Say Yes To Any Automation Project With Ignition

Speakers

Travis Cox

Chief Technology Evangelist

Inductive Automation

Binh Vu

SCADA Practice Manager – Ignition

CSE ICON

Kyle Muldoon

Project Manager

Avadine

Pat Smith

Solutions Architect

Avadine

Derek Simonette

Director of Sales

Polaris Automation, Inc.

Jeremy Gibbs

Senior Manager, Digital Solutions, Americas

ATS Global

Have you ever had to say no to a customer’s or boss’ request because the industrial automation software you were using was too limited or expensive? Unfortunately, it’s a situation that happens all too often — but what if, instead, your software empowered you to take on more projects with greater confidence?

At Inductive Automation, integrators and end users frequently tell us how they’ve completed projects with Ignition that would have been impossible or impractical with any other industrial automation software. In this webinar, experienced integrators will share some of these true stories with you. As you’ll see, adding Ignition to your toolset can take you from having to say “sorry, we can’t” to declaring “yes, we can!”

• Discover how unlimited licensing makes ambitious projects affordable
• See how the right software helps you finish projects faster
• Learn about building industrial applications to meet any need
• Hear about real Ignition projects and ask questions

Register now — even if you can’t attend, we’ll send you the recording!

Transcript:

00:01
Travis Cox: Hello, everybody, and welcome to our webinar today, "Say Yes to Any Automation Project with Ignition." I'm so glad that you can join us here today. My name is Travis Cox. I'm the Chief Technology Evangelist here at Inductive Automation, and I will be the moderator for this webinar. Throughout my career, I've been fortunate to work closely with end users and integrators in helping to build their projects and solve challenges. Today, I get to continue to share my expertise through education and awareness and exploring the art of the possible with Ignition. I'm extremely excited about today's webinar because you're going to see projects that think outside the box and explore what is possible using Ignition. So here's our agenda for the next hour. I'm going to introduce you to the exciting panel of guest speakers we have and give you a quick overview of Index Automation and our software, Ignition. Then we're going to dive into today's topic by exploring four projects that show how Ignition empowers you to say yes to any kind of automation project. After that, I'll share a little more information about Ignition, and then we'll devote the remaining time to answering your questions.

01:09
Travis Cox: To submit a question, just type it into the questions area of the GoTo Webinar Control Panel, and we'll answer as many of them as we can at the end. If we can't get to your question today, please reach out to one of our account representatives, and we'll be happy to answer it for you. And yes, the recording and slides will be available after the webinar. Tomorrow we're going to email you the recording, and it'll be available on our website. So let's meet our guest speakers. All of them work for companies that are part of Inductive Automation's integrator program, and they have years of experience implementing Ignition and other technologies. So please welcome Binh Vu, SCADA Practice Manager for Ignition at CSE ICON. Binh, can you tell us a little more about yourself?

01:53
Binh Vu: Yeah, sure thing. So I'm the SCADA Practice Manager at CSE ICON. I've been working with the company for 13 years now, 10 of which have been working on Ignition projects. But most of the projects that I've been working on have been oil and gas projects, primarily SCADA migrations and integrations with SCADA using Ignition. So my current role is to manage our team of engineers and integrators to help out with the execution of all of our Ignition projects that we do at CSE ICON.

02:20
Travis Cox: Thank you, Binh. Next we have Jeremy Gibbs, Senior Manager of Digital Solutions Americas at ATS Global. Jeremy, can you tell us a little more about yourself?

02:29
Jeremy Gibbs: Yeah. Hello, everyone. My name is Jeremy Gibbs, and I work for ATS Global. We're a global systems integration firm with locations in 28 countries across the globe. And here in the Americas, my role is basically anything MES or SCADA or manufacturing operations-related underneath one umbrella. And one of our practices is an Ignition practice. And so we've been doing quite a few projects across the globe over the past few years.

03:00
Travis Cox: Thanks, Jeremy. We have... Next we have Kyle Muldoon, who's project manager at Avadine. Hey Kyle, can you tell us a little more about yourself?

03:08
Kyle Muldoon: Hey, of course, my name is Kyle Muldoon. I've been with Avadine for seven years. Started out just doing the initial SCADA work and just worked my way up. Started doing project management and now in charge of the vertical itself. We at Avadine work to ensure that we have an end-to-end approach. We work with oil and gas, water and wastewater, and many other industries, and we just offer software solutions, and we're here for everybody. We try to be, at least. Thank you very much.

03:36
Travis Cox: Thanks, Kyle. Appreciate it. Next we have Pat Smith, whose solution architecture is at Avadine as well. Pat, can you tell us a little more about yourself?

03:44
Pat Smith: Yeah, thanks, Travis. Hey everyone. My name is Pat Smith, also at Avadine with Kyle. Been in the industry for a long time. About 13 years of Ignition development experience. Previously as an end user at a large oil and gas company in California. When I was there, I led all the projects to replace their roughly 40 legacy SCADA systems with Ignition. We did all that, almost all of that in-house. But we supplemented our SCADA integration resources with Avadine, which is how I got to know them. And I was also the lead developer for the control systems group and the OT architect for the company. I just recently made the switch to the dark side as an integrator and joined Avadine as a solutions architect and am trying to leverage my past experience in operations and with Ignition and as an end user to try to help Avadine take it to the next level as a SCADA integration company.

04:32
Travis Cox: Thanks, Pat. And last but not least, we have Derek Simonette. He's director of sales at Polaris Automation. Hey Derek, can you tell us a little more about yourself?

04:41
Derek Simonette: Yeah, thanks, Travis. Happy to be here today. So I've been with Polaris for about a decade now, and I am the director of sales. Before I did that, I was also an integrator, developer, and engineer for us, so Ignition is very near and dear to my heart. We're happy to be here to talk about the platform today.

