two great guests here with me today. They are Gopinath PS, the deputy managing director at BASE Automation, and Frank Costa, the manager at Sandalwood Engineering and Ergonomics. Gopinath and Frank, thanks so much for being here and for sharing your insights on how you see Ignition increasing industrial efficiency. Before we get started, though, can you both take a moment just to introduce yourselves and your company? And I'll start with you, Gopinath.

00:54
Gopinath PS: Sure. Thanks, Travis, and hello everyone. I'm Gopinath from BASE Automation, a premier systems integrator for Inductive Automation. And, we are present in India, in the Middle East, and in the USA as well. We work across tires, automotive, auto components, food and beverage, wastewater, and data centers. Firstly, many thanks for this opportunity, and I'm excited to share our experiences and perspectives on Ignition. For us, it's very much a dream-it-and-do-it platform that lets us go from concept to reality, which is also our company's tagline. Travis, I'll stop there and hand it back to you. Thanks.

01:31
Travis Cox: Perfect, thank you so much. Thanks, Gopinath. And then Frank...

01:35
Frank Costa: Yeah, good morning, everyone. My name is Frank Casa, and I'm a manager in a system integration group here at Sandalwood Engineering and Ergonomics. Sandalwood is headquartered in Livonia, Michigan, with additional offices in both Canada and Mexico. And, we specialize in delivering digital transformation solutions for manufacturers based out of Michigan; particularly, we are in the automotive space. So I've been with Sandalwood for almost 20 years, working as an SI for all that time. And I've been a manufacturer for over 27 years across plant floor, operations, automation, and enterprise integration. I'm really excited to be here with both of you to talk about how to increase industrial efficiency with the Ignition platform we all truly love here at Sandwich.

02:23
Travis Cox: Awesome. Well, thank you both so much for being here and again for sharing those insights. We can talk about how we think Ignition helps, but it's better to hear it from people who are doing it every single day out there. So let's go through our agenda here today. We're going to take a couple of minutes to introduce you to Inductive Automation and our software Ignition, and then we'll get into a detailed discussion about increasing industrial efficiency starting with plant floor efficiency. And we're going to move into data visibility and decision efficiency and then into engineering and development efficiency. And then we're going to talk about how to scale and standardize across different sites and ultimately look at IT and enterprise efficiency. And then we'll cap it off with a final takeaway from our guests, and then we'll have a wrap-up where we'll share some additional resources and answer any questions that you have today. If you have a question, please go ahead and type it into the questions area of the GoToWebinar control panel. We're going to get to as many of them as we can, but if we don't have enough time for your questions, please reach out to one of our account representatives, and we'll be happy to answer them for you.

03:28
Travis Cox: And, just for housekeeping, the recording will be... It is being made and will be emailed to you tomorrow, and the slides will be available on our website. So no worries, you can come back and watch this again or share it with other folks in your organization. All right, so if you're not familiar with Inductive Automation, if you're new here, here are a few facts about us. Our software Ignition is used by 69% of Fortune 100 companies. So it's literally used every single day inside some of the world's biggest companies. We have over 5,000 integrators in our program worldwide, and we have two amazing integrators on our call here today. And we have a highly diversified customer base across all industries with thousands of Ignition installations in over 140 countries. We've been in the industry for over 22 years, and we have over 350 employees both in the U.S. and in Australia in our two offices. We are a software company. That's all we do. We don't do any hardware; we don't do implementation. We focus on the Ignition software platform, and it's a universal industrial application platform for enterprise integration, industrial applications, and much more.

04:35
Travis Cox: It acts as a central hub for everything on the plant floor and beyond. You could build any kind of industrial application with it, whether you need SCADA, HMI, MES, IIOT, or any other type of application that you need to improve your operations. It's web-based, it's web-managed, and it's web-deployable to desktops, industrial displays, and mobile devices. And it has an unlimited licensing model that allows you to continue to add on and scale as you go forward. It's fully cross-platform, and it offers industrial strength, security, and stability. And we're going to explore some of these key features of Ignition here today as we talk about industrial efficiency. So if you haven't noticed, 2026 is almost here, right? We're a week away from getting some time off and having the holidays, and we're all thinking about New Year's resolutions, and I wonder what you think your New Year's resolution is going to be for your factory or for your facility. We'd like to humbly suggest that increasing your efficiency is a great resolution for 2026. And that's what we're going to talk about here today. Improving efficiency may look like a steep uphill battle when you're dealing with challenges like siloed data, outdated systems, lack of standardization, harsh environments, difficult integration and deployment, and so on.

05:48
Travis Cox: But the key to rising above these challenges is leveraging the possibilities of the Ignition platform. As we often say, it starts with Ignition, because it's a Swiss army knife for your entire operation. So let's discuss how Ignition software provides new ways to unlock efficiency across your enterprise so you can have a happy and productive new year. The plant floor is the heart of your enterprise. It needs to run as efficiently as possible. And it's not even a day-to-day effort; it's a minute-by-minute effort. So I want to start here in looking at the plant floor. And my question to my guest here today is, where have you seen Ignition make the biggest impact on plant floor efficiency? Is it with operator workflow modernization, mobile access, alarm response, communication, or other ways that you're looking at it? And so with this, I will actually start with you. Gopinath.

