Building What’s Next in Chemical Manufacturing with Ignition

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Fantastic. Can everybody hear us? Just give a hand up? There should be somebody who will give us a thumbs-up.

Yeah, somebody will give us a thumbs up. Yeah. It’s usually repeat offenders as well.

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No, they can hear us. Okay, well, fantastic. I just want to share my slides.

Why am I not able to do that? That’s strange. Maybe you should move to Windows, Jaco. What’s that? It’s Mac.

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I don’t see the option for sharing. That’s interesting. Make it large.

Oh, there we go. Fantastic. It rains and I’m incapable of doing anything.

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All right. You’re not driving. That should be better.

Yeah, fantastic. Excellent. Good morning, everyone.

Thank you very much for joining us for our Element8 Quarterly Webinar on Building What’s Next in Manufacturing. I’m coming to you from a fairly wet and miserable Johannesburg on this Friday morning. I hope wherever you are that the weather is a little bit more pleasant this weekend.

We will do our typical product update this morning, run through a couple of product highlights you may have missed over the last few weeks. I believe it’s already March. That’s crazy, scary.

The way the year’s been going, it feels like it should be July already. And then obviously, typically, what we do in these webinars, we go through a success story, a case study, really an opportunity to see some good work that people have done, applications that they’ve implemented. And this morning, we will talk with the gents from Sun Ace, who we’ll introduce in a moment, as well as Jacques from Consera.

Jacques, you’ve been with us before. Yes, it feels like you’re a regular. And we will discover how you guys have built essentially more than that, but essentially a unified production batch and quality control application for Sun Ace using Ignition that delivers control, visibility, and traceability.

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So that’s a pretty cool application. We’re looking forward to reading or hearing more about that. If it’s your first time joining us, who we are is Element8.

We are the sole Sub-Saharan Africa distributor for the Ignition industrial automation platform, Sepasoft MES, and the Canary Data Historian. Why we exist as a business, we want to help ensure a data-driven and flourishing future for Industry. We’re really passionate about manufacturing in the South African economy.

We believe that manufacturing has a massive part to play in our economy and the growth of our country. Our guiding principles are to humbly serve our community and our industry, learn from others, and share what we’ve learned. And what we provide, of course, is intuitive and scalable industrial technologies that break down the barriers of cost and complexity.

That’s a mouthful. So that’s who Element8 is. My name is Jaco.

I look after the team at Element8. With me, I have Luan. Luan is on the production side, so he’s responsible for putting together all the webinars and the videos and all the cool things that you see on YouTube and LinkedIn.

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And then on my left, I have Gary Lowenstein, Sales Engineer with Element8, our resident grey wizard. And then across from me, Jacques, you’ve been with us before, director and engineer at Consera. Thank you again for taking the time to come in to talk to us today and showcase some of the amazing work that you guys have done.

And then, Francois, Renier, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourselves, if that’s okay. Yeah, that’s fine. I’m Francois. I’m the financial manager at Sun Ace.

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I’m responsible for finance, admin systems, procurement, and logistics. So that’s also quite a mouthful, but we’re a small team. Only? What do you mean by that? I think that’s a good introduction.

That’s why Rene is here. Yeah, so that’s why some systems like this are right up our alley, in my opinion. Yeah, fantastic.

Thank you. I’m Rene van Wijk also. I joined Sun Ace only in 2022.

And to be honest, it’s a very small team. I come from factories that had 200, 300 people, and this is 12 or 13 or 15 in a plant. And yeah, it’s been quite an interesting thing.

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But the production wouldn’t say that you’re only a handful of people. No, we are actually doing quite well. Yeah.

And to tell you, if it wasn’t for Francois, we wouldn’t be here. You know, then finance people usually, I’m also, I’ve got a little bit of a finance background, and money is always tight. But you know, luckily, he’s got systems as well.

You know, he likes systems. So that’s where the money comes from. Fantastic.

Technology, technology. 100%. Fantastic.

Lovely. We’re going to chat to you in a moment, but welcome. Thank you for taking the time to join us.

A couple of product highlights you may have missed over the last little while. Hot off the press, Ignition A34 was released last night. Yesterday.

