Inductive Automation Blog

In 2022, Döhler South Africa realized they were reaching capacity in their production facility, an impasse that countless growing companies have reached. The question always becomes: make do with too-cramped quarters or invest in a long-term solution?

Döhler — a multinational company that manufactures fruit juices, compounds, flavors, emulsions, and concentrates — chose the latter for their new facility, which specializes in blending and secondary transformation. Located in Paarl, South Africa, the new plant adds tenfold capacity while remaining scalable. “We had to really plan for the future and really give ourselves the capability to grow,” said Dirk Brand, Head of Engineering at Döhler South Africa. “Not only for the next three years, but for the next ten years.”

Integration for a project of this size and complexity has the potential to become a game of compromise, but with the help of INTEG System Integrators, Döhler South Africa successfully implemented a massive manufacturing system built in Ignition — the unlimited industrial automation platform for SCADA, MES, IIoT, and more — that balances a staggering amount of functionality with an intuitive interface.

Greenfield Development

While the sheer scale of this greenfield project might make some blanch, INTEG viewed this as an opportunity to build from a clean slate. “We could start from the beginning and develop the project like we wanted to, in essence,” said Brian Cooper, Managing Director at INTEG. “On a brownfield project, it's difficult to do that. You've got existing standards, you've got existing equipment, and it makes it difficult.”

While the project requirements remained fairly consistent throughout, on a more granular level there were, inevitably, changes every day. “How we thought it was going to work versus how it actually worked at the end were two very different processes,” said Brand.

“During commissioning, it became apparent how easy it is to make changes on the fly and build new functionality within the SCADA system very quickly,” said Tean Butler, Technical Manager at INTEG.

Now complete, the Ignition system — built from the core combination of Ignition’s Perspective, Tag Historian, and Reporting modules along with Sepasoft’s Batch Procedure Module and the Canary Historian — boasts approximately 1.2 million tags on two gateways, as well as sophisticated batching, navigation, interlocking, and ID generation systems.

Architecture

INTEG originally considered a standard Ignition architecture on a single gateway. However, it quickly became evident that the system — which encompasses around 200 routes, 2,000 phases, and 400 equipment modules for 1,800 control modules — required some additional architectural complexity.

The system features a load-sharing, bifold structure to match the plant’s two sections, each with their own separate gateway, tag provider, and Siemens S7-1500 1518 PLC. The first gateway acts as a hub, running Perspective and housing over 600,000 tags, while the second, a “headless” spoke gateway, has over 500,000 tags. Even with Ignition's unlimited licensing model, a tag count this high requires certain considerations. All of those tags are document text exposed within the User-Defined Type (UDT) structures to allow easy access and increased flexibility with the Siemens PLCs.

ISA 88-Compliant MES

Batching integrates everything in the plant. Using Sepasoft’s Batch Procedure Module as the engine, INTEG developed the MES solution to the exacting standards of the food and beverage industry. “We were quite adamant on using a strict ISA 88 standard,” said Brand.

With an ISA 88-compliant project of this size, it was vital to build the plant according to a set standard, which led INTEG to develop an ID generation system. “The ID generation system was built using Ignition and a database system that helped us to always provide a unique code or unique identifier to each and every single component,” said Butler.

The ID generation system works based on an ownership model to ensure proper interlocking throughout the plant, from general capabilities down to phases, then equipment, and finally to control modules. Because every component in the system has a discrete ID, when an operator runs a batch, the system makes all associated equipment unavailable for any other processes.

Döhler’s plant does not function conventionally via SAP recipes; operators have the flexibility to run batches when needed. Each order comprises several batches as it progresses through the plant, the last of which being the transfer to the shipping truck for delivery. “In order to proceed from one station to another, a batch has to be completed,” said Butler. “One new batch cannot start before a previous batch has been executed.”

Every batch must pass quality control (QC) before moving onto the next process, and equipment must be Clean-In-Place (CIP) before it can be used again. To prevent any batches from starting without proper QC and CIP, INTEG used Ignition’s host of scripting functionalities to implement a sophisticated interlocking system.

“As part of the batching standard that we've developed, we've also implemented a unit state,” said Cooper. “The unit state determines whether the equipment is dirty or clean or being washed or CIP'd, and that is used to interlock specific systems or specific equipment.” The batching system makes cleaning in place exceptionally easy because Döhler can create a recipe to run against the CIP process. The Batch Procedure Module collects this information, recognizing which recipes are linked, and then displays the correct recipe for the operator. This, along with the interlocking that extends down to the control-module level, provides the operator with full visibility of the entire plant from the batching engine.

“Everything is linkable. Everything is trackable,” said Brand. “It really does make their life easier.”

Navigation

Döhler’s staff needed an intuitive method for navigating a system this large and complex. INTEG developed the interface with the simple conceit that an operator should be able to reach any part of the system in three clicks. To accomplish this, they implemented what they dubbed the “breadcrumb” system. “The breadcrumb is an easy way of taking you exactly to that specific area,” said Cooper. “It's developed in a logical way, so if you just know the plant and you know where you wanna go, the breadcrumb would easily take you there.”

This type of quick navigation lends itself naturally to acknowledging alarms. Integrating the breadcrumb system with Ignition’s Alarm Notification Module, INTEG created an easy way for operators and maintenance staff to pinpoint alarms. From the system homepage, operators can simply click on the notification in the header, then filter down through the sections of the plant, following visual indicators to specific areas and process cells.