05:01
Travis Cox: Perfect. Well, thank you all for being here today and sharing your projects. I know it's going to be very insightful for the audience. So before we get into that here, in case you're not familiar with Inductive Automation. Here are a few facts about us. Our software, Ignition, is used by 65% of Fortune 100 companies, which means that it's being used every single day inside some of the world's biggest companies. We have over 4000 integrators worldwide in our integrator program, and we have a very diversified customer base across all verticals with thousands of Ignition installations in over 140 countries. We've been in the industry for over 22 years now, and we have over 350 employees in the US and in Australia. If you're watching this, chances are that you solve technical problems for a living. Whether you work for an industrial organization directly or as an integrator, you pride yourself on being able to rise to any challenge that comes up. So when the organization wants to start a project to improve its processes or systems, you never want to have to tell them, "Oh, sorry, we can't do that," or "We can only do part of what you want to do," or "Maybe we'll be able to do that someday."

06:15
Travis Cox: That's so frustrating for everybody involved, and it's a lost opportunity for the organization. So why does this happen? Well, many times it's because of a gap in knowledge or skills. The real problem is that the software cannot meet the technical, budgetary, or time requirements of the project that you want to undertake. The problem gets to the heart of why we started Inductive Automation and built the Ignition software platform. Ignition is a universal industrial application platform for SCADA, HMI, MES, IIoT, and much more. It acts as a central hub for everything on the plant floor and beyond. You can build any kind of industrial application with it. It's web-based, web-managed, and web-deployable to desktops, industrial displays, phones and tablets, smart TVs, and more. It has an unlimited licensing model, it's cross-platform, and it offers industrial-strength security and stability. I absolutely love Ignition, and I know that I can use Ignition to solve any challenge that's out there. It's an amazing toolkit, from the breadth of connectivity options to the application-building capabilities, to Python scripting, the SDK, and more. All that allows you to develop fast and iterate and continue to solve problems.

07:32
Travis Cox: In fact, if you know me, I always say, "Yes, Ignition can do that," because I'm confident that I can address any problem, especially with being able to integrate with amazing solutions in the ecosystem. So maybe you're thinking, "That sounds great, but why should I take your word for it?" And that's a good point. That's why we've invited our guests to share projects that were made possible and more practical to accomplish because of Ignition's unique features. Each of these projects is for a different industry, and each one, you'll hear unique and specific reasons that Ignition helped the integrators say yes to the customer's requests. So let's start with Binh from CSE ICON to talk about the first project. So, Binh, I'm going to give it over to you.

08:21
Binh Vu: Awesome. Thank you, Travis. All right, so I want to talk a little bit about one of our Ignition success stories. So this customer approached us asking about using Ignition for their oil and gas SCADA system. So discussion in this project is going to be that we were able to complete and succeed in the migration of one of their assets to Ignition using our Upstream Accelerator. So my role in the project was a technical advisor. I was in charge of providing leadership and guidance to the team of integrators and also assisting as needed. But a little background on the customer. The customer's name is Ovintiv. So one thing, one of the things you might know about them if you don't, is they're a leading upstream oil and gas company with assets across North America. And through some acquisitions, they had multiple SCADA systems that they used to manage the operations of their oil and gas production facilities. So the question for them was they wanted to build an enterprise SCADA system to help simplify the management of all their assets and to handle all the different types of sites that they had in the field. And their question to us was, can you build a robust, scalable, and flexible SCADA system with a responsive HMI to manage the hundreds of sites that they have out in the field?

09:29
Binh Vu: And the answer to that is yes, you can. With Ignition in Perspective, you can build an enterprise SCADA system with the proper development strategy, basically. So going into a little bit of detail on some of the requirements, the task at hand was basically, how do we build a system to integrate Ignition? Well, to basically build a SCADA platform for them. So they decided on Ignition. They needed to develop a flexible Ignition solution that helped them unify all their systems, standardize their data, and also improve efficiency as well. So we're looking for a partner to help them develop a solution, and coincidentally, we at CSE ICON were working internally on an Ignition framework to deploy Ignition for upstream oil and gas customers. So we leveraged our experience in SCADA and the oil and gas industry to kind of build out a standard data model that's scalable and flexible to handle all the diverse facilities they have out in the field. One of the things that our Upstream Accelerator framework has is a standardized tag and folder structure, kind of using UDTs to standardize our folder structure. Also custom metadata tables and views to store all the site and equipment relationships and metadata management screens to help manage all those as well.

10:43
Binh Vu: Some of the things that we also built for the Upstream Accelerator framework were templates for the tabular screens to quickly build overviews and also templates for the detail screens so they can quickly show KPIs for different facilities. So it's kind of a little bit of the groundwork for the Upstream Accelerator that we built for the oil and gas industry. Going ahead, working with the customer. Well, the main goal of this project was to migrate one of their assets from a legacy SCADA system to Ignition to kind of optimize their operations. So the first few steps were requirements gathering and functional design specs spent quite a bit of time gathering information about what their facilities were like, equipment, tags, and worked with them on understanding how they wanted their HMI to look and feel, what the navigation strategy was, and how. And then we basically customized our Upstream Accelerator to match their needs, basically. For their pilot implementation, they wanted us to integrate and migrate five of their central delivery point sites, which are their main facility types that they had at Ovintiv, and they wanted us to migrate that to our upstream data model, basically. So some of the requirements that we had to do, we had to build some custom database tables to store all the relationships between their central delivery points and the wells and tank batteries, SWDs.

12:01
Binh Vu: We needed custom metadata tables to capture those relationships. We also built custom detail screens for each of the facility types. So there are CDPs, or central delivery points. We had to build screens for that, build screens for their wells and tank batteries, and we had to make them templatable. So basically, as they're navigating through all of their different facilities, we'd be able to see them dynamically. So as you're going to one CDP facility, if it's got different equipment than another CDP facility, we didn't want to have to build a second screen for it. There was a single templated screen for each of their screen types to visualize all of them. Also had to build a navigation structure with drop-down boxes to help filter and find the facilities. If you've got hundreds of facilities, it becomes a challenge to basically look and find the data that you're looking for, specifically. So I created some navigation dropdown filters to help facilitate that. And some other requirements that they had were some custom roll-up calculations for dashboard trending. So big overviews on their screen were to kind of totalize and roll up their production numbers and kind of display them on the screen so they can see what the trends were for each of their roll-ups.