Yesterday. It was. Yesterday, that time, last night, or the early afternoon.

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US time and South African time. Yes. All right.

Dollar pricing and Rand pricing. Yeah. Something like that.

So, A34, as always, there’s a fairly extensive list of things that have been added that are new. Probably the highlight is the core historian, or rather the embedded QuestDB. There’s some improvements to that.

There are taggable wildcards for event streams. And there’s also diagnostic tags for DMP3 driver connections. So those are three of the highlights, but there’s a whole list of other additions.

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I’ve quickly scanned through the release notes this morning, and there’s a list of enhancements, improvements. There are a couple of bug fixes. Fantastic.

It’s worthwhile downloading and getting it up and running. So that’s it. Version 4 of 8.3 is already available.

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It’s moving quickly. It’s adding a lot. There’s a couple of really, really nice Ignition Exchange resources that have been added.

If you’re not familiar with the Ignition Exchange, it is an online repository of phenomenal tools, resources, and applications that people have built for Ignition. That’s available for free. You’re welcome to download any of these resources, applications, use it without restriction.

These are three highlights for us because it’s three South African resources that have been added. It’s always nice to see South African companies and South African engineers adding useful tools. The most recent one at the top right is our tag history migration tool from Liam Hendricks down in the Western Cape from the Intech team, which provides a very simple UI-driven tool to migrate your Ignition tag history from a PostgreSQL-based historian to any destination history provider on your gateway.

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So that could be a core historian, another SQL historian, the history tag splitter. So that’s a really, really, really nice utility. Then we have the Power Chart tag context and stacking pins.

So that is, I don’t know, who was that? Oh, that was Jacques. So that was a resource that Jacques and the team from Consera added that allows you to automatically add pin descriptions and engineering units when a tag is added to the Power Chart. Something really simple, but really, really powerful and useful.

And that can easily be modified as well to use either the metadata available from the tag, or you can separate the tags that stores the description and engineering units. So that’s really nice. Because otherwise, you’d sometimes add a couple of pins, and then you don’t know which one you’re looking at.

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I like the stacking pin images. Cool. And then the third one we wanted to highlight, which is fairly recent as well, is from our own Markus Oosthuizen from our team, the Ethernet IP scanner for Factory Talk.

Again, a simple utility, but incredibly useful and powerful. So that is an Ignition perspective resource that transforms your session into an intelligent map of any control logic chassis and its downstream Ethernet IP devices, all exposed within your perspective and Ignition project. So that’s a really cool, useful utility.

We will share afterwards, as we always do, the links to all of these resources. So you don’t have to go Google for them right now. We’ll send you the actual download links to all of these.

And if you have any questions, please let us know. These sessions always feel like monologues unless we get some questions. And if you’ve joined us before, you know that the first question always gets a golf shirt, a pair of socks, or a doughnut.

So if you have any questions, please let us know. Luan is monitoring the chat for us, and we’ll make sure that we answer each question before the end of the session. Next up is the Canary module for Ignition.

It is now supported or there is now support for Ignition 8.3. And that provides, that module now provides full compatibility with Ignition 8.3. And you configure the module to both collect and provide data back to Ignition. And then the other performance addition that was added is that it now leverages Canary’s API, native API for the collector and the provider, which increases the performance quite a bit. Yeah.

It’s a really, it’s a subject to configure because there’s one thing to configure now, not two in the old version. Yes. Yeah.

And of course, Canary 25.6 is out. That’s right. Which is really, really got some fantastic new things in there, especially with the calculations and events.

You can do golden batches and those kinds of things. It’s really cool. Okay.

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Interesting. MQTT University. What does MQTT stand for? You’ll get a doughnut.

There’s about eight doughnuts out there. So Message Queuing Telemetry Transport. It is a protocol that if you haven’t heard of MQTT and it’s variant or payload called Sparkplug-B, an amazing new technology, we can see an increase in popularity in terms of its use, not only for disparate systems.

We have multiple sites communicating data back to a broker, but even smaller architectures that provide a lot of value and a lot of benefits to using MQTT, like store forward, as an example, the fact that it’s a very light payload. And it’s a single port you open and secure. Yeah.