06:42
Gopinath PS: Sure, Travis, thanks. When we talk about efficiency, let me start where it actually happens. The operator's fingertips. On the plant floor, efficiency starts with what the operator sees and does every minute. In most factories we walk into, the operator experience is kind of still fragmented. One HMI for start and stop. Paper for orders, Excel for downtimes, A phone to chase supervisors. None of that helps them make a better decision in the next 60 seconds. With Ignition, we have turned that into a decision cockpit. In one view, the operator sees the current and upcoming orders. The material that must be loaded is live and critical to quality trends with limits and structured downtime capture right where the event occurs. Add energy KPIs on the same screen, and suddenly the operator understands it's not just "Is the line running?" but "Are we running the line well and economically?"

07:40
Gopinath PS: So we embed collaboration directly into that workspace. Instead of leaving the line to find someone, the operator can call the supervisor with the click of one button and ideally chat from within the screen itself. On top of that, Ignition's alarm engine uses rosters as part of the gateway. So the critical alarms just don't blink on a screen; they hunt down the right person either via SMS or WhatsApp or even a phone call based on who is actually on the shift and on call. That's how you quietly save minutes of every incident and start to see a real downtime reduction. So Ignition basically lets us deliver this on the shop floor. Once people see that in action, it's very hard to go back to a traditional panel. Travis, that's how we've been using Ignition to turn the operator screen into a real decision cockpit and quietly take waste out of the operator of every shift.

08:43
Travis Cox: That's perfect. I really love the focus on operators. We all know that they're key, and we are building these applications for them and providing the right data to them. And I know, Frank, you have an important perspective on this in terms of being able to have the right context. So I'll hand it over to you next.

08:59
Frank Costa: Yeah, thanks. And, just to piggyback off of what Gopen was talking about, right. We find a big impact using Ignition for these context-aware HMIs and designing it through Ignition right. So Ignition enables you to create templatized, reusable HMI screens that can dynamically adapt based on things like a scheduled production type, work order, or even the station that is being deployed at. So, operators are presented with only the relevant data for the current job that they're working on. And that reduces, to go with Pedro's point, screen clutter and improves decision-making speed. And we do this by configuration-driven logic, not hard coding the HMIs. So, the screen behavior would be driven by configuration rather than code. So using switches that are stored at the Ignition station, UDT level, database-driven schemas, or even JSON-based files that are saved in the station database. So this approach allows engineering teams to introduce new products or process variants with minimal development and deployment time, which really reduces risk. Right. So, it goes through to reduce training time for new operators, allows for faster diagnosis and resolution, improves consistency across shifts and sites, and again, it allows for better collaboration between operators, engineers, and maintenance.

10:34
Frank Costa: And, we do that using a lot of the inherent tools that are built into Ignition. So, using those standard header and footer layouts with the left/right navigation panel. So that delivers a consistent operator experience across stations, lines, and plants. Right. And we're huge fans of the Flex repeater, so we leverage that all over the place to allow the screens to actually dynamically render based on, again, the product type, station capabilities, or other process variables that have been enabled or disabled at the engineering or process engineering level. And just with these dynamic HMIs that I'm talking about. Right. The enhancement at the fault handling level is a lot of work in the automotive area. Machines will generate faults and they'll generate codes, which is great to kind of explain what the machine is doing, but a lot of it is lacking sort of contextualization. Right. So now using the Ignition screens that resolve dynamically, we can go ahead and add... And augment the operator experience so they can enter in their own comments and their own thoughts when the faults happen. And it transforms the... The fault handling into a continuous improvement feedback loop, and all that data again is Ignition. So we're storing it all in the back end. It helps accelerate the resolution of issues.

11:59
Travis Cox: Yeah, we can't stress how, you know, how important it is to provide the right context to the operators. And in order to do that, of course, that means that we have to get access to the right data and be able to bring that all onto the screen and provide them everything they need at a glance, as you both were mentioning. So that brings us to our next section, which is really talking about data and visibility of that data that you need to have better decision-making. So my question to both of you is, how does Ignition change the way organizations collect, manage, and use real-time data for operational decisions? And that can be across all of the different levels there and stakeholders that are using it. So with that, Frank, I'm going to let you kind of go from there and talk about how you see the importance of Ignition with getting access to data.

12:46
Frank Costa: Yeah, I mean, Ignition excels at rapid state of design development integration and allows manufacturers to sort of move from data acquisition to visualization in a super short time frame. I mean, once connectivity is established, real-time operational visibility can be deployed almost immediately across the shop floor. This is what we kind of call the day one decision enablement. Right. So operators, supervisors, and engineers can start using live production data on day one to help identify bottlenecks, monitor process stability, and validate assumptions about throughput and performance. We had a project where, I'll be honest, I actually forgot to go in and get the license. But we were able to deploy Ignition, hook it up to several machines through OPC UA, and just start dropping in a Tag Historian and some power charts in there. We got that going under the two-hour trial limit and got the license in place before it ever expired. Right away the engineers and supervisors were able to see live data that was being historized. And then we went and started going back and working on visualizations, which they could go back and apply to previous timeframes. It was actually pretty special there.