Alternatively, if operators already know what they’re looking for, they can use the search function. The system follows ISA 95 naming conventions, so by either entering the control module prefix or copying and pasting parameters, operators can quickly scan through the available equipment.

High-Performance HMI

During the commissioning phase, Döhler was unsure whether the plant would have a dedicated control room or field-mounted stations. Ultimately, they opted to forgo a large control room, a decision that greatly influenced the HMI design.

With operators not tied to a central area, INTEG aimed to heighten situational awareness with a high-performance HMI. The grayscale palette reserves color for events or notifications that require immediate attention. “It's easy to build a lot of P&ID pictures and confuse the operators,” said Cooper. “So we developed different layers.” As operators drill down through the layers, they go from overview tiles and simple routes to detailed P&ID-style views, giving individual operators the ability to decide which style works best for them.

“You have buttons and options and menus for everything, but the learning curve was a lot shorter than what I imagined it would be,” said Brand. “Operators pick it up quite quickly.” The Ignition HMI standardizes the look and feel across the whole plant, allowing operators to move from one process to another easily. That flexibility extends to process improvement, letting Döhler add new screens to the Ignition application without restarting or reinstalling the system.

Historical Data And Trending

As with any MES application, historical data and traceability are paramount. Using Ignition, Döhler has complete visibility of their data and the tools to perform root-cause analysis. “It's quite easy now to, within the click of a few buttons, know the exact origin of the problem, the resolution of the problem, and what was done to fix it,” said Brand.

This historical data can also be put to more immediate uses like trending. “We realized that it is necessary for operators to be able to pull up trends easily from the user interface,” said Butler. The system allows operators to access the trending tool from any control module faceplate and easily add values from the same pop-up.

Linguistic Diversity And Symbols

South Africa is host to a huge amount of linguistic diversity, with twelve official languages and at least thirty-five languages spoken in the region. In Paarl and the Western Cape area, there are only three dominant languages, but English — which is used exclusively in Döhler’s Ignition system — would still likely be a second language to much of the company’s staff.

Even without this linguistic hurdle, there is an inherent learning curve for a system with this many moving pieces (not to mention routes for moving those pieces). INTEG sidestepped this potential issue by including symbols throughout the screens to clearly indicate each piece of equipment’s capabilities. “Symbols really helped ease the transition for a lot of the operators,” said Brand. “Something like a mixed proof valve might not be something that's familiar to all the operators, but a picture of a valve makes it clear.”

Maintaining consistent symbols from screen to screen has made it simple for operators to connect the physical plant floor with the representation on the HMI. “The operators picked up on a complex system very easily,” said Cooper. “They, in a short period of time, were able to operate the plant and get product out the door.”

A Communal Success

The success of Döhler’s new facility was truly a group effort. “What really impressed me about the INTEG project team is their product knowledge. The experience with similar plants and similar processes, how proactive they were in identifying potential problems and solving [them] before it becomes a problem,” said Brand.

Likewise, INTEG appreciated the two-way communication during development. As Cooper said of Döhler, “They are knowledgeable people. They gave us feedback and input on control philosophies, on control narratives, and on the methodologies that we used to develop this batching system.”

In addition to technical assistance from Inductive Automation, the project also received support from Element8, the Authorized Ignition Distributor for Sub-Saharan Africa. Butler said, “Any project such as this will encounter technical difficulties, but they had our back all the way.”

With scalability built into the system, Döhler is already looking toward future improvements. “There's almost no limit to what Ignition can offer a client,” concluded Butler, adding that Ignition “makes it easy for developers to express themselves more deeply within the SCADA systems.”

Project Scope

• Start Date: March 2023
• Deploy Date: Phase 1: December 2023, Phase 2: May 2024
• Tags: 1,200,000+
• Screens: 80
• Clients: 7
• Alarms: 6,400
• Devices used:
  • Two Siemens S7-1500 1518 CPU
  • 600+ ASi-Valves
  • 200+ IO-Link Instruments
  • 200+ Profinet Remote IO
  • 70+ Flowmeters and Drives
• Architectures used: Hub & Spoke
• Databases used: PostgreSQL for access control, trending tool and materials library. NoSQL for historical data logged.
• Historical data logged: 30,000

Join us for the next installment of our new series of webinars exclusively for integrators: Ignition Power Hour! The Power Hour is a webinar series covering a range of topics to provide useful Ignition knowledge and insight to the integrator community. Power Hour webinars can include tips and tricks of the trade, educational topics, technology trends, new Ignition features, and more — and are all led by IA engineers and specialists who are experts on the subject at hand.
 
In this next Power Hour, we will discuss Ignition Cloud Edition, and do a deep dive into Pikaview, an Exchange resource that provides a new way to interface with databases in Perspective. We'll also discuss the value of Ignition support plans and upgrade protection.
 
Learn About:
 
- Ignition Cloud Edition
- A Deep Dive into a New Database Interface Resource, Pikaview
- The Benefits of Ignition Support Plans & Upgrade Protection

When Castle & Key took ownership of the long-idled Old Taylor Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, and revitalized it as a modern facility, they opted to leave some of the 140-year-old buildings’ wear as is. The property, which features an honest-to-goodness castle, a sunken garden, and the world’s longest rickhouse, had languished in disrepair. Prior to the sale in 2014, there was even talk of deconstructing the castle itself and selling the limestone bricks. Leaving the patinaed brass and occasional cracked tile is an aesthetic choice, one that nods to the site’s history as the birthplace of bourbon hospitality in the 1890s. But step inside, under the original Old Taylor sign, and it’s clear that Castle & Key is equal parts tradition and innovation.