It’s lightweight. It’s easy to configure, and you can apply your own security posture around MQTT. Yeah, absolutely.

So if you’re not familiar with MQTT, the founder of or the co-founder of MQTT, Arda Nipper, his company, Cirrus Link, has amazing people, great tools. They have created the MQTT University, which is an amazing free resource collection that will help you learn all the basics of MQTT, Sparkplug-B, and the unified namespace. It also includes deep dives into the latest white papers.

And what I really like about it is, it’s practical lessons, essentially on how to implement MQTT step-by-step. It’s called MQTT University, and it’s on the Cirrus Link website. We’ll share a link to that as well.

And very similar to Canary Academy and Inductive University, it’s free. You simply need to register and work your way through the videos and the content. But really, really nice learning around MQTT.

You use MQTT. You’ve deployed MQTT as a cloud site. All right.

So that’s a very quick update on some of the product and resource things you may have missed over the last couple of weeks. But the reason we’re here today and these gentlemen sitting across from us, we want to hear your story and what you’ve developed is Sun Ace. And the application that started in 2023.

You were a youngster then. Yeah, I had hair in 2023. So it’s a project that’s evolved, and it’s developed over time.

But maybe we can kick it off with Francois and you guys, maybe telling us a little bit more about Sun Ace. Maybe that’s a good departure point to learn about. Sun Ace is an international chemical manufacturing company.

We make PVC stabilisers. That’s a fancy word for chemicals that the PVC market uses to stabilise chemical reactions when they make PVC pipes, fittings, conduits, stuff like that. We’ve got a small plant like Renier that we did previously.

Only about 12 permanent staff members in the factory work on the night shift and the day shift. But it’s a very complex and technical process. You really rely on your operators to know what they’re doing.

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Luckily, our operators have been with us for a while. So they know how to cook the pot, if we can call it that. As long as you don’t cook the pot.

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So yeah, we are small, but from a South African perspective, we probably provide 70 to 80 per cent of the market with the raw materials they need to make PVC water pipes, fittings, stuff like that. So in our market, we’re big. We have a need to maybe optimise it and get through from some manual processes.

I think we had some safety risks as well. Renier will probably talk about that. That’s where this all began.

We had a bit of an incident. We thought maybe we could get some measures in place to assist with safety. And then that quickly snowballed from just, well, more than safety.

What else can we do? Starting to talk to Jacques and his team and really realising what’s out there. Because you don’t know what you don’t know until you start talking to experts in the field. And I think that’s sort of where this whole thing started.

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Just to also add on what Francois says, we all know PVC. It’s pipes and fittings, and swimming pool pipes and sewer pipes or whatever. So you fly to a toilet, and that stuff goes through a pipe.

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Now, I’ve been in that industry for all my life. And you cannot make a pipe without finesse, or this product, or the little bit of material that we put into that to stabilise it. Because it stabilises the whole system.

So I started in September 2022, and we had the accident in November. So it was a safety incident. Yeah, it was a safety incident.

So the main thing is the reactors; it’s extremely hot. Waxes, that’s what we’re talking about. It’s a waxing.

Imagine putting a candle on your arm; it burns. And we thought to ourselves, we’ve actually got no control over what we do. There are four reactors there; we’ve got no clue.

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Every operator does their own thing based on experience. This guy’s been here 20 years; he takes two minutes to do something, another guy’s been there two years, and he does it completely differently. So it started off with an incident.

So it was a safety incident that prompted you to look at your processes, systems? Actually, we started off, and we said, Okay, we need to be able to monitor the levels within the reactor and give us an early warning. And then Francois came back in the morning, and he slept over something, and he said, Maybe we can go further. Honestly, and that’s where it started.

Look at technology. Look at just getting our processes closer. It’s a long process, it’s three tonnes of material that you melt down and so forth.

But the main thing that we do is to get our process closer together. Every guy does exactly the same thing at exactly the same time and he waits exactly the same. It’s exactly that.

And that’s where it started. It was very, very hard-coded in the beginning. And I get very upset with him because you are getting used to a material, it’s 15 different materials going to, and then it comes with five different other ones, and we’ve got to change things.