13:06 Binh Vu: Moving on. So overall, the completion of the project. Well, actually, let me go back one slide. For the full-scale implementation, after we finished migrating the first five sites, we did go ahead and complete the migration of the remaining facilities. So after the success of the pilot implementation, customers were pleased with the results, and we went ahead and migrated the rest of their sites to the new data model. But overall, looking at the results of the project, we were able to improve their efficiency by letting their users use Ignition to manage their operations. We did end up having better performance on their screens as well, so it was much easier for them to view and trend their data using Ignition as opposed to the legacy system. Development time was saved as well since we've already had some prebuilt screens for them to build their operations, and user experience was improved as well. So it's much easier for them to find their data, navigate to the specific facilities, and view their data. Some user enhancements that we had to build for them as well were some custom themes and custom trending so they can have more customizability for each of the users.

14:15
Binh Vu: But overall the project took just a little bit over three months from start to completion. And the end result was we were able to migrate over 100 of their central delivery points with hundreds of wells and tank batteries and SWDs that were also related to the central delivery points. And that was all done with Ignition. So that's the main goal of it. The next piece is just a couple of screenshots of what we delivered for the customer. So you can kind of see a little bit of the layout that we built for them. So on the level one overview screen, you can kind of get a dashboard view of all of their facilities. Level 2 would be kind of the overviews for all the facilities out of a given route, and level 3 would be the individual assets. So kind of dig in a little bit on some of the screenshots. Taking a look at the dashboard, you kind of see on this side, you can see the navigation tree on the left side, different areas for their facilities. These are routes that are tied to all the facilities, and you can see all the CDP facilities located underneath that.

15:16
Binh Vu: And those roll-up calculations. You can kind of see the trending on it. You can kind of see the basic trend of this particular house kind of trending upwards with a little hiccup here in the middle. So that's the dashboard view. Kind of going, looking to the next level is the well view. So when we're looking at the wells, you can kind of see all of the wells that are associated with this route and then the production numbers as well. Another screenshot I can kind of show you is the dark mode. So dark mode highlights the customizable themes that we're able to give to the customer. So the user is going to save their custom theme so when they load up their screens, they can use dark mode if that's their preference. The next screenshot is the individual details for the wells as well. So you can kind of dig into the wells and see all the associated equipment for this specific well. So you can see, depending on which facility they're at, if a facility doesn't have meter data or some certain piece of equipment, these little cards will disappear and hide dynamically based off of that.

16:13
Binh Vu: And there's a schematic screen as well. So as you're looking through and navigating to each of the facilities, you can kind of see what the basic layout is and some basic telemetry on the well facilities. And then finally we've got a note summary screen. So we built a custom notes functionality to allow the operators to store notes for each facility and kind of view and manage all the notes for their screens for the facilities as well. That's basically about it. That's all we had for the migration product. But overall, the customer was pleased. They were much happier about the navigation strategy, and it was definitely a more modern and robust system that they're able to use to manage their operations.

16:56
Travis Cox: Well, thank you very much for presenting your project there, Binh. It really showcases how to bring disparate data together into a single pane of glass and get that data to all the right stakeholders. And you did that just in three months. It's really incredible to see, especially the screenshots that are coming out of that project. So thank you so much for that.

17:17
Binh Vu: Welcome. Thank you.

17:21
Travis Cox: All right, so now we're going to hand it over to Jeremy at ATS Global to talk about their project. So, Jeremy, over to you.

17:30
Jeremy Gibbs: Okay, appreciate it. So I'm going to talk a little bit about something that might be the other side of the pendulum here. Binh's project was pretty impressive, but the goal here is to say yes to any automation project. So we're going to talk a little bit about a food project that we did. It was a very unique project from the standpoint that the project was actually in progress or had already been, I guess, kicked off. But they lost their internal resources, so their SMEs, other folks that were part of the project, and then their external resources as well. So they came to us and basically said, "Hey, ATS, can you do this?" So a little bit of a challenge here from the standpoint that we didn't know exactly what we were getting into, but we had a chance to sort of view what was there. They had some restrictions on us as far as no unscheduled downtime and no major changes to the interface, and they didn't really have any information on their oven control. So to put this in perspective, it was eight ovens. They had black box control in them; they really didn't have insight into the recipes, they didn't have good information about the system, and they had very, very limited support.

18:40
Jeremy Gibbs: So if they had an issue, they would call in, and it would take them months to get a response, if any. So they said, "How can we do this better?" What can we do? Also, we want to make sure that the platform, the way it is, was kind of built around a bunch of disparate systems pooling together, and they wanted something that was quick and easy, and it was kind of future-proof, so optimization down the street. And then also from an education standpoint, they just kind of said, "Hey, we picked Ignition, but we really don't know this, or how do we even set this up, or what's the best way to do this?" So we were kind of starting from scratch, but with a project that was already in motion. So the theme of this webinar is the ability to say yes. So we knew that the platform that was chosen would give us the ability to say yes even if we didn't have all the details. So some of that breaks down into some pretty simple things. Like, we know that we can give them one pane of glass because of the platform itself.

19:38
Jeremy Gibbs: We know that there's web-based development, so we can just launch them from PCs that were either existing or, if we need to, put some more on the floor. We knew that the black box control probably wasn't going to be an issue because we were going to end up mostly rewriting what we needed to do. What we needed from a recipe management standpoint or from any kind of database connectivity, we were going to be okay there. We also knew that using the platform, we were going to be able to monitor and control the equipment without the need for some of the other additional platforms that were already there. We knew from a change management standpoint, because again, there was a restriction of "don't stray too far from what we have already," that using Vision, we could create a similar look and feel and that that would help empower the workforce there. And then, obviously, flexibility with this platform and scalability were something we knew were going to be beneficial as well. The initial system that they had in place had multiple PCs and multiple licenses. We came up with. We were using Initiative Vision. So why do we use a Vision?