Castle & Key implemented Ignition — an industrial automation platform for SCADA, HMI, IIoT, and more — with the help of Gray AES to replace an outdated FactoryTalk system. Headquartered in nearby Lexington, Gray AES is a professional services company offering architecture, engineering, and automation solutions across a wide range of industries, including major greenfield or brownfield expansions. “Supporting distilled spirits producers and bourbon distillers, being headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky, is very important for us, not just as a systems integrator, but as a corporate citizen of our home state,” said Taylor Sawyer, Director of Business Development at Gray AES.

The two companies have a long history together; before the Ignition implementation, Gray AES had redone Castle & Key’s control cabinet, running new terminals and updating the PLC programming. After that success, Gray AES was the clear choice to upgrade Castle & Key’s SCADA system. As Elliott Schmitz, Distillery Manager at Castle & Key, put it, “Our goals were aligned from the get-go.”

Improving Operational Efficiency

The biggest issue with the old system was the lack of historical data. While Castle & Key could see current production numbers, there was little context. For a company with multiple products that require years to properly mature, this inability to look back made looking forward increasingly difficult. “Distilleries are in a unique position. They have to make decisions on a five-to-ten-year spectrum. They can't make a product today and sell it tomorrow,” said Sawyer.

There is a limit to throughput as well; spirits like bourbon require physical space to age. To remain competitive in the market, Castle & Key needed to use the space they already had to its full potential.

Speaking about operational efficiency, Sawyer said, “It's not so much a buzzword or a euphemism within the industry. It's just the nature of where the industry is heading. How do you do what you're doing today, albeit more efficiently?” This is especially true for a registered historic site that doubles as a production floor.

“We are a historic distillery, but the things we like to modernize aren't necessarily traditional whiskey practices. It’s more [about] improved automation techniques, better data and analytics, correlation and connectivity, and then just constantly being neurotic about scientific advancement of our craft,” said Castle and Key’s Brett Connors, whose formal job title is Whiskey Wizard, a position that encompasses the duties of head blender, product strategy, hospitality, and sales support.

High-Performance HMI

This implementation was Gray AES’ first large-scale project using Ignition’s mobile-responsive Perspective Module. “The main request was to make it a more modern look and feel. Perspective was a natural fit, taking advantage of the CSS and the style sheets,” said Jeremy Plunkett, Digital Transformation Engineer at Gray AES.

Gray AES designed a new SCADA system featuring a high-performance HMI, leveraging modern frameworks closer to website design than traditional SCADA visualization. The goal was to modernize the system to run mostly on iPads while maintaining a close visual resemblance so that operators could easily transition to Ignition with minimal training.

When developing the system, Gray AES utilized DevOps principles. “We would pull down a stack into our local environment, spin it up with Docker, have code reviews using GitHub, and we'd create pull requests for any changes. Then we deploy it to our test server, test out changes before we'd actually deploy it to the production environment,” said Plunkett.

The design process was collaborative between both companies, not just between Gray AES and Castle & Key upper management, but with plant-floor staff as well. One request from operators was to keep the application’s primary color the same. While the new HMI still adheres to the fundamentals of high-performance screens — heavy use of gray, bright colors like red reserved for alarms, minimal clutter — the background is a bright, inviting teal. When activated, all valves, pumps, and motors turn white, in line with the high-performance standard. “It felt very unfamiliar until we had the teal background. And it makes the white stand out a little bit more too,” said Schmitz.

More than anything, this gave operators a sense of ownership of the Ignition system. “At the beginning, operators were a little resistant, just because change is difficult,” said Schmitz. “However, there have been some really good features in Ignition. It’s very easy to navigate and it's been well-received among the team.”

Being able to access the Ignition system through mobile devices has greatly improved operator workflows, and the application’s “crisp” response provides immediate feedback.

UI/UX

The Ignition system defaults to an overview of Castle & Key’s still, giving operators an immediate view of the high-priority functions. The system is logically connected for the process flow, allowing operators to navigate between screens without having to return to the main overview like they did in the previous system.

The side menu provides quick access to other screens within the application. The operator can select the screen, monitor key metrics like temperature, and control distillation to hit target proofs and ensure consistency. With so much information on the screens, operators can move pop-ups out of the way, monitoring flow rate while adjusting the aperture of a valve. Additionally, Gray AES designed a variety of standard faceplates so that anytime Castle & Key needs to add another pump, agitator, or valve, they can reuse assets.

For processes like grain intake, the application shows the operator the entire path flow, including all conveyors and valves, as well as any information required to bring the grain from the truck to one of the silos. In addition to individual mobility, the Ignition system saves time by giving operators access to every part of the facility at any time. For example, when one operator is getting ready to unload a grain truck and does not have an iPad, they can radio for assistance, and another operator can help remotely.

Historian

Beyond the visuals, the Ignition system includes the Tag Historian Module. This allows Castle & Key to easily view historical data, identify trends, and make projections. Perhaps most importantly, this access to historical data allows them to identify anomalies, which can have far-reaching consequences for a process that is still as much art as science.

“On the product strategy and research side, we love the historian functionality of [Ignition] because it allows us to really integrate our product quality to historical records and data to be able to improve our overall strategy and processes,” said Connors. “We're excited about the data being able to come from the historian and to correlate that into our production methodology.”

Alarming

The system also features Ignition’s Alarm Notification Module, which provides two locations where operators can access alarms: current overview and alarm history. The former allows operators to see any active alarms in the system, while the latter gives Castle & Key long-term data, similar to the historian, to make continual improvements and better dial in preventative maintenance.