14:12
Frank Costa: That being said, it's not just machine data that you want to go through and visualize, right? Digitizing the shop floor is some of the low-hanging fruit we like to identify, because it doesn't require the networking to the machines or whatnot, but it gives you such an ROI on your process, right? So when we're talking about digitizing shop floor processes, it's quality inspections and checks, operator sign-offs, confirmations, and process verification steps. So page-per-base or ad hoc workflows are replaced with a guided, enforceable digital process. And when you do that coupling, the floor digitization of shop floor processes with data acquisition and display, right. All that data is automatically aggregated. And you can start applying insights between the shopper processes that you've been digitizing and the actual machine data. And they can be aggregated across products, shifts, work orders, line stations, and basically anything that you're collecting from the shop floor. So yeah, that's my take on that.

15:24
Travis Cox: I love that. I love the idea of that day one decision enablement, right, because that's what we were trying to do with Ignition: be able to let you download it, have a trial period, get it in there, connect to things quickly, build out an application, connect to all the sources, get the data that you need, and ultimately have this iterative platform. Sometimes we don't always know, right, all the data we want to work with or exactly how we want to visualize it or who we want to get it to. But with Ignition we can start out small, we can get those wins and get that day-one decision enablement started, and then have the iterative process from there on. I think that becomes a really important part of it. Now Gopinath, I know from your side you've got some great stories on how you can increase that real-time visibility and eliminate paper and create the proper dashboard. So over to you for this one as well.

16:16
Gopinath PS: Perfect. Yes, Frank. Once we get the basics digitized right, the next layer of efficiency for us is about the truth that you are willing to look at. Many manufacturers we have worked with usually have a very comforting story about the numbers, usually built on Excel or paper. Frank covered the data set really well. Maybe I'll add a slightly provocative example from our side. One plant that we worked with, they were absolutely convinced that their OE was around 85 percent. I told the plant head that there are only two possibilities. Either your team is lying to you or you are to me, and we both agree to test it. So we connected Ignition, computed OE directly from their PLCs, and ran it on a two-month trial license. When we turned it on, the real OE was actually 48 percent and not 85, and the data clearly showed the third shift was dragging the performance down. The entire conversation changed overnight. So it went from "We are probably fine" to "Why is third shift different?" Which loss categories are driving this, and on which lines? By focusing exactly on those hotspots, we moved OE from 48 percent to roughly around 62 percent without buying new machines just by finally seeing the reality in real time in a span of a hundred days.

17:46
Gopinath PS: The second aspect is getting rid of paper. So across different industries we now have over 14,000 digital logbooks implemented using Ignition for operations, for maintenance, and for quality, and wherever possible the values are read directly from the machines into these logbooks. So, the operators, kind of, they're not scribbling and retyping it later into a system. We are actually gearing up to launch this as a package-integrated solution on the IA website soon, as well as the digital logbooks. And, for those customers who want us to build an MES instead of buying an off-the-shelf product, IGNIS is our natural platform of choice. We call our approach the truck-to-truck system. A truck enters with raw materials and leaves with finished goods, and everything in between is tracked on one platform.

18:39
Gopinath PS: From the incoming truck on the way bridge into RM stores to production on the machines, recording the process parameters in the historian, the exact location of the semi-finished pallets on the shop floor, all the way into arrows and final dispatch. Every step is connected and visible. So that means traceability is not just a detail at each step but trustworthy end-to-end from both IT and OT perspectives. And, once you have this clean centralized data, Ignition becomes a playground for analytics. Because the data is structured often around a unified namespace. You spin up dashboards for plant managers or quality or energy teams without starting a new integration project each time. Every new view is just another lens on the same trusted truth. That's where the efficiency decisions start getting faster and a lot less political. Travis, I mean, that's been our experience on the visibility side. Happy to dig deeper if you have more time later.

19:46
Travis Cox: No, that's perfect. Thank you so much for both of your insights on this area. Data is key to decision-making, and at the end of the day, you've got to have a platform you can install quickly, provide the right applications and operators, and get the right data. But all that does have to be developed, at the end of the day, right? There is engineering and development time that goes into these projects, and we know that Ignition is known for speeding up that engineering. My next question for both of you is, what aspects contribute most to faster development deployment in your projects that you have seen with Ignition in your experience building these projects? So with that, Gopinath, I'll start with you. What have you seen from this side?

20:29
Gopinath PS: From an engineering perspective, Ignition lets us move from the custom craft to productized engineering. So at BASE Automation, we have built a substantial library of UDTs, the templates and reusable screens across our verticals, which are the tire, automotive, utilities, energy, and environmental sectors. Each template kind of bundles tax structures, faceplates, alarms, and KPIs. That's our set of industrial Lego blocks. So we call when a new project comes in, right? So we are not starting from a blank canvas. So we assemble from proven building blocks, which are prebuilt. So that completely changes the economics of rollout. Again, I would like to quote an example here: for one customer, we delivered an MES project for a US plant sitting in India in just 14 days. The reason was kind of simple. We have already built and tested the full solution at the India plant on Ignition. For the US site, we reused the same project and just remapped the tags to the local PLCs and adjusted a few plant-specific details. So instead of two big projects, they effectively got one platform rollout. And with Ignition 8.3 coming in with Git integration, the project configuration is now file-based and can live in Git with full version history, branching, and code review that opens the door to DevOps practices as well.

22:01
Gopinath PS: We wanted the DevOps on the OT for a very long time, and with the CI/CD-style pipelines, automated deployments to test and production, and which contribute to the safer and faster upgrades. And there is a culture story attached to our company about Ignition. So when we first started with partnering with Inductive Automation, our OT team was kind of very comfortable with the traditional SCADA. So they saw Ignition as the software team's work, as there is Python and JavaScript involved. And, once they experienced how quickly they could build, reuse, and version projects in Ignition, the internal conversation again flipped. Now, almost every time a new opportunity shows up, the first question they ask our sales guy is like, can we please use Ignition for this? Exactly. That's when you know the platform is accelerating engineering instead of constraining it. Travis, that's our view from our system integrator side.