20:36
Jeremy Gibbs: Basically, because it was similar to what they had. We demoed Perspective, we demoed Vision, and they said, "Wow, Vision feels closer to what we're used to." We feel like we're going to be okay with this. We also knew we could put in the right architecture with just a single Ignition gateway with redundancy. It met IT standards and met security standards. They also had legacy Windows environments that were in there that we were able to overcome with this platform as well. I believe, actually, some of it was Windows NT, if anybody on this call remembers those days. And one of the other pieces to the solution was pretty simple. They just kind of said, "Hey, we want to push a button and make sausage, right?" So the goal was, why do we have to go through all of these steps and click all of these buttons and use all of these pieces of software just to simply make sausage?

21:24
Jeremy Gibbs: ... With text files, PLC files, pulling it into a database, and all kinds of different things. But we knew with the inherent controls within Ignition, we were going to be able to take care of that for them. They also had some control upgrades that were going on at the same time. So we also could incorporate those controls into Vision as well. So they could take those damper controls and now make them part of their recipe system. So there'd be dynamic feedback and changes. And of course, the other piece of it is always going to be the people portion of it. So we want to make sure that we're empowering the operators. We took everything that was being done or needed to be done in several manual steps and incorporated them behind the scenes. So their look and feel was still there, but it was being done behind the scenes for them. So they could really simply push the button and do all of the things that need to be done. When it came to recipe edit creation or additional functionality, that was incorporated there as well. So consolidation and simplification is what we were aiming for. This is the end result.

22:29
Jeremy Gibbs: And you can see that there were some recipe tables that used to be their own thing. There were data, alarms, and events that were their own thing. The configuration for the oven itself, meaning the dampers and controls, was also a separate system. So what we did is we were able to consolidate using that redundant pair right there and take them through one single database. So again, there was one single pane of glass that they could look through, and they built in that functionality so that they could simply just use their legacy system. Because again, these ovens weren't the newest ovens in the plant, but they were the workhorses. They were the ones that made the money. So they didn't want to take them down, they didn't want to lose any of the functionality they already had, but they wanted insight into what they could do. And so, with that being said, I'll show you this next screenshot. They're definitely not as pretty as the last one. This almost looks like a carnival threw up on an HMI screen. But the intent was, yes, we can do it. They asked us, please just make it look the same.

23:28
Jeremy Gibbs: We don't want to have to retrain operators. We're already dealing with a small workforce. So the answer is, yeah, we can do that. But what the beauty of Ignition was, it may look old, it may look like a clunky screen from the '90s, but it's very, very modern. So behind the scenes, behind the buttons, there was the capability that just isn't seen necessarily by the operators. But we took that worry away. The change management piece went right away. They recognized the colors. This definitely is not high-performance graphics for sure, but they recognize the colors. They were able to easily do their jobs. The transition was very much seamless for them. And then behind the scenes, we were able to add in some of that modern functionality as well. On some of the screens there in the middle, where they could do a recipe file, and on the third screen down in the bottom right-hand corner, they could do some trending and running reports. They had manual control so they could open and close dampers and see how things were going to work. So we're able to incorporate old and new into this solution for them.

24:26
Jeremy Gibbs: So the end result, as we were saying, is yes equals success. So we were able to say yes, and we were able to successfully take this project to completion. A lot of what we did and a lot of what the platform allows us to do is build that trust. We listened, and we were able to come up with a viable product. We were able to meet their requirements not only from the shop floor but all the way to the top floor with some additional reporting and some report outs that we were able to take that data and provide them to submit to the FDA so that they didn't have to do it manually with Excel spreadsheets and things like that. And we set the stage for future improvements for this company as well. From an empowerment standpoint, the operators now had the ability to control and make adjustments locally. They didn't have to call up to a control room, and they didn't have to call the vendor themselves to do different things. We eliminated the need for a real SME, which they had lost. That person that knew all about the things gave them a simple solution for them so that they could feel that they were in charge of that oven system themselves.

25:24
Jeremy Gibbs: Minimal learning curve allowed for faster decision-making because they had the data at their fingertips; it wasn't spread across multiple different platforms. And then, of course, rapid deployment, what everybody is always looking for. So this was it, approved. We had a simple architecture, and out of the eight ovens, when we put the first oven in, we tested it, we ran it through its paces, shook out all the bugs, if you will, and then we were able to deploy the seven remaining ovens in a fraction of the time. In fact, we did the remaining seven ovens in about two days, and they are still up and running to this day, no issues. Although they are calling us back and saying, "Hey, what can we do next?" And we'd be glad to help them out. That's all I have.

26:03
Travis Cox: All right, well, thank you very much for your presentation there, Jeremy. I know this project, to me, showcases a couple of really important points. First, you may not know all the requirements up front, but working with Ignition, you know that you have a platform that's ready for any kind of challenge that's out there. Secondly, it shows how to really leverage SQL databases for more than just history. You could easily build robust recipe systems and store configuration. There's so much you can do with just Ignition and an SQL database. Again, thanks, Jeremy, for that amazing project. Next up, we have the project from Avadine. So I'm going to hand it over to both Pat and Kyle at Avadine. So Pat, over to you. I think you're starting out there.

26:46
Pat Smith: Yep, I'm starting out. I'll hand it over to Kyle in a second, so thanks, Travis. So, yeah, this project was for the government, so we don't have any pictures we can share, but it's such a cool project, we think. I'm hopeful that sharing about it, just sharing about it, will be enough reason for why Ignition can help you say yes to any automation project. So from fragmented BDAs to a single pane of glass with Ignition, I know you're probably thinking, what's a BDA? BDA stands for bidirectional amplifier. Not many people know what a bidirectional amplifier is. Police departments, fire departments, other government and first responders all use radio systems to communicate. As we're all aware, and as you can imagine, these radio systems are critical for public safety and emergency response. In the event of emergencies, the ability for first responders to communicate clearly is huge for ensuring the safety of the public and the people in the buildings. A bidirectional amplifier is a device that enhances radio signal coverage within buildings, allowing first responders to communicate during emergencies, even in areas with weak or even no signals. These are buildings like hospitals, high-rise buildings, sports arenas, government buildings, and other facilities where reliable communication is crucial for public safety.