Prior to Ignition, acknowledging alarms was a highly manual endeavor, requiring an operator to physically walk to a machine (sometimes on a separate level of the production floor) and press a button to stop the process. Now, with Perspective’s mobile-responsive capabilities, operators have a convenient, and immediate, method for responding to alarms.

Momentary Push Buttons

Distillation involves a great deal of sensory response during production; operators monitor the smell, taste, and visual clarity of product as it travels through the system. Fittingly, part of the process is dependent on another sense — touch — more specifically, the need to hold down buttons. “The FactoryTalk application had a lot of momentary push buttons, and that was a bit tricky with Perspective because there's not a one-to-one component that mimics a momentary push button,” said Plunkett. “We didn't want to have to rewrite all the logic in the PLC, so we pretty much created our own custom momentary push button.”

Gray AES’ solution was to let operators tap a button in the Ignition application to “bump” open a valve or open it completely instead of holding down and releasing. Accurate grain weight is a critical component of spirit production, so the ability to slightly open, throttle, and completely close a gate with a tap or two instead of continually holding the button down has been just as, if not more, effective.

Parallel Deployment

As with most manufacturers, Castle & Key could not afford to halt production while Gray AES installed the new system. “We took a gateway backup and dropped it into their Ignition gateway on site. We had a simulation PLC as well, so we had already had all the tags mapped,” said Plunkett.

That last point was originally considered an issue because all labels were stored in the FactoryTalk HMI and could not be directly collected from the PLC. While this task seemed daunting at first, Ignition’s scripting capability allowed Gray AES to write a script that parsed through all of the tags from the HMI, then populated them in Ignition, avoiding what would have been an arduous conversion process.

Deploying the Ignition system was fast (“It took five minutes to deploy,” said Plunkett) but to ensure there was absolutely no downtime, Castle & Key ran the old and new systems in parallel. That way, if there were any unexpected changes after the fact, the plant floor could continue moving, not to mention bubbling, agitating, and distilling. “You can connect either to the control panel on the iPad on the same internal network or be connected to the PLC and Ignition at the same time,” said Schmitz.

“The ability to continuously run on our daily basis as we're developing this new programming system was really paramount because it caused us to not have to lose any production time as we were planning and eventually now transferred onto the new system,” said Connors.

Process Refinement

Shift after shift, Castle & Key is collecting data to further refine their processes. They have found that the Ignition system opens up a whole new path forward. As Schmitz put it, Ignition allows them “to get that access to identify trends and make improvements either to our programming or to mechanical aspects in order to drive consistency.”

Even as Castle & Key plans to expand the system by incorporating more processes, they intend to retain the human element that makes their operation unique. “Our industry relies a lot on organoleptic and sensory data. How do you correlate a human experience to your automated experience?” asked Connors. “To be able to actually take that data and scientific overlay and then apply that to your organoleptic program is incredibly uncommon. That's kind of the way our industry merges the balance of science and art, where we're still very human, but the more we move towards automation, we're not trying to remove that human element from the actual tasting and enjoying of whiskey, but we're trying to imbue that into our scientific ideology.”

Sawyer echoed the sentiment succinctly. “Technology is seen as it's going to replace human beings,” he said. “Here it augments, it enhances.”

Project Scope

• 27,505 Tags
• 27 Screens
• 16 Pop-ups
• 10 Clients
• 736 Alarms
• 1 Devices
• Basic Architecture
• 1 Database
• 62 Tags logging historical data

In this Power Hour (our webinar series exclusively for integrators), we will discuss considerations to be aware of when upgrading from Ignition 8.1 to 8.3, as well as a deeper look at new 8.3 features, including Event Streams, Perspective drawing tools, and the new Form component. In addition, we will showcase notable Ignition resources available on the Ignition Exchange. Learn about:

• Ignition 8.1 to 8.3 upgrade considerations

• A deeper dive into Event Streams, Perspective drawing tools, and the Form component

• A showcase of notable Ignition Exchange resources

Most people think of Ignition as software for SCADA or industrial automation, but there’s a lot more to the platform than that. Ignition is a toolbox for building whatever kind of application your organization needs. Here at Inductive Automation (IA), we have found plenty of everyday uses for Ignition because it allows us to create customized tools that generate tremendous value.

When we recognize the need for a new application, Inductive Automation still evaluates Ignition against other products on the market, but in some cases, using Ignition makes the most sense, whether that is due to our unique requirements or the speed with which an application can be implemented and updated.

In one form or another, everybody at Inductive Automation is impacted by Ignition. Below, discover a few of the ways we leverage our own software platform.

Building Automation System

When IA moved into our 56,000-square-foot headquarters, we inherited an old HVAC system, controlled by commodity HVAC software. Offices were over 10 degrees off setpoint at all times, compressors broke regularly, and heaters constantly reset unbeknownst to the control system, resulting in melted wires and visible damage. The system needed to run 24/7 because some offices would never recover from a shutdown.

It was IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors Steve Hechtman who had the foresight to run the HVAC on Ignition, which was unorthodox, given that specialized HVAC software already existed. His decision, however, proved to be the right one. Commodity HVAC controls would have narrowed the system’s visibility too much to isolate the root cause of each issue. Additionally, this commodity software required an external technician to make changes, resulting in slow, expensive, and sometimes ineffective solutions.