22:59
Travis Cox: I love that, and I might be a little biased here, but I've been leveraging Ignition to build applications for many, many years now and... It is just the perfect place to start in just building applications, right? Once you experience that, you have that feeling like, why don't we use this for everything? We certainly could. It becomes a matter of what should you take on and what shouldn't you take on? In that way, we could design everything, but what makes the most sense? I know, Frank, that's something that you look at as well from an engineering development standpoint. But let's get your take on this.

23:36
Frank Costa: Yeah, sure. And when we're talking about engineering being efficient at developing your solution, right? We always start with the unified namespace as a foundation, because establishing that UNS, a unified namespace, is critical to creating a scalable and maintainable industrial system, whether it's for an MES or a SCADA or even a standard work instruction delivery system. A UNS and its structure provide a single logical representation of assets, processes, and data independent of that physical device structure. It really creates that model. So UNS aligned UDT design. Right. When we talk about that, we're talking about implementing Ignition unities that explicitly support UNS methodologies. Insurance consistency across sites and facilities, lines, and cells. Again, your machine type and then your machine data. So it's not just the physical sort of SCADA data that you'd be picking up, but also the process data, that metadata that is becoming so much more important.

24:47
Frank Costa: And this allows us to create the standardized data model, and then we can sort of overlay that context of where HMI design is on top of it, because we know where everything is going to be landing, and we can use Ignition scripting language to expose it in a dynamic way. In doing it this way, understanding what your UNS is designing and UDTs that align with that UNS, it helps decouple that data acquisition layer from the visualization. So UNS-driven design allows teams to divorce those layers. So you can have your dedicated teams, your control teams, your electricians, and whatnot working on getting the data up while your visualization and development teams are working, knowing where the day is going to land, they can start Working on screens and front-end components to those standardized UDT and UN layers. Right? And that helps standardize the processing that happens. So this results in a common reusable code base that'll scale naturally as your UNS grows, as you get more inputs into it, right? You just start enhancing that UDT library. And again, the visuals understand where they're at, and they can dynamically start picking up some of the data that's being pushed up there.

26:04
Travis Cox: Yeah, absolutely. Object-oriented design is critical in the computer science realm, and that applies really well here. You could build those underlying resources and reusable UDTs and templates. It can help really speed up development going forward, right? And it takes some time up front, and you have to kind of think about those, but there's tremendous efficiency you get by really thinking about it in this kind of standardized way. And that kind of brings me to the next question, which is we typically start out at a particular line or a plan or a machine, and we're connecting to it, getting the data, and getting the value out of that. Then that blossoms from there. With the licensing being unlimited, you expand to the next project, to the next line, to the next area, and then all, you know, it's across the entire site and in places you never thought it would be. Then you start thinking, how can I leverage it across multiple sites and/or across our entire enterprise? And so, that is something that, as you scale, there are... There can be challenges. And from your perspective, my next question for both of you is, how do you see Ignition helping organizations standardize and scale these solutions across their enterprise? And with that, I'm going to start with you, Frank.

27:22
Frank Costa: Yeah, I mean, we've been saying it; all of us have been saying it right for a while. Right? Ignition provides that platform for consistent structured data ingestion from PLC devices, being able to input any third-party systems. Right? It's basically an IT platform that can talk OT. It's all over the place. It's no secret, right? And this standardization ensures that data is comparable across stations and lines. It's trustworthy for analytics and reporting and reusable for your next project. So when... You might be starting off with an OE system, and you can use that same data and the same principles to go out and create the SCADA or an MES or integrate with the third-party ERP system or any other IIoT sort of initiative you have. And as far as rule-based asset allocations, right. Initial scripting libraries enable the creation of rule sets that can automate your asset creation allocation within the UNs. So you can actually start going through. And we've done this multiple times, right? So new assets can be instantiated and mapped quickly, reducing manual configuration, copy and paste errors, engineering, and commission time. And what we're really talking about is sort of... We've got a lot of IT departments that don't want to maybe expose the designer to a lot of people, but you do need different levels of engineers to be able to create and add and extend the system on the fly.

28:55
Frank Costa: And that's where the sort of real-based asset allocation comes in. Because you can use Perspective to sort of go through and do all that work that's done on the designer side. If you've got your UNS established, you've got those UDT-driven, UDT-aligned, and UNS-aligned UDTs as well as that context of the HMI design philosophy, right? And that just... It just creates a dynamic US UDT-driven visualization. So by binding the visualization components directly to the US components, you get those dynamic dashboards and screens that can be generated automatically. You don't need someone to go through and start creating these screens. And again, if you haven't been using it, use your Flex repeaters because they are used to render asset-based information. Based on that UNS structure and the data sitting down there. It's just incredible what you can do with the UNS, with the UDTs, and a good CF programmer back there.