27:56
Pat Smith: And not only for obvious safety reasons, but also because, many times, the installation and status of these devices are typically regulated by building codes, which I never knew until this project. So we were approached to design and develop a monitoring and alarm notification system for Washington, DC. And their 230-plus bidirectional amplifier network for the city. And we immediately knew Ignition was the right tool for the job. Yes, Ignition does SCADA, which we all know. Yes, if you can dream it, you can build it, as the famous Ignition slogan goes. But you can also develop a system to monitor critical radio infrastructure for the capital of the United States, which is pretty stinking cool. And so I know myself and everyone else who's used Ignition for a long time. It's hard to find something you can't do in Ignition. The bidirectional amplifier network for Washington, DC, prior to this project had little to no monitoring capabilities. The operators of the devices detected problems either by visiting the site manually and doing inspections and finding they weren't working or by users reporting poor radio signals. So the goal of this project was to change that.

29:03
Pat Smith: They needed a way to monitor all these BDAs and be notified automatically which ones weren't working before people noticed it all without having to physically visit the site. The challenge was integrating with various BDA vendor hardware. It's not all the same, not being allowed to have any system downtime. These are government and first responder radio systems we're talking about, and we're dealing with tight government budgets. But all three of those were easily overcome with Ignition. So architecture at a glance: we did implement a VPN mesh network using Tosibox that we wanted to highlight that allowed Ignition in the gateway to remotely connect with all of the BDAs over the VPN network. Ignition has the ability to communicate with these bidirectional amplifier devices natively using the SNMP module in Ignition. And then beyond that, it's just the beauty of Ignition we have all come to love. Tags, UDT scripts, alarm notification pipelines, and then visualizing all this live data on the native map component in Ignition Perspective. And here's just a very basic and generic diagram of what I just spoke about in regard to the architecture. But you can visually see how an amplifier on a building is connecting over the internet using VPN technology. Ignition connecting to it and displaying that information on the Perspective application. And from here I'm going to turn it over to Kyle to take over the rest of the presentation on this one.

30:32
Kyle Muldoon: Awesome. Thank you. So I just wanted to do a quick dive on the technical side of stuff so we can kind of talk about how we made this possible. Why Ignition, let us say yes to this project. We were able to create a user-centric web portal that was built entirely within Ignition, leveraging the native map component to enable real-time GPS tracking, status, color coding, one-click shutdown restore functionality for each of the BDAs, one-click remote device portal access, and live KPI dashboards tailored to the end user's priorities. The rollout itself, we executed a six-month phasing process where we, like... Like part of our requirements where we had zero downtime for the existing radio services, and we were able to do that phased onboarding with little to no... with no interruptions and be able to have a high success ratio there. The first biggest thing, like I kind of mentioned earlier, that gave us the biggest yes was the native map component. The visualization of these BDAs was crucial to be able to see the current statuses at a glance of every BDA throughout the system, be able to get a quick health metric, and then also be able to inspect and go to any of those BDAs via that map component and be able to pull up a KPI about any of those devices dynamically.

31:53
Kyle Muldoon: We were able to leverage UDTs and scripting that allowed us to automate the creation of the UDT instances themselves as well as any metadata that would be driving that, which would be necessary for the MAP component, allowing each new device to be fully integrated into the system dynamically. This approach not only made the system evergreen, but it also slashed all of the engineering hours that were originally thought to be required. We accelerated the development via those means, and we also improved long-term maintainability and reduced requirements from the operator side, and you have to get involved in the development of those tags and placement on the screen, stuff like that. That all got removed. The open driver architecture that Ignition allows allows us to drop in Kymera's SNMP module with no friction, no custom coding, or workarounds required to fully integrate there. We have the built-in alarm escalation logic where we have the alarm pipelines that let us meet the 24/7 operational requirements without any third-party services or plugins. And kind of finally is that we were able to utilize Ignition's cloud-ready security architecture to help us satisfy the internal district policies and federal compliance under the FedRAMP right out of the box.

33:06
Kyle Muldoon: So the big wins that we had within the first six months. The results came fast. We were able to go live, and the big gains that we had were that we had the alarm detection time drop from two hours to under a minute, which allowed us to transform how quickly the teams could respond to these outages. Manual site visits... Oh, thank you, Pat. The manual site visits that they had averaged before were about 15 to 20 per month fell to fewer than one, freeing up field resources and cutting off the truck rolls. RF interference incidents were reduced, which had originally happened several times per year. We had none over the course of the first six months. Thanks to the proactive visibility and monitoring that were enabled by the map component and the scripting objects. These wins allowed for early confidence to be built, and the organization really dove in, deploying more of these BDAs throughout, getting them connected, and just seeing it roll out itself almost. And that's pretty much my summary there. Speaks for itself, almost.

34:14
Travis Cox: Thank you, guys, for sharing that project, Pat and Kyle. That is definitely an amazing project, and it really showcases that you could build any kind of application. It doesn't have to be a traditional SCADA or HMI. And here, leveraging the SNMP module that was built using Ignition's SDK, it shows how you can easily extend the platform to do more. And I also want to key in on the fact that you built the application to be dynamic, allowing you to easily connect more sites without having to go in the designer and do any manual configuration. It was kind of plug-and-play automatic discovery as you go forward, which is, it's pretty incredible to see that kind of project being developed. So thanks again for sharing that. All right, so now we're going to turn it over to Derek, and he's going to tell us about the project that they did at Polaris.