But the recipes are growing. Yes, and it evolves constantly. And then I have to speak to Jacques and say, can you please programme this? It’s not ball dress anymore.

It’s now called black and not white or whatever the story is. But it’s still ongoing. I mean, we’re busy with other things.

Yes. And that part, we call it the flake reactor. The reactors and the flake part of it were to start.

We implemented a very small beginning on the powder side. François was busy with something else, but he needed to fix a few things first before François could get over him. But in any case, that’s where we are.

So it was reducing operational risk, I suppose, and ultimately, you realise you can get much better visibility. And the quality has improved. Everything has improved.

I mean, we had a flake; if you think about that colour on that piece of paper, it is now white. And it’s just because we streamlined the process. Everybody has got an idea.

We started with high temperatures. We are 25 degrees lower than what we used to be because we don’t need it. And we never knew it previously.

I’ve got no clue. I was in the pipe manufacturing industry. This is different.

But the point of the matter, the whole thing was to not have every second or third or fourth batch of colour or this or that. We haven’t had a failure in the flake line for two and a half years now. It’s a product consistency.

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Yeah, I think it improved 100% sometimes. I think we’ve always been in control. We just didn’t have all the data to back it up.

It’s easy to say everything passes, but if something goes wrong, you don’t know where or how. Now, at least we know exactly where we can go back to, and we can have a look. Fantastic.

And Jacques, you guys got involved. You turned off the plant for three weeks while you could implement everything. That’s always the first challenge is disrupting active production and downtime.

So that’s when you started developing. That was the first challenge that you had. Yeah.

So the big thing, I mean, everything was well planned. Renier is definitely very set in his ways, and he makes sure that, listen, we’re going to make sure that there’s only this time available. We’re going to do everything well-scheduled.

So yeah, just to take it back to the beginning, it’s like I said, it was that beginning that they just wanted to see the level. So it’s identifying the right instruments and then taking it further. Yes.

But for something that’s essentially very hard. That’s essentially just for safety. And then they started to realise: listen, while we’re adding our additives through the process, it’s interesting to see what the levels actually do now that they didn’t usually have.

And I think the big thing, eventually, when we started, it was also, yes, we wanted these recipes. This is how we wanted to work. But we’re seeing the level now.

Yeah. Let’s take a step back, get somebody in an industrial engineer to actually go through the process and see, this is what we… It was an opportunity. Yes, definitely.

And I mean, it’s like Francois just said, you don’t know what you don’t know. And as soon as you start to know something, then it sparks the next idea, next idea. And what he says is we had like four recipes.

Yeah. Yeah, four. Now we’ve got four recipes with 17, 18, 19 different recipes, things like that.

It’s changed. And the big thing, what is nice, is the same as this was, I’m going to say, learning and a growing experience for them in this specific product. It was also a learning and a growing experience for us to push our limits and to adapt to what they needed the whole time.

And I think that’s also a testament to the product that we used and how everything can grow, the modularity. So yeah, from there on, as you said, then we identified, yes, let’s quickly just… Let’s automate the reactors. Let’s automate that type of process.

So that was the start. That was March 2023. Yes, that was the big start.

And it’s not automation in the sense that everything is added automatically, but it’s prompting the operator when to do what. So it’s that interaction with them, but still… Almost a standard operating procedure. Yeah, it is. Capturing that data.

And like Renu said, yes, then it evolved that, listen, we don’t want these four standard recipes anymore. Let’s make the system more dynamic. We want a batch.

Yes. And so, I mean, it started just with a gateway, and I think it was two or three perspective licences. Then it was, no, no, no, but we want now history.

So we added the history. Then, yes, we wanted reporting. I mean, even the report was a very particular type of report that they wanted.

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Is that a compliance report, production report? That was just initial production. And yeah, that grew. From there on, it was closing the loop.

Then they wanted the recipe management system. So it was going back to the PLC, making it more generic, but letting them rather have the databases from… And we’ll go through it in a moment. We’ve got some screens and stuff.

There are a couple of recipes there. So I’m running a little bit. No, no, no.