29:59
Travis Cox: Yeah, I really love that. And this is... I want to highlight this again here because I think it's a really important piece that, right out of the box, you don't really necessarily get or understand that it could be possible. And this—you talk about this rule-based asset allocation, this idea that, in Ignition, you could build tags, you could build UDTs, you could build screens, and you could build it in a way that's very static, but you can also build in a way that's very dynamic. Meaning that you could drive all that configuration, even build a front end, a little mini application that helps you build new sites or new systems very quickly by being able to instantiate or create these things on the fly. It's just a very powerful part of Ignition. And once you see that, it really opens up this possibility of the types of applications you can do with Ignition. So I would encourage everybody from here, if you take one thing away, to look at that and see how that could really help you in terms of real true scale. Not just at... Within one site, but across your entire operation there. Now Gopinath, I know you have some important perspectives on this as well, so I'm going to hand it over to you.

31:10
Gopinath PS: I really agree with Frank on this. So, engineering efficiency ideally sets you up for the real price, right? So which is the scaling and standardization? Most multi-plan manufacturers don't want 10 different solutions. They want, like, one playbook that works everywhere. With Ignition, we deliberately designed that playbook, and we've had fantastic experiences so far. We standardized the HMI layouts and the navigation structure, the OE and downtime definitions, the logbook structures, the security roles, and even project folder structures. One or two plans agree on that standard, and every new plant inherits it.

31:58
Gopinath PS: So operators transferring between plants see familiar screens. Corporate teams can finally compare OER energy without spending weeks arguing over their definitions. Different definitions at different plans. Again, for leadership, this is the efficiency story, right? You invest once to get this architecture, the standards, and the UX user experience, right? And then you reuse that investment across every site. Ignition gives us enough flexibility to adapt locally but again enough discipline to keep everything within a common framework. And once you have the reusable components and the set of engineers who love Ignition, right, you can genuinely do design and deploy many strategies. So, Travis, from where we sit, Ignition is what lets you standardize once and then press copy-paste across the network.

32:58
Travis Cox: I love that. Absolutely. Well, that brings us to the next piece of this, which is once we start putting Ignition out there and deploying it and building out systems and all of that, it especially becomes critical. We've got to manage this; we've got to work with IT for deployment and architecture and management and best practice security—all of those pieces. My next question for both of you is, from an enterprise or IT perspective, what makes Ignition easier to deploy, maintain, and integrate than traditional systems? I know... You know, Frank, you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier, so I'm going to, just for this one, start with you in terms of your take on the IT enterprise efficiency.

33:43
Frank Costa: Yeah, sure. I mean Ignition, it's purpose-built to function as an enterprise-grade IT platform and adheres to all the established IT principles that happen to talk with the OT, right? Its architecture naturally supports all the well-known IT paradigms. You don't need any special skills or control engineers to do anything. It is... It just works. So, you've got your staff coming out of school with CS; they can go through and start understanding and working in Ignition, not maybe needing to know what the floor looks like. And you let those experts go ahead and worry about it. The other powerful thing is it's open; it's non-proprietary. Customers are not locked into a closed system. Right? There is no black box. It's meant to integrate seamlessly with a wide range of third-party systems, right?

34:45
Frank Costa: So databases, MES, ERP, anything that talks REST using the OPC UA or MQTT is just meant to be open about how to get data in and how to get data out. And again, the Ignition unlimited licensing model is usually what brings people in. I'm so glad you guys have kept going with it because, I mean, it just allows anybody to start playing with it. Unlimited tags—there are no limits on clients or screens or whatnot. The only limitation that I've ever seen with Ignition basically comes down to hardware, right? The capacity and what you want to invest on the hardware side before you do the right thing and sort of expand it out into a proper gateway functionality. I know Gopinath's got a lot more to go on that.

35:34
Travis Cox: Yeah, perfect. Gopinath, I know you have a unique take on how you guys are doing your architecture and how you do integration. So over to you.

35:44
Gopinath PS: Thanks, Travis, and I reflect Frank's thoughts as well. So Ignition helps here in two big ways, the way I look at it. Ideally, first is the licensing and platform model. Like Frank mentioned, Ignition is server-based with unlimited tax, clients, and connections per server. There is no per-tag or per-client tax, as opposed to the other platforms in the market. So that means when a plant says, "Let's connect 10 more machines," or "Let's give maintenance and energy teams their own dashboards," there isn't a licensing debate every time. That's why I like to say with Ignition you can dream the architecture you actually need, and then again do it without being throttled by licenses. The second major is the architecture and connectivity. Frank has already covered that extensively. So Ignition connects to almost everything, and it naturally fits into layered and secure topologies as well. So be it—edge gateways, DMZ site gateways, or central or cloud gateways with proper role-based security and auditing that IT teams recognize.

37:01
Gopinath PS: And ideally it plays well with the rest of the enterprise as well. We use MQTT, which publishes clean contextual operation data into the cloud. And we use REST or HTTP or any other connectors; it can integrate with systems like ERP, LIMS, or any other line of business systems. So production and quality data actually flow into the business workflows instead of living in the SCADA silos. So, from an enterprise point of view, again, Ignition is close enough to the machine to be real-time and open enough to feed into everything else. The most important part these days as far as the cyber security compliance, Ignition security rules, the authentication, and network zoning align well within IT best practices, and it plays nicely into the IT infra team as well. And again, like Frank mentioned, it's not a black box on a corner that they have to maintain. It kind of becomes the operations data backbone. Travis, I mean, that's how we are seeing it, and enterprise teams embrace Ignition.