35:00
Derek Simonette: Thanks, Travis. So Polaris is one of Ignition's premier integrators. And we tend to work traditionally, where digital transformation in industrial automation and this project is a really, really good example of that. So to set the stage, there was a plastics manufacturer that had a highly manual process, lots of paper travelers, and manual recording of data. The process really required the operators to take a batch traveler to know what they're blending, what they're making, and in what quantities, and then they'd weigh all the information or weigh out all the materials and then report that information down manually. So, as you can see, the system was really reliant on the operators to be accurate. And the client was ready to take their first step into the digital transformation. So, and really the goals were to eliminate all the paper, improve flow, and improve record keeping. So the approach we landed on to modernize the process was Rockwell PLC's Ignition PLC, an SQL-based Ignition Perspective solution. So the overall architecture that we went on or developed with them, we started with the ground with a ground-up approach. The way that the overall architecture needed to function was we needed a centralized server, and we needed to have five individual blending stations, all with a slightly different Perspective client.

36:28
Derek Simonette: And because we needed to grab data from both the OT network and the business network, we had to have a dual network card primary server. So the five blending stations, each one of them was going to have a different look and feel, and we needed to be able to write file access to the OT network or to the business network. Here's a high-level overview of what we actually deployed. This is the topology. We had to be ready to have future expansion. That's what you can see on the left side here. And on the right side, this is what was actually deployed today. There's also a network ring there so that we were making sure the network was very resilient in case anything did happen there. And here's our simplified overview of what the actual Ignition architecture ended up being. So we had a direct connection to PLCs and the database and pushed out to the individual touch panels for the client views. And then we have an additional network connection to the business network. So why is Ignition a great fit for this one?

37:34
Derek Simonette: And a few of the most straightforward reasons were project inheritance, parameterization based on IPs, CSV import and export, and SQL integration and scalability. And probably one of the best time-saving and biggest pieces for us was the ability to use inheritance. So with this framework, we're able to adapt to what we've already developed previously. So we spent several years developing both MES and batching frameworks that really reduce delivery times. And we know that this is a code base that we can really trust. So by using project inheritance, we can extend the projects and meet our clients' needs really, really rapidly. So our clients tend to love it because it shortcuts development time and delivery time, which ultimately will reduce costs. And then we really love it because we know the integrity of our code base stays intact. So it allows us to really extend our... What we've done in the past to cut down development and make things just way smoother for our clients. The next piece that we want to lean into here was that due to the project requirements, we had these... Each of the individual workstations, each of the five workstations, is going to have a slightly different look and feel.

38:51
Derek Simonette: So each one of those workstations all uses the same master screen. So each of the workstations still has the same underlying screen that they're pulling from... But due to parameterization, we're able to show a slightly different look or feel depending on what is actually available there. The way we're doing that is we're actually leveraging the IP of the individual workstation to set those parameters and to drive it forward. And what it does is, being able to do it this way, it creates a really seamless user experience as an operator goes from one workstation to the next. And one of those things that happens to happen on every workstation and has to work the same way is the CSV import. So for... And this was probably the biggest and most systemic shift for them: eliminating those paper travelers. So when we had them in their original state, they had the paper traveler going around giving them all the information, and it was just kind of an antiquated system. So in this digital transformation, the first thing that we wanted to do and make sure that we really were doing was eliminating that paper traveler.

40:00
Derek Simonette: So being able to leverage the CSV files is just a completely big game changer for them. And that's both for the importing of the recipes and the exporting of the batch records. So now when the operator goes to a workstation, they're able to open up the navigation tool, and they go to that shared network location, which is why we had to have that dual network card. They select the file, and they're able to import it. When they import it, we go through that CSV, we parse out all the data and the information that's got all your raw materials, your weights, your targets, and your parameters, and then we'll display that back to them. So through this portion of it, they're able to actually see what each of their individual work steps are through the job number or through the job. And they'll see what all the different batching ingredients are to see what the individual batching steps are. And then we keep track of all that information, so we're keeping track of everything. And then when they're finished, we actually bundle it all back up into another CSV and push it back onto another network location.

41:08
Derek Simonette: Now this is kind of a half step. In the future we are going to be going fully into keeping those batch records in the system, and that is because Ignition plays really nice with SQL. So because we can do that in the future, we're going to be able to leverage more full track and trace and additional Ignition. The fact that Ignition can do real-time monitoring through SQL, all of the real-time historization, is a huge feature that just brings a ton of additional value to our clients and to this client in particular as well. And then one of the biggest reasons why this is such a really good application and why we were able to do what we do with Ignition is because of the future readiness. So in addition, the next step for this client is we're going to be doing a full batching suite deployment. We're going to be managing the work orders and recipes directly in the system. We'll be able to do ERP integration through API backflushing, and we'll have full batch historization in genealogy. So that's just one of the absolute best things that they can do and be able to be ready for Industry 4.0 in that full digital transformation.

42:23
Derek Simonette: So in conclusion, the client was really happy with the results, and we were really appreciative to have another client that we can work with on their digital transformation journey. So the project was a really good example of how the right tools and the right team can really transform an operation and get them ready for that future return-ready state. And I think that is all I have, Travis.

42:45
Travis Cox: Well, thank you, Derek, so much for that presentation. This project is a perfect showcase for digital transformation, right? Getting rid of whiteboards and clipboards and migrating them to a modern application with an SQL backend. And the CSV integration itself is a perfect example of being able to say yes, to be able to do that. If you can get the data in a form that's easy to read and you can bring it into Ignition, you can take advantage of that data and do more with it. So again, thanks for sharing that. I want to sincerely thank all the guests here today for sharing these impressive projects with all of us. There are a lot of other great case studies and testimonials that you can find on our website, but to add a few of my own thoughts, one of our company slogans is "We make software for problem solvers." To take that idea a little further, we also strive as hard as we can to make software that enables you to solve any problem by removing as many limits as possible. So for all the reasons that you've heard here today, I feel confident telling you that the more you use Ignition, the more you'll be able to say yes to the challenges that come your way.

43:51
Travis Cox: If you've never tried Ignition, this is a perfect time. I invite you to download a free trial today and see it for yourself. It only takes about three minutes to download, so if you start downloading it now, it'll be done before the webinar is even over. And then you could use it in trial mode for as long as you want and try out every feature and be able to build an application you could play around with. I also invite you to check out the Inductive University, which is our free training website with hundreds of educational videos so you can learn Ignition step by step at your own pace, all for free. And there's a comprehensive online user manual that you can refer to at any time. And no matter what your experience level is, you can always learn more at no cost whatsoever. Let me extend one more invitation to you all. The Ignition Community Conference, or ICC, is coming up on September 16th through the 18th this year. We are excited to move the conference into its new, bigger venue, the Safe Credit Union Convention Center in Sacramento. If you like what you saw on the webinar today, you'll get much more of that at ICC.