It’s quite extensive. The main thing that you must also remember is that when we planned this whole thing, we said, okay, let’s just… Because it was all manual. Yes.

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There’s one thing that I told him: we need to be able to make it manual. If you need to. If I need to.

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That’s one thing. It cannot stop. But for instance, you work with steam pressure, and you’ve got to try and control a certain temperature.

So in the past, the guys, if they think it’s going up too high, they close the valve manually. And then he opens the valve when he thinks, oh shit, my… Sorry for the word, but yeah, my temperature has gone down too much, and now I’ve got to open it up. So we added a specific hardware component within that, and he needed to speak to it.

So now it’s all, I don’t do it anymore. The system does it for us. You don’t have to rely on guessing.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. And we can change it within our recipes.

We can say whatever we need and whatever we want. So it’s amazing. And Jack, for the batch control and the recipe management, did you take the easy route and get the batch model of the engine, or did you take the value-for-money challenging route and build everything yourself? Now you need to answer properly.

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Yeah, the guys, they really challenge you. So you have to build custom systems that fit exactly to what they need. Yeah.

No, I’m teasing. I did see that. It’s a very, very specific, the requirements are very specific.

And there was a lot of scripting, I would imagine, in the back end as well. A lot of database interaction. Yeah.

DBN scripting. It’s in that course. You can definitely continue.

So that was a data-driven recipe management system for the flagline. Obviously, the GUI was added. There were some PLC logic enhancements.

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That’s quite a lot of work. And then in June 2025, you replaced the manual batch capturing process with a fully integrated solution. Yeah.

So it was, apart from the flagline, they also wanted to do the CZ line. Okay. And then, yeah, Franco wanted to close the loop then to basically automate it so that the lab, that they can also input the results on the specific batches itself.

Absolutely. Why not? As well as… You may as well. Create the certificate of approval for the whole process.

Yeah. Because it’s such a technical product, if something goes wrong in a year’s time with a customer, we would like to transfer back to the QC in the lab, back to the factory, back to when the operator started. Have the data available.

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Yeah. Push play for the process to start. How nice it is to see everything, and you can go back and say, Okay, well, maybe something went wrong here, maybe something went wrong there.

And you can actually go back to the individual raw materials. Yeah, absolutely. All the way to the source.

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s… Back to his purchase order.

Yeah. Who did he speak to? So that certificate is obviously crucial.

Within the ISO system, you need to be able to trace your materials back to the source. Yeah. And this is… I mean, this is easy, actually, because you just press a little button and it’s all there.

Yeah. Okay. It’s easy now.

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Well, I think it was… As far as we said we wanted… Yeah. I think we had a manual system previously. Yeah.

The main thing is you had to go back four years and go through… Yes. Papers and whatever, and try to follow every row. Correct.

Now, I mean, it’s in a database. You can find… If you know what day and you know what batch number, you know you can get anything. Fantastic.

So… The big thing I just want to add is you’re… They are empowered to do whatever they need to do. That’s a big thing. They’re in control of their system and… Yes.

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They can use it as they like. Yeah. We’ve been following this a lot, and we’ve got a couple of results on here, and I think everything we’ve discussed… So, the recipe changes, you can now create, approve, and manage those recipes independently.

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You spoke, Renit, about the waste. There was a reduction of waste, lower temperatures for certain processes. There must be some… Maybe not proven yet, but maybe there’s got to be some utilities, some energy savings there.

That’ll be nice to quantify at some point. Product quality, you mentioned, the full historical data we’ve just spoken about, and then, of course, linking the production data with the lab results for your certificate of approval. Well, Renit, to just come back to energy savings, we used to run two boilers constantly.

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Yeah. Now, we’ve got to switch one off because we use one. Yeah, we don’t use the other one anymore.

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Fantastic. It’s just the efficiency, isn’t it? Yeah. So, it’s very difficult to put that into money, but I can see it.

The maintenance on the stuff has gone down. People don’t come out anymore to fix problems. So, that’s a major, major improvement.

Amazing. So, despite what everybody else says, the team did an okay job. Well, I suspect it’s not going to be the last.