38:18
Travis Cox: No, that's perfect. I love that. At the end of the day it's what I... What's really taken away, what I think was really important there, is we're not dictating architecture by the product. We're fitting the product into the right architecture the customer wants and the way they want to do things and how they want to connect these systems together. And that ultimately is most important, right? So that we could do it the way that makes sense for them, so that they can manage to secure it and ultimately get the most value out of that. All right, so that brings us... We've kind of gone through a lot of different areas of efficiency, right? From the plant floors or data, through scaling, engineering time, IT inefficiency, and standardization. There are a lot of areas that we've explored. But let's look at wrapping this up with one final takeaway, and that is, if a manufacturer's top 2026 goal is efficiency, why should they consider Ignition? Now, we talked a lot about different things here, but what's your main thing for why they should consider Ignition? Gopinath, I'll start with you. What's your final takeaway here?

39:20
Gopinath PS: Absolutely. Manufacturers whose 2026 goal is efficiency should pick up Ignition because it lets them treat efficiency like a system and not an on-time project. It's kind of one platform for SCADA. You can do MES, and you can do IoT. So instead of juggling three products and a lot of duct tape, you get a single modern stack that can actually keep up with how fast the business wants to change. Firstly, it's kind of the licensing, which we covered—unlimited everything. So it means you don't have to argue about whether one more time, one more screen, or one more KPI is worth the license. So you connect what you need and give access to people who can improve things and worry about improvement, not in terms of meters on a license portal. Secondly, on the data side, Ignition is designed to sit at the center of a unified namespace, as Frank also mentioned, pulling in real-time data from PLCs and assets, structuring it, and then sharing it out to dashboards, historians, ERPs, and other third-party systems as well. So that means everyone from the operator to the plant manager to the data scientist is finally arguing about the same numbers, but not their favorite spreadsheet.

40:36
Gopinath PS: And lastly, Ignition is something both IT and OT can live with. IT gets a secure, open, well-documented platform they can own. OT gets rapid development and straightforward integration into the real plant world. For a manufacturer chasing efficiency in 2026, that mix of the one platform, real unified data, repeatable rollouts, and genuine peace between the IT and OT is what really moves the needle. From our side at BASE Automation, the pattern is clear. So when Ignition sits at the center, you move away from one-off projects and build a system that you can keep reusing across lines and plans. And, that's why for anyone who wants 2026 efficiency goals to translate into hard numbers, Ignition isn't just a nice tool; it becomes the backbone of how you run operations. Travis, I'll hand it back to you with that comment.

41:33
Travis Cox: That's perfect, Frank. How about your final takeaway?

41:36
Frank Costa: Yeah, look, if you're focused on efficiency coming, your Ignition hits the mark, right? It brings all your data together in a unified and normalized manner. Get your OT and IT teams on that same page, and it makes it easy to replicate what works across your one line to the rest of your site. It gives you insights quicker, rolls out faster, and scales easier. And it does all this without boxing you into some inflexible or proprietary system. And for us, most importantly, Ignition doesn't ask you to compromise your operations' needs. It's built to support what your operations need today as well as what your operations are going to want tomorrow. I have no words. Ignition is just a fantastic platform that you can use across both your IT and your OT projects.

42:34
Travis Cox: Well, thank you both for all of those amazing insights and the takeaway there and for joining our discussions here today. We really appreciate it. As a next step on your efficiency journey, I invite you to try the latest version of Ignition. Ignition 8.3. You could download it today from the website. It takes a couple of minutes, and you could try it for as long as you want in the two-hour trial period; just keep resetting it. There are a lot of amazing new features in there, like the new Core Historian, the Time Series Historian, and, based on QuestDB that's built in, the Event Streams module to move data around, deployment modes for dev to production and DevOps processes, and a lot of great new tools in Perspective. So you have to come and try it out to see how Ignition 8.3 can help you out. You can also check out the Inductive University, which is our free online training library with hundreds of educational videos to help you learn Ignition at your own pace. There's also a very comprehensive user manual that's online you can refer to any time. So no matter what your experience level is, you can always learn more at no cost whatsoever.

43:38
Travis Cox: For those watching here outside North America, we have a network of international distributors who can provide you business development opportunities, sales, and technical support in your language and time zone. To learn more about that or to contact a distributor close to you, you can see the information here on the screen. If you'd like to speak with one of our account representatives here at our headquarters or in our office in Australia, both of those numbers are on the screen here as well. So with that, we're going to get into the Q and A portion here, and as a reminder, you can type any questions you have in that area, and we're going to try to get to as many of them as we can here. So first actually there were quite a few questions, Frank, that came in about the rule-based allocation that you talked about in that scaling standardization area. And they're just wondering if you could provide more details on that.

44:28
Frank Costa: Yeah, so. Oh, I'm on. Okay. I thought I was muted. When you're going through, we talk about the instantiation of a UNS, and then you have duty keys based on that. Well, when you go through and create those structures, you can go back and say, "Hey, if I'm..." And I'm going to use very simple machines, right? If I'm creating a rundown of stations, I know the type of equipment I'm going to be using and the type of metrics that I'm going to be getting. So you can go through and on your visualization side say, "I'm creating station one, and it is going to be a rundown station," and then you can write the code in the background to start taking those UDTs and start putting them into the tag browser, if that makes sense. Right? So you create a set of rules.