In contrast, Ignition empowered IA staff with its ability to historically log every datapoint, build ad hoc dashboards to investigate issues, and rapidly make changes and refinements. Ignition’s visibility helped us discover thermostats wired to the wrong rooms, incomplete ducting, failing contactors from faulty logic, short-cycling heating and cooling modes that were undetectable in the previous software, and more. Ignition also allowed us to review historical trends and rethink the air handler sequencing to mitigate runaway cooling of interior offices.

Now our HVAC is so efficient and responsive that IA can shut down every night and weekend, resulting in significant energy savings without sacrificing employee comfort during operating hours. Using Ignition on our HVAC also allowed us to test and refine our BACnet Driver before we released it publicly. Overall, the building automation system has given IA the visibility and flexibility to make rapid, informed changes, on our own schedule.

Lobby Sign-In

The Lobby Sign-In application at our Folsom, California headquarters is built in the Ignition Perspective Module, meaning that front desk staff can use iPads to check in guests, vendors, and trainees. The application opens with a “Welcome to Inductive Automation” screen, then gives four option tabs to choose from: Interview, Meeting, Training, and Other.

For in-person training classes, trainees can easily find or input their names. The application saves their information for the week, which makes each subsequent sign-in quicker because they don't have to re-enter their information.

The application efficiently keeps a roster and helps track who is in the building at any given moment, ensuring a secure environment for everyone. One of the application’s standout features is the ability to look up anyone who has checked in on our CRM and generate a lobby sign-in report.

IA’s Sales Engineering Division has made plenty of updates to the application for an easier check-in experience, including the ability to configure different greetings and sign-in methods. They have also uploaded the project to the Ignition Exchange.

Notes App

Sales Engineering is always creating new projects in Ignition and helping integrators build their own solutions. Sales engineers have always had a way of tracking notes, but now with the Notes App, they can derive some analytics from it.

When sales engineers meet with customers, one common question is, “What are the big things you’re seeing? What is trending lately?” The Notes App can create a word cloud based on the terms that sales engineers have recorded from their calls, giving insight into what the Ignition community is interested in. This offers a convenient way to gauge general interest in certain topics right now and over time.

Architecture Builder

Sales engineers build architectures for customers every day. Before they implemented the Architecture Builder, they had to build architectures manually, with basic digital drawing tools. Naturally, because each architecture was essentially drawn by hand, there were variations from engineer to engineer. To solve this problem, the Sales Engineering team needed a way to be consistent, fast, and add additional Ignition-specific context.

The Architecture Builder has a drag & drop editor that allows sales engineers to build out architectures quickly. The application lets engineers move servers around, choose modules, as well as create a bill of materials and pricing quote for the entire architecture. The Architecture Builder gets to a place of real value because more than just giving customers the quote or the architecture, it can additionally provide hardware recommendations based on the architecture and system size.

Zendesk Display Dashboard

IA’s Support Division helps customers with their Ignition systems every day. And Ignition helps Support do that in a number of ways.

The Zendesk Display Dashboard gives Support managers and team leads a quick overview of their teams. They can filter and set audio notifications to check in when a call exceeds 45 minutes to ensure a speedy resolution. The dashboard also shows what Support staff is doing at any given time, whether they are on a call, researching, or just sending an email.

The application has available and unavailable tabs, so managers and leads know who they can assign emergency tickets to. The dashboard is integrated with Slack to display live status, showing who is out sick, in a meeting, or on their lunch break. In any of those cases, instead of being in the available tab, they will be automatically moved to the unavailable tab. These tabs can also be filtered by team, position, or shift.

Project cards display the number of tickets in each respective queue in Zendesk: Open Problem for unassigned tickets; Special for enterprise customers; Tech Triage for tickets that haven't been triaged yet; No-Contract tickets; and Suspended tickets. By clicking on any of these, the application will show general information about the ticket, including the current assignee, subject, time history, and links to any relevant Slack conversations with the Development Division.

Thread & Slack Stats

One of the more difficult tasks that Support has to do is look through thread dumps because they don't always know what these threads are supposed to be doing or what they are responsible for. The Thread Stats feature has collected hundreds of thread dumps and parsed them for key metadata about each thread pool. This gives Support a resource for understanding what normal behavior looks like so they can better identify what is acting abnormally.

Slack Stats is another integration with Slack. When Support staff run into a roadblock while troubleshooting an issue, they reach out to the Dev Slack channel or just start a general support channel to ask questions. This project monitors those individual messages and makes sure they’re being answered in a timely manner. If they haven't received a reply in 30 minutes, it will trigger an alarm.

CRM

A few years after its founding, Inductive Automation was looking at different CRM systems. However, since Ignition's unlimited licensing is so unique, we realized that any other CRM would need to be completely customized to suit our needs. IA decided that building an in-house CRM would provide the exact application that we wanted as well as allow for continual improvement.

These days, Inductive Automation upgrades the CRM to every new version of Ignition, with a dedicated team for implementing updates. Like any company, IA faces a variety of business challenges and having an application built in Ignition lets us solve them faster. IA needs to be agile and this application allows us to be exactly that.

The CRM synthesizes both Ignition visualization modules, with the bulk of the application built in Vision and the executive dashboards in Perspective. The CRM lets the Sales team easily manage not only the organizations and companies that IA does business with, but also quotes, invoices, and license keys.

IA lets the CRM be the single pane of glass that pulls data together into one place, and because it’s built in Ignition, the CRM can integrate with other business intelligence tools as well. The CRM interfaces with our accounting software, our marketing lead generation tool, and helps us stay ADA-compliant. IA uses the CRM not only for our ordering system so the Sales team can create quotes and orders and manage licenses, but also as a reporting tool.