There’s always something. So, you would have seen that our little logo and why we call this webinar the What’s Next, Building What’s Next, is that once you have something in place and you can understand how you could deploy a piece of technology to give you visibility and things like that, there’s always a what’s next. What do we want to do next? You come up with another idea or another metric that you want to track or another, and that’s the ability that you have to put whatever is next.

You can build it. I think the main thing is what I think

 I think the main thing is what I said to Francois, we’ve got the next already in. It’s already been trying to quote me on the next. But then I said, yeah, but I think Francois, it’s going to be difficult. He says, the system guy just let it be Jorge’s problem. Yeah.

Cool. And, uh, this is a very simplistic view of the architecture, but yeah, maybe talk us through what we’re looking at.

Yeah. So you can see the PLC integration with Modbus to the Ignition gateway. What they’ve got there now is like I said, it’s the Ignition gateway reporting historian.

 So that’s all Modbus.

Modbus comms. Yes. The integration with the PLC. Yes. It’s. Yeah. Okay. Um. Yeah. Like I said, the historian reporting. And they’ve also now gone to, um, the unlimited license on their perspective because they saw the need for that, especially, I mean, with you’ve got on the line on the two flakes apart from all the guys in the labs and, uh, them watching it from their office or wherever they are. Yeah.

And the great thing about the unlimited clients is you, you want to throw something on a screen somewhere, some KPI. You can do it. You can. You’re not limited in any way by who you give access to. Obviously, the appropriate and secure information, but you can easily share that.

And then yeah, on the historian side, the SQL Lite is still more than efficient for, um, what they’re capturing from the process itself. Okay. But, but in the batch management system just runs on a separate database.

 Yeah. That’s a bit more hairy. Yeah, that’s a bit more.

 As well as the interaction with it is. Yeah. Okay. It needs a lot more traffic.

 Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. Really, really pretty simple architecture.

 Yes, yes.

 Okay, so we’ve got a couple of screens here. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but I think it’s.

 A nice entry screen. Yeah. Just for some.

 And then you chose our four reactors. Um, and the.

 Reporting section.

 Yeah. So that’s just the first page.

 And we started now only learning, there’s a little thing that looks like a.

 A trend.

 A little, uh.

 Lightning.

 That’s the quote I’m waiting for.

 Oh, okay. All right. So you added that to.

So you will see that they, I mean, being fairly new to the system, the adoption was there wasn’t an adoption process for we’re used to conventional types of data. So we initially went for the skater for them as well. Yeah. Because, yeah, it’s just there’s a lot of like we spoke in the past. There’s.

 There’s one thing that.

 The way that the industry goes and, uh, there’s definitely a lot of benefits to it.

He’s going to get a shock very soon. It’s one thing that he’s going to say because you’ve got a product and you’ve got different, uh, materials within that product. And Francois always comes with different products that needs to be. I need four or five suppliers and whatever. Now you’ve put that in a recipe and you have. What do you say. Some oxide liquid and that’s oxide liquid becomes something else now. Now I’ve got to redo that whole recipe. Yes. I want eventually copy and paste and change one thing. Um, so yeah, that’s also coming.

 Yeah, yeah. You.

 What’s next?

 You see the complexity of it. The complexity of it is not going to stop.

 So no, it’s got a problem.

 Yeah.

 He needs to solve it. But that’s what it is.

So great about when you’re starting out with the system. You can always look at it and say, ah, I want that. Yes. And it’s somebody else’s problem to build it for you. Yeah, yeah. So, ASM, uh, if you’re not familiar with the term ASM, it’s one of those three-letter acronyms that we throw around in our industry. So, ASM is abnormal situation management. Um, there’s actually a I s a one hundred and one, I think, um, also speaks to.

 Yeah, uh, high performance.

 High-performance skaters. ASM is definitely a lot of people call it grayscale, fifty shades of grey. Yeah. Um, it really is just from a visibility point of view, it makes it a lot easier for not only an operator, but anybody to recognise that something needs attention or something is wrong. Yeah.

 So even apart from that, I mean, you can also see that you’ve also got the Fifty Shades of Grey type thing here. And even if it’s not needed for a recipe management type system reporting, they already like the theme. And they said, yeah, this looks clean. They want to keep with this. Yeah, yeah. So, so that’s actually the.