45:14
Frank Costa: They can be... We've used direct code for the rules as well as a JSON-based schema so they can be created on the fly through other systems as well, and they will go through and just basically pick and choose those UDTs that are going to be instantiated under the hierarchy for the station, and they in turn will be referencing back to the UNS that has created the UNS structure, I should go through and say. Now, some of these, when you're going through the rule-based stuff, there has to be some sophistication or some standardization right at that PLC level. So at the very least, you know certain data is going to be landed. It doesn't have to be landed at the exact same maybe tag or address, but in the same sort of area. And then you can use that, the OPC browser, if you're connected on OPC UA, to actually go through and start looking for things that you're expecting. I hope that made sense.

46:15
Travis Cox: Yeah, perfect. If there are any follow-up questions, put them in there for us now. There were also quite a few questions, Gopinath, on the Digital Logbook there, and... If you could elaborate a little bit more about what you did. And they were also wondering if there were any case studies or references where they could see your... What you were talking about in action.

46:35
Gopinath PS: Absolutely, absolutely, Travis. Digital Logbook is kind of one of our most successful projects that we have done across industries. We started that for one of the tire industries, and basically what we did was... We started designing the logbook similar to their paper-based logbooks, and the operators just had to fill like 18 to 20%fill in of the data. All data comes from the controller itself, from the sensors, and from the devices themselves. And the first project, what we did was we were imitating the paper logbook. So we did around 300 to 350 logbooks. So 350 perspective screens our team has designed and again multiple reports as well. And on the second iteration to another factory, that's when our team came up with an idea. Why don't we make it dynamic?

47:32
Gopinath PS: So ideally we gave the power back to the customers, where they can design the logbooks within the Ignition platform itself and create the text boxes. It's like a form that can be linked to what tag and where the data is going to come from. Till that level we have given that flexibility, and we've also created a project where a workflow is defined. So for this logbook, once the operator fills it in, next the supervisor has to approve it. And then whether it has to go to the quality person or not. Till that level, we have created software inside Ignition itself. And that's how we replicate it across the industry. So we don't implement projects anymore. So we purchase a license of Ignition, we load this particular project to them, and they start creating logbooks the very first day when we have deployed it.

48:23
Travis Cox: Okay, perfect, perfect. Thank you for sharing more on that. This final question that was asked is, are there any case studies where you kind... Show off that you. Have you guys done anything with us that shows off any of that or any projects in Discover Gallery? I'm not sure.

48:37
Gopinath PS: I would be happy to share that. So we have a very good presentation with regard to it, and if required, I'll be happy to share. And probably I... It's a good idea to put it on the gallery online on the Inductor site itself.

48:54
Travis Cox: Okay, perfect. Yeah, so for the people that ask that question, go ahead and just reach out to us, and we'll connect you to Gopinath so that we... You can see that, and that is that. That's okay, Gopinath?

49:06
Gopinath PS: Absolutely. Absolutely.

49:08
Travis Cox: Okay, perfect. Perfect. There were quite a few questions here regarding the sort of standards and around data and the... I think this might be more of a general question here, but for you guys, how do OPC, UA, and MQTT really fit into a lot of what you've done? We didn't go into the nitty-gritty of those. Those are two important standards for Ignition. But from your... From both of your perspectives, how are you leveraging those technologies?

49:36
Frank Costa: I'll just jump in real quick. Big fan of MQTT. Right. And we try, when we can, to use that sort as the crux for the data exchange. Now depending on the industries that we work in, there are POCs that will natively start, publishing JSON payloads directly to... Directly to a broker. Some of the older brownfield sites don't do that. So what we do is we will use addition to go through again instantiated UNS. We do whatever we're going to do with it, but we also publish that information, UNS information, down to a broker so that any other system can go through and consume it. Because once you... Once you land it at the JSON object, there... It is consumable by even older IT systems. So there might not be an explicit link or API endpoint that we're using MISSION to push the data to, but exposing it down at that MQTT layer again opens up the data to democratize the data for consumption through other systems. And that includes... There are a lot of ETL transforms; I have to have it. I'm very excited, by the way, Travis. For the ETL stuff that you guys are going to be pushing out.

50:48
Frank Costa: I saw on the roadmap at ICC, which got me really excited, but that's how we get it. So, you could have your SCADA. If a customer wants to see their data in a Power BI sort of thing, you don't have to necessarily grant them access to the back-end database and everything that's going on in Ignition. Publish everything out to a broker, do an ETL, and they can land it in a data lake if they want to do it. If they don't want to do it directly from Ignition. We always try to get them to use Ignition as much as they can. But there's some... There's some analytics tool that other people want to use. Let them use it; let them have the data. That doesn't necessarily have to be facilitated by an API endpoint. Just makes it easier. That's my two cents on it.

51:34
Travis Cox: Perfect. Gopinath, how about you with those standards?

51:39
Gopinath PS: Yes, Travis, in fact, I have a very interesting story about MQTT. Usually we've also had the habit of using MQTT to push data to the cloud. But one of our customers asked us to build an MES, which is completely wireless devices on the shop floor. So we have HMIS on the shop floor, which has to be wireless and has to connect locally to a control system. And there are two sites, two remote sites, which are, I would say, like around 3,000 kilometers apart, two different plants. And we want just to have one single instance of Ignition, which runs the entire MES out of the plants. And what we did is we had the smart HMIs, which were MQTT capable. So I believe we are close to, like, 700 to 750 smart HMIs on the shop floor. And that talks to the remote instance. We installed a broker at each plant, and it talks to the HQ where the Ignition is installed. And it was fantastic. I mean, we did not miss any... I mean, of course, initially there were a lot of hiccups in terms of data transactions and fiddling around with MQTT settings. But now the system is very stable, and we don't miss even a single record of data. And the plant runs 24/7, and we have not shut the Ignition system for almost like a year and a half, and it keeps on running. So, that's a very, very good use case that we take when we talk about MGT on Ignition.