All of our training courses are connected to the CRM. When someone signs up for a training course, the CRM creates the order and registers that person to the class. The CRM also lets us adapt quickly to new situations. For example, when we sell tickets for the Ignition Community Conference, we use the CRM to track attendees’ dietary restrictions.

License Portal

The License Portal fulfills a need that is specific to Inductive Automation. Ignition’s server-centric licensing lets organizations choose the architecture that’s right for them, but it also means that there’s no off-the-shelf solution for managing Ignition licenses.

The application, which is built in Perspective, allows for IA employees, integrators, end users, and Authorized Ignition Distributors to manage Ignition licenses, and view certification statuses, quotes, and invoices. They can search for specific licenses by criteria like license key, location, status or role, edition of Ignition, and more.

The application displays which customer a license is associated with, plus all related modules and activation history as well as all the developers in an organization and their current certification status. Beyond just seeing licenses, the License Portal also gives the ability to add additional context to licenses by setting and/or editing a location, and adding descriptive notes or searchable tags.

The other critical feature of the License Portal is the ability to view quotes, pay invoices, and generate new licenses. This aspect of the application is particularly useful for Ignition distributors around the globe because they can quote and place orders directly through the License Portal. It gives distributors autonomy, which is especially important for locations with dramatic time differences from our headquarters in California. Being able to independently process and order for their customers eliminates the sometimes multi-day process of ordering using the traditional route.

Quoting Tool

Before Inductive Automation acquired the assets of iControls and launched Inductive Automation Australia (IA AU), iControls was the official Ignition distributor in Australia. iControls acted as a middle entity between end users and IA. As a result, they sometimes had difficulties translating quotes to local currencies and different types of markets, due to IA’s unique business model, not to mention various discounts and nuances of licensing. Prior to implementing this application, translating a quote from the IA website required three people to input the exact same data, so IA AU developed the Quoting Tool in Perspective to improve the sales process.

IA AU wanted to keep HubSpot as a single source of truth, integrating it with the Quoting Tool to bring in important pieces of data like company type, certification level, managed accounts, NDAs, and more.

The Quoting Tool lets Sales create a quote by selecting a combination of gateways and edge products in addition to support and training packages, plus an option to add a completely customized product for special cases. The tool also transparently displays the discounts applied to each part of the quote in addition to the exchange rate for the chosen currency. Once the quote is created, it is saved as a searchable template to expedite the process of building complex quotes or updating an existing one.

IA AU also wanted to address the quoting workflow. Each quote enters a track and trace mechanism as it progresses through the various steps of internal review and approval. Once the quote is approved, the document is ready to be deployed and downloaded by the sales representatives to send to the end user. IA AU is currently working to integrate the Architecture Builder with the Quoting Tool to automatically send the quote and architecture diagram together.

The Quoting Tool has provided an easier path for members of the Sales team to do their jobs, reducing mistakes while gathering data and setting goals for continuous improvement.

Share Your Unique Ignition Projects

Inductive Automation has pain points just like any company. Our approach is to look for solutions in the platforms that we already use, but if they lack specific functionality or interoperability, then we leverage Ignition to make the platforms we already have even more effective.

With its open-ended design and inherent flexibility, Ignition can solve pain points for any organization no matter the industry, so we want to hear your success stories. Share your projects with us and let us know how Ignition is helping your business and your customers.

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Transcript:

00:02 
Travis Cox: Most people think of Ignition as a platform for industrial automation or SCADA, but there's a lot more to it than that. At Inductive Automation, we build applications in Ignition for internal use because we can create small, customized tools that generate tremendous value, and once those products are in place, we can roll out improvements quickly. That's not to say we sink a bunch of development time into reinventing the wheel. We still evaluate Ignition versus other products in the market. We just happen to find plenty of use cases where Ignition is the best option. Everybody at Inductive Automation is impacted by Ignition in one way or another, so we're gonna show you some examples of how we use our product and how it gives us value.

00:40 
Kurt Seifert: When we moved into our 56,000-square-foot Folsom headquarters, we inherited a unique and old HVAC system controlled by common HVAC software. Offices were often 10℉ off setpoint, compressors were breaking regularly, heaters were constantly tripping and resetting without the control system knowing as evidenced by melted wires and visible damage. We had to run the system 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because some offices would never recover from shutting down overnight. It was a mess.

01:07 
Mike Hechtman: It was [IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors] Steve Hechtman that had the foresight to run our HVAC on Ignition, which seemed unusual at first, given the specialized HVAC software that already existed. But as we soon discovered, his decision was spot on. Existing HVAC controls run on slow networking and hardware with sluggish screens and historical trending. You either don't have enough information logged or you lose your train of thought waiting for information to load. How do you debug anything with that? How do you get to the root cause? And adjusting controls logic has to be done on some technician's schedule, not our schedule?

01:44 
Mike Hechtman: Often, by the time someone can come out to fix something, you've forgotten the important details. Adding time to a problem is much more expensive than people realize. But with Ignition, we can make changes on the fly. Historically log every data point, calculate and chart how far off setpoint the entire building is. Make ad hoc dashboards to compare this to effects of outside temperature. We can wire inputs to physically verify equipment is running and show this on the HMI. We can investigate any issue as it's happening on our own schedule. We can do anything we dream up. It is empowering.