44:53
Travis Cox: Plus lots of networking, a big exhibitor hall, the thrilling Build a Farm competition, and a lot more. I'm telling you we are making the ICC Conference bigger and better than ever, and we're really leveling up every aspect of the conference. So please, we invite you to come. The in-person tickets and livestream passes are on sale now at ICC inductiveautomation.com. I'll be there, and I hope to see you all there as well. So for those of you who are outside of North America, we have a network of international Ignition distributors who provide business development opportunities, sales, and technical support in your language and time zone. If you want to learn about the distributor region, please visit the website on the screen here and/or contact our distribution manager, Igor. If you'd like to speak with one of our account representatives at our headquarters in California, please call the number you see on the screen, and you can also reach our Australia number at the bottom. Let's get to the Q&A section now. And as a reminder, you can type in the questions into the GoToWebinar control panel. And again, we'll try to get to as many of them as we can.

45:56
Travis Cox: All right, everybody, so we're going to ask the first question. There are a lot of good questions that have come in here, but this one's just kind of general. You saw a lot of the ways that we say yes to customers here, but the question was, what would be the best method to convince companies to switch to Ignition SCADA, especially if they'd been using something else for a very, very long time? So I'll throw it out to anybody here on the panel.

46:20
Pat Smith: Yeah, so this is Pat. And so, yeah, I'll start out. I'll let anybody else chime in. So I have a lot of experience with this because at my last company we were with a different product. I won't say the name, but it rhymes with "underwear." And everyone was married to it. And it was. It was hard to change. And so I was kind of that first one through the wall that got bloody that was trying to sell Ignition to the business. And I think for me, the biggest thing is leading with business value and not just the cool geek features that, like us as OT geeks and SCADA geeks, we have fun playing with. It's really about business value because those who can actually make the decisions, those that are signing the checkbook, don't typically always care about the cool features or the tech stuff that we do. So, ROI, cost savings, what are the pain points of the existing system? So with Ignition, it wasn't hard to explain the cost savings. Ignition is far cheaper than the alternatives. And so that was just a slam dunk. But to really look at that and say, what are we spending in terms of licensing, in terms of annual support with our current solutions, what would it look like if we were to switch to Ignition, and what is that cost savings?

47:38
Pat Smith: That's huge for the people who are decision-makers or the people who sign the checkbook, and then the pain points: how many licenses are we having to manage? How expensive are those licenses again? But how many licenses do I have to license everything? Is every tag a license? Is every historian point a license? Is every client a license? With Ignition, it's unlimited, but it's limited with the other solutions that are out there. And a lot of SCADA systems, you're kind of locked in. So, for platforms you're locked in, if I use this platform, I kind of have to use their entire ecosystem. I can't use other things. I can't plug in other third-party solutions or other vendor tools into this or other devices into this platform. And then beyond that, it's then getting to the tech stuff. And those are the things that are easy to speak to, I think, for us. But the big thing for me was explaining the future-proofness of Ignition, the fact that you can easily integrate with newer technologies, with internet protocols, with MQTT, with REST, and with OPC UA. And it seems like that's an obvious thing to say, but a lot of other platforms don't integrate with those things easily or at all.

48:49
Pat Smith: And then my favorite part is Ignition. Like Travis just mentioned, you can download it and install it in a few minutes and run it in trial mode. And the trial mode is... It includes everything. It's not like you get only a few things. It's the whole platform in trial mode for two hours. And you can keep resetting that every two hours so you can download it, install it, and build your entire project without giving Inductive Automation $1 and do a proof of concept and then show your business, "This is what it would look like if we were to switch." And you have zero financial investment until you make that decision. But that gives you the ability to actually truly test it without having to commit to anything.

49:28
Travis Cox: Wow, thanks, Pat. That's a great answer. Does anybody else have anything to say on this one?

49:33
Derek Simonette: Yeah, I'll pile on there, Pat, just a little bit. I think you hit the nail on the head there. But I also think what you have to do a lot of times with hesitant clients is start small and scale up so you find that one niche project that you can do with Ignition that you maybe can't do with those legacy platforms, as Pat was alluding to there. And yet you solve that problem, and then you keep piling on, and eventually you're at a full-scale solution. So I think being... having that ability to start small and scale up typically is a huge, huge win.

50:09
Travis Cox: Perfect. Okay, so let's... I'm going to move up to another question here because there are actually quite a few about this, and there... So in the presentation today, we talked about two different visualization modules for Ignition. We talked about Vision, and we talked about Perspective. And so there are people out there trying to understand the advantages of Vision versus Perspective or understand the difference between the two. I know, Jeremy, in your presentation you talked about Vision there. So I'm going to open up to the group here about just kind of helping people understand the differences and why these two different visualization modules are there in Ignition.

50:42
Jeremy Gibbs: Yeah, so this is Jeremy. I can just start by saying that the way we presented and the way we talked about it with our client is exactly what is kind of pointed out in some of the documentation that's on the Inductive website. It's basically like, what are you using it for? There was no need for mobile applications. There was no need for some of the other things that Perspective brings along. It really was a true kind of standalone, legacy-type situation. They wanted a traditional kind of HMI look and feel, but they still needed some of the functionality that's obviously given by the Ignition platform. So a lot of it just boiled down to what is it that you're trying to do with this? Much like we all ask our clients when we say, "You want data, but then what?" So we kind of said, well, you want this; you want to upgrade. But then what? What were they really looking to do? Anything above and beyond? Not really, but they did need the openness of the platform. They did need to be able to make some connections behind the scenes.

51:40
Jeremy Gibbs: So it was less about the front end or I'm sorry, it was less about the back end but more about the front end. They really want to just kind of be that similar. That's the tried and true standalone SCADA HMI type feel. And that's why we went with Vision.