53:15
Travis Cox: Okay, perfect. So I'm going to take this next question. It's one that is for Ignition. And the question is, can you comment briefly on the bandwidth gateway resource requirements between Vision and Perspective, and where do you suggest the internal MES teams apply these architectures? So there's a lot there. But in terms of Vision Perspective, they're both visualization modules for Ignition. Perspective being the newest one that's HTML, so you could open any browser. And there are some differences between Vision and Perspective. But ultimately where everything's going is Perspective and where folks are leveraging that. Of course that does mean there are a few more requirements of the server to launch prospective applications because they're running on the server.

54:01
Travis Cox: But one of the great things that we do from an architecture standpoint is that we could break apart Ignition so you could have a backend server and a frontend server and connect those together. And I know with what Frank and Gopinath have been doing that... Those architectures are commonplace, where you kind of—that's how you scale out systems and become really large, where you can handle more data and more clients. So that's kind of what I'll say there. And if there are any further questions on that, reach out to us. We can; we can certainly answer that more. But just real quick, Gopinath and Frank, is there anything else you'd like to mention on that particular question, just in addition to what I've said?

54:39
Frank Costa: The only thing I'd say, especially for a SCADA or any data acquisition system, is leverage the edge, right? Offload, depending on what you want to look at. I'd rather have a redundant gateway structure with a bunch of Edge deployed than multiple gateways. That's just my take. Push that data processing as far down, as close as the data generators, and use Edge's capability because you can deploy it everywhere. You don't need fancy hardware or software. Just let it process the data, push it up, and then use the gateway for the visualizations and aggregations as required. Those are my thoughts.

55:18
Travis Cox: I love that. So I guess the last question I'll have for you guys, Will... Which is... It's always a question, you know, of whether you're going to get it, which is, of course, talking about AI, which is an important topic these days. And, from an Ignition perspective, we are going to be releasing our EA, or early access, of the MCP module that we demonstrated at ICC back in September. So we're really close to getting that out the door. And if you have questions, you can contact us. We can share more details on that. But from an AI perspective, Frank and Gopinath, how are you guys approaching that? Are you excited about the MCP side? Are you handling it outside, and are our customers demanding that right now? I guess that's a big question, but how do you see this journey going right now?

56:06
Gopinath PS: Absolutely, Travis. I mean, that's one of the most exciting discussions that we usually have. In fact, last week I met a customer who had asked us... So, we're talking about dark factories now, and why are we still talking about SCADA systems? Why does the operator have to look at the screen to understand what's going right or what's going wrong? Shouldn't there be an AI system connected to the SCADA time series, which analyzes exactly what's happening on the machine and gives alerts rather than people looking at the SCADA system? Why don't you bring that AI flavor into the complete application architecture? And he also mentioned it again. I don't want multiple layers of systems like the traditional architecture. So MES, SCADA, and HMI should be in a single platform. And we told him that's where Ignition shines. And we already started working on some of the AI models, of course, with APIs and custom modules, which can be integrated, of course, with the Python libraries we can import natively into a scripting engine within Ignition. We've been playing around with a good amount of AI-based projects, and we are looking forward to the MCP build from IA soon.

57:26
Travis Cox: Awesome. Frank, how about you?

57:28
Frank Costa: Yeah, from our side, everyone's always curious about AI, specifically on the machine learning side. And, we do a lot of coaching, help people understand that some of the… I'm going to put this: some of what's being requested is like, I always think of AI and machine learning as sort of SPC charts on steroids, but they haven't even gone through the work of trying to go through and create like the SVC chart. So we're trying to educate manufacturers to see what you have. You can extend it with Ignition. These are not heavy lifts. This isn't a government project sort of thing. You can implement some of these, realize some gains, and again try to understand where AI is going. To Gopinath, I think it does. It's fantastic. And we've done much; much like Gopinath, we've used API endpoints to push data to local models that are running on LM Studio or Ollama that these customers are working on in the background to sort of get them some insights. But again, we're also very excited about the MCP models. That's something we haven't done. We are looking at it, but again, maybe I'm just old-fashioned, Travis. AI is coming; we get it. But you have to understand where the application actually adds value. And ROI is always that it's what's going to drive everything.

59:02
Travis Cox: 100% with you, and I think that's... That really sums up our discussion today because it's all about being able to provide practical solutions that... And having a platform that you can iterate on and can add in when it makes sense and when it's appropriate, when you have the right use cases. And at the end of the day, all we're trying to do is just make that journey easier for customers. So thank you so much, Gopinath and Frank, for being a part of this webinar. We really appreciate your insights. Thanks, everybody, for attending here today. We'll be back in January with another webinar, but until then, connect with us on social media and see our latest case studies, blogs, and videos. You can visit our website. You can subscribe to our weekly newsfeed email. And with that, happy holidays, everybody. Happy New Year. We're looking forward to an amazing 2026. With that, we'll say goodbye for now, and we'll see you next year. Have a great day.