02:21 
Kurt Seifert: Ignition's visibility helped us investigate and discover thermostats wired to the wrong rooms, incomplete ducting, faulty logic that shortened equipment life, and short cycling of heating and cooling modes, which couldn't be detected in the previous software, and the list goes on. Once all this was handled, Ignition allowed us to review years of historical trends to totally rethink the air-handler sequencing we were provided, at a high level, which helped us solve offices that were often eight degrees under temperature despite minimum airflow. Now our HVAC is so efficient and responsive that we can shut down every night and weekend for significant energy savings without sacrificing employee comfort during open hours.

02:58 
Mike Hechtman: Using Ignition on our HVAC also allowed us to test and refine our BACnet Driver before it reached the public. It's a testing ground for us. If there is ever anything wrong with Ignition, we are gonna feel it in the office. But overall, Ignition gave us the visibility and flexibility to make rapid, informed changes on our own schedule, really challenging the norm, and it was actually a lot of fun.

03:23 
Dara Claiborne: Our Lobby Sign-In application runs on Perspective, which means that we can use iPads upfront to check in guests, vendors, and trainees. The process is pretty simple. The application opens up with a "Welcome to Inductive Automation" screen, and then gives four option tabs to choose from: interview, meeting, training, and other. For in-person training classes, the trainees can find or input their names. The application saves their information for the week, which makes the sign-in process quicker because they don't have to retype all their information. The application as a whole officially keeps a roster and helps us track who is in the building, ensuring a secure environment for everyone.

04:05 
Dara Claiborne: It's really easy to integrate other systems with Ignition, so one of the standout features is the ability to look up anyone who has checked in on our CRM and we can generate a lobby sign-in report. Connor Futa and Chase Dorsey from our Sales Engineering team have made plenty of updates to the application for an easier check-in experience, including the ability to configure the different greetings and sign-in methods for the version that's available on the Ignition Exchange. It's really convenient to have them continually improve the process.

04:39 
Matthew Raybourn: The Sales Engineering Division is always creating new projects in Ignition, like the online Demo Project or helping integrators build their own solutions. The first application I want to talk about is the Notes App. Sales Engineering has always had a way of tracking notes, but now we're trying to drive some analytics from it. When we're meeting with customers, one of the questions Sales Engineering gets asked all the time is, "What are the big things you're seeing? What is trending lately?" The Notes App can create a word cloud based on the terms that we have recorded from our calls, giving us insight into what people are interested in. It gives us an easy way to gauge general interest in certain topics, especially over time. There have been three iterations of this application and you can see the progression through each version. One of the reasons we built this application in Ignition is that we can easily implement changes to better align with how we use it.

05:33 
Matthew Raybourn: The second application that I want to talk about is the Architecture Builder. As sales engineers, we build architectures for customers every day. Before we had this application, we were building architectures manually, using basic digital drawing tools. The problem was that because we were essentially drawing these by hand, there were variations from engineer to engineer. We needed a way to be consistent, fast, and add some additional Ignition-specific context. The Architecture Builder has a drag-and-drop editor that allows us to build out architectures quickly. You can move servers around and click on a server, choose the modules, and create a build of materials for your entire architecture, providing a pricing quote or a build materials. The Architecture Builder gets to a place of real value because we're not just giving customers the quote or the architecture, we can even provide hardware recommendations based on the architecture and system size. The application allows us to be more effective in how we communicate to customers. Both of these applications are relatively simple tools that provide tremendous value. You see that everywhere at Inductive Automation.

06:43 
Corbin Harrell: IA's Support Division works with Ignition every day, helping customers with their own Ignition systems. And Ignition helps us do that. One of the main ways is the Zendesk Display Dashboard. This dashboard gives the managers and team leads a quick overview of their teams, which they can filter, and they can send audio notifications to check in when a call exceeds 45 minutes, so that we can ensure a speedy resolution to the problem. The dashboard also shows what everyone is doing, whether that means they're on a call, researching, or just sending out an email. We have available and unavailable tabs so that we know who we can assign emergency tickets to. The dashboard is integrated with Slack to display live statuses. We can also see who's out sick, in a meeting, or just on lunch. In any of those cases, instead of being in the available tab, they'll be automatically moved to the unavailable tab.

07:31 
Corbin Harrell: These can also be filtered by team, position, or shift. These project cards tell us how many tickets are in their respective queues in Zendesk. This first card is the Open Problem queue for unassigned tickets. This card is for our enterprise customers. Tech Triage for tickets that haven't been triaged yet, No-Contract tickets, and Suspended tickets. Click on any of these and you can see general information about the ticket, including the current assignee, subject, time history, and links to any relevant Slack conversations with the [Software] Development Division. Here on the side, we can look at Thread Stats, which is a pretty new project. One of the more difficult tasks that support has to do is look through thread dumps because we don't always know what these threads are supposed to be doing or what they're responsible for. So we've collected hundreds of thread dumps and parsed them for key metadata about each thread pool.

08:20 
Corbin Harrell: This gives us a resource for understanding what normal behavior looks like so we can better identify when something is acting abnormal. Slack Stats is another integration with Slack. One of the most common Support workflows is that when we run into a roadblock while troubleshooting an issue, we reach out to the Dev Slack channel or just start a general Support channel where we can ask questions. This project monitors those individual messages and makes sure they're being answered in a timely manner. If they haven't gotten a reply yet for 30 minutes, it will trigger an alarm. This project has been a continual work. It's super useful for the Support Division and handles a lot of how we're getting data behind the scenes, but that goes for all Ignition projects, right?