51:54
Travis Cox: Perfect. I know, Pat, you had... You want to chime in on this one?

51:57
Pat Smith: Yeah, I'll chime in. I agree. I think this topic comes up all the time. It's almost a debate. And I think people think since Perspective is like newer, they need to migrate their Vision projects to it, or if they're doing a new project, they have to do it in Perspective. There's this conspiracy that Vision's going away, or you guys are going to stop supporting it, which has never been stated. I think they're both really good, but they have their pros and cons. But it depends on your requirements. And so, just like Jeremy said, for Vision, like, it's been around longer, so it's more mature. So there's something to be said about that. It's Java fit client, meaning you have to install a client launcher. So that's something to think about. But it's not mobile. Since 7.9, version 7.9 had a mobile module, but moving into Ignition 8, that is now what Perspective is meant for. So it's meant for desktop environments. So if you have no need for mobile, like Jeremy was talking about, then Vision, I think, is a great option. I think it's what you should do.

53:00
Pat Smith: And because of that, it's really meant for the plant floor, like where you need... Where performance is critical, I would say Vision. A few things to know are that in Vision scripts and event handlers, they run client-side, and in Perspective, they run server-side. So that changes your architecture a little bit. So that's something to keep in mind. Another big thing is Local Client Fallback. With Vision, there's an option to go with a feature called Local Client Fallback, which is a really cost-effective way to have failover without buying the full redundancy, without having to have a master and a backup server. If your server goes down, you can dedicate a single client on the plant floor or in the control room that takes over and runs the server functionality and keeps your HMI available to users. That's a really good feature for Vision that people need to think about, not just say, "Oh, I have to go with Perspective because it's newer." But Perspective is newer. It is, I think, "sexier." It's web-based; you don't have to install anything; it runs in the browser. So that's pretty cool.

54:01
Pat Smith: But if you're doing mobile, that's what you need to use Perspective for. Because mobile is available, there's mobile responsive development. You can have one window or all of your windows be designed so that if they launch on a viewport that's the size of a desktop monitor, then it shows a certain way. If it detects, oh, my viewport is this size, it will launch a mobile display, and you don't have to develop two different applications, which is awesome. And I think another cool thing is because Perspective is designed for mobile, you get access to the mobile hardware. Like it detects, oh, this is a mobile device. So it has access to the camera, it has access to the GPS, and it has access to the accelerometer. And you could take advantage of those things and have your application do some pretty cool things with those things on the user's device. And then one thing that I don't think is talked about enough is the fact that Perspective is HTML5 and CSS. Advanced styling with CSS is almost like... There are almost endless possibilities. If you know how to do CSS, you could make your application look so custom. It's like I said, endless. So if the customer is wanting, like, a really crazy look and feel, you can do some really awesome things in Perspective.

55:14
Travis Cox: Okay, awesome. So there were a lot of questions in here about whether we have done projects for different industries, automotive, space and defense, and others. So can we get the integrators here to kind of share what other industries you all have kind of done projects in and how... And also, as a subsequent question, how does Ignition help address the needs and help you get into different industries? Because it is... We have software installations everywhere. What does that mean for you all?

55:45
Derek Simonette: Yeah, I can jump in for the first year. So, yeah, we've done oil, we've done the chemical industry, lots of paint, we've done food and BEV with this, and we've done discrete manufacturing. Lots of chemical industry and discrete manufacturing seem to be very consistent areas where we can apply Ignition or have applied Ignition in the past. So those are just a couple there. I know it's kind of a broad spectrum there, but yeah, the way the platform works is just, it can really adapt to any industry, including med device and some of these other more highly regulated industries like the government folks were talking about earlier. So it just... The ability for the platform to adapt to anything just makes it very easy to get it in pretty much any company and any location in the industry right now. I don't know if the other guys want to talk about specific industries as well here.

56:43
Travis Cox: That's perfect. And we've got time for one more question here, and then we'll wrap up. There were a lot of questions, and there are a lot of great questions for everybody that we're not going to get to all of them. We could follow up with you guys afterwards. But there were a lot about integrating with some newer technologies, like newer time series databases, as well as integrating some kind of AI. What is that role? What are you guys seeing in that role, and how we? We leverage Ignition to kind of get into AI and all of that? So I want to open up to the group here. Is anybody kind of dabbling in time series databases or kind of getting into AI technology here?

57:20
Pat Smith: Yeah, this is Pat again. I'll jump in. So, yeah, I've been a part of a few machine learning and AI projects, and a lot of those platforms are cloud-based. And so speaking to something I spoke to a little bit earlier is the fact that Ignition talks these modern internet languages, protocols, and internet of things stuff, right? So the ability for Ignition to natively store data into its own tag historian means it can store data into other tag historians. You can use that data in those platforms and feed that data into algorithms or AI platforms. But the REST API integration was huge for the projects that I worked on. So that and that coupled with MQTT and Sparkplug B. So the technology that we used for our AI project was Databricks, and it had REST and MQTT integrations built into it. And so we were able to publish data natively from Ignition using Cirrus Link's MQTT modules and publish that data directly to Databricks. And it would subscribe to that data and bring that data in and transform that data and put it into its data schemas for its modeling. Then we also were able to call APIs or have Databricks call API services that we built in Ignition both ways for the REST piece.

58:46
Pat Smith: But yeah, I think, again, it highlights the fact that it's a platform that's looking forward and not just staying in its comfortable space, doing automation the way we've always done it since the '90s and early 2000s. And that has really helped leverage the projects that I worked on in this space.

59:08
Travis Cox: All right, well, that's all the time we have for today, so thank you very much to all the speakers here again, and thank you all for attending. We're going to be back on June 26th with another webinar, but until then, connect with us on social media and subscribe to our weekly newsfeed email. You can also stay up to date through our blog, case studies, and more. There's a ton of helpful content for you to explore on our website, so go check it out again. Thanks, everybody, for joining us today. Have a great rest of your day. Bye-bye, everybody.