09:01 
Vannessa Garcia: Back when Inductive Automation was only a few years old, we were looking at different CRM systems, but Ignition's unlimited licensing is so unique that if we used any other CRM, we realized that we'd have to completely customize it to suit our needs as a company. We decided that building our own CRM would give us the exact application that we wanted and let us continually improve it. Fast forward to today, Inductive Automation has upgraded our CRM with every new version of Ignition. We have a team that manages the CRM and actively updates it all the time. Like any company, IA faces a variety of business challenges and having an application built in Ignition allows us to solve them faster. We need to be agile, and this application allows us to be exactly that. IA's Chief Technology Evangelist Travis Cox built the original application. The CRM synthesizes both of Ignition's visualization modules, with the bulk of the application built in Vision and executive dashboards built in Perspective.

10:08 
Vannessa Garcia: In Sales, the CRM lets us easily manage not only the organizations and companies that we do business with, but also our quotes, invoices, and license keys. Travis built those executive dashboards for Steve Hechtman, IA Founder & Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, because Steve wanted a fast way to see data. Since Perspective runs in your browser, that is the fastest way to do it. Building the CRM and Ignition lets us integrate other business intelligence tools as well. The CRM interface is with our accounting software, our marketing lead generation tool, and helps us stay ADA-compliant. All of our training courses are also connected to the CRM. When someone signs up for a training course, CRM creates the order and registers that person to the class. The CRM also lets us adapt quickly to new situations. For example, when we sell tickets for the Ignition Community Conference, we use CRM to track attendees dietary restrictions. What our customers get from Ignition, we get too.

11:18 
Vannessa Garcia: It's a tool to capture and manage data the way we want. We use the CRM not only for our ordering system, so our Sales team can create quotes and orders and manage licenses, but we also use it as a reporting tool. The CRM application really has its fingers in all different parts of the organization. We let CRM be that single pane of glass that pools data together into one place. This is the most important tool we have. We rely on Ignition daily to run our business, so we know firsthand the amount of trust it takes to go all in with Ignition.

12:00 
Yegor Karnaukhov: The License Portal fulfills a need that is specific to Inductive Automation. Ignition's server-centric licensing lets organizations choose the architecture that is right for them, but it also means that there's no off-the-shelf solution for managing Ignition licenses. The application, which is built in Perspective, allows for IA employees, integrators, end users, and Ignition distributors to manage Ignition licenses and view certificate statuses, quotes, and invoices. They can search for specific licenses by criteria like license key, location, status or role, edition of Ignition, and more. The portal displays which customer a license is associated with, plus all related modules and activation history as well as all of the developers and organization and their current certification status. Beyond just seeing licenses, the License Portal also gives the ability to add additional context to licenses by setting and/or editing a location and adding descriptive notes or searchable tags.

13:04 
Yegor Karnaukhov: The other critical feature of the License Portal is the ability to view quotes, pay invoices, and generate new licenses. This aspect of the application is particularly useful for Ignition distributors around the globe because they can quote and place orders directly through the license portal. It gives distributors autonomy and independence, which is especially important for locations with dramatic time differences from our headquarters in California. Being able to process an order on their own for their customers eliminates the sometimes multi-day process of ordering using the traditional route.

13:41 
Francisco Carrión: Before Inductive Automation Australia, when we were still a distributor, we were that middle entity between end users and Inductive. As a result, we sometimes had difficulties translating quotes to local currencies and different types of markets. We had tried another software to handle quoting, but it was really hard to customize because of IA's business model, not to mention the various discounts and nuances of licensing. With our previous setup to translate a quote from IA website, we ended up having three people input the exact same data. So we developed the Quoting Tool in Perspective to improve our sales process. We have used HubSpot as our CRM since the beginning of the operation, which we wanted to keep as our single source of truth.

14:24 
Francisco Carrión: HubSpot integrates with the Quoting Tool to bring in important pieces of data like company type, certification level, managed accounts, NDAs, and more. Then anything that we quote is translated into a deal in HubSpot. The Quoting Tool lets us create a quote by selecting a combination of gateways and edge products in addition to support and training packages. There's even an option to add a completely customized product for special cases. The tool also transparently displays the discounts applied to each part of the quote in addition to the exchange rate for the chosen currency. Once the quote is created, it is digitized as a searchable template to expedite the process of building complex quotes or updating an existing one.

15:06 
William Bowen: We also wanted to address the workflow, so once somebody requests a quote, it goes through an internal review and we keep a track and trace mechanism for the quote as it goes through the various steps for approval. Once the quote is approved, the document is ready to be deployed and downloaded by the sales rep to send to the end user. We haven't automated the delivery yet because for complex architectures we want to attach an architecture diagram, but we are working to integrate the Architecture Builder so soon we'll be able to automatically send the quote and diagram together.

15:36 
Francisco Carrión: The Quoting Tool has provided an easier path for people to do their jobs, an easier way to request, an easier way to review, and an easier way to approve. We are reducing mistakes while gathering data and setting goals for continuous improvement. Sometimes the fear is that you're using Ignition for something that is potentially out there already, and so it's a waste of resources. Our approach is always to look for something in the platforms that we already use, but if they don't have the functionality, or if the data that we want cannot be communicated between platforms, then we leverage Ignition to solve the problem and integrate those softwares. For us, the key word is "orchestration." We are using Ignition to make the platforms we already have even more effective.

16:19 
Travis Cox: Inductive Automation has pain points just like any company, but we address them using Ignition and rely on the customized tools that we built with our own platform. Due to its open-ended design and inherent flexibility, Ignition can solve pain points for any organization no matter the industry. We want to hear your success stories, share your projects with us, and tell us how Ignition is helping you and your customers.