 You know what the worst thing is now, you change something on a Wednesday. Um, for instance, there’s a lot of product or a new product, and you make a new bill of materials. And then Monday morning, the guy comes from the factory and says, I can’t do anything. So what is your problem? He says, there’s no bomb in the system. Um, or the lab comes back and says, I can’t do my quality and says, why? Because there’s no bomb in the system. So that’s amazing. So it keeps everybody on their toes as well.

 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, yeah, quite an extensive list. Um, and this is all database interactions.

 Yeah. So, so that’s, of course, you know, just a made-up list not to give any of their products away. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t know if I think you guys have looked at extracts in some, uh, data crystals, but, uh.

 Yeah, I don’t even read the details.

 I think you all get a lot of fun creating this stuff.

 Yes. Yeah. Very nice that you asked for a couple of suggested names for an imaginary. Uh, that’s really cool. Um.

 Yeah, so it’s just, you’ve got a main view for recipe management, and then we use, um, the side panels and so on for maintaining the supplementary or the adult-type tables, so they can go and add products and add their bombs.

 You know.

 The nice.

 The thing about it is I don’t have to actually type in anything, I can copy and paste, which is amazing.

 Absolutely. And do you in terms of security, do you have any, uh, in terms of who can add edit view only? Are there any different security levels?

 There are definitely specific security levels to which I need access to the recipe management. And then of course, the lab guys that they’ve got access to, to their portion of it. And then of course, the operators to their portion.

 And the lab, that’s, that’s essentially data entry that they’re doing, uh, that feeds back into the system.

 Yes. Yeah.

 Okay. Very nice.

 And then, of course, um, even on those views, there’s some quality-of-life type things when they insert those steps; you always make sure that a recipe’s steps are sequential. You only allow them to add a specific step. You can’t go from Step six to Step eight.

 Correct.

 All these types of checks and recognition allow you to build that type of functionality.

 That workflow with those steps. Yeah. And obviously, there’s a full audit log. What you alluded to earlier, there’s not only the data, but there’s a full audit log available as well. This, I think, is a video, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah, it’s a video.

 It’s a video. And then, but yeah, this is now for the lab guys. What they can see, they can actually go into the batches that have been produced on the CSS and the flight plans. And from here on they can go and enter their results. Um, this, this, this is me entering results due to my very rigorous testing of that specific, uh, stabilised logic compound. Right.

 Did you apply any kind of guidelines around potential deviations in data? So in other words, it could only be between one and ten. Did you provide any? Yes.

 You see the other.

 Problem.

 On those fields you can only. I can’t remember, but it’s only a specific number of digits. Okay. That’s something else.

 You see that, that that the product that he’s got there is that comes from the factory.

 Yes.

 So if the factory makes a mistake. This mistake goes all the way through. Yes. And they’ve got the means to change that in the lab. If there’s a mistake in the plant.

 Yeah. As well as they can also do some manual entries if something happened that. Yeah. Um it’s a nice way for them to listen. We need to do a specific type of analysis. Then they can go and capture a batch manually as well. Add it to this list.

 Because they also the lab also does um, trials or new products.

 Yes.

 R&D, R&D stuff. So they need to be able to.

 See the certificate of approval.

 And the COAs. Yeah, there’s also some checking. It’s actually two different certificates. It picks up what type of, um, what types of tests were done, like rigid versus flex, that type of thing. Um, but they also only allow specific products to be grouped together. They can view up to how much ever they want to, if they send that type of batch over to a customer, like, okay, there are fifty batches of these orders.

 And these certificates of analysis, um, do they reside in a PDF format somewhere as well? Or do you, you kind of draw them from the system as you need them, or do you keep them? Well, both.

 Yeah, I think they do pull it off. It’s just sometimes easier for logistical stuff to go into a database they don’t have access to necessarily bullet themselves. But what I wanted to add to this is not just that it helps us have a bit more control. It also helps our departments, not necessarily not talking to each other, but from thing to do. Hey, you have to do your job. So what could happen? For example?

 What’s next? He needs to do what next?

 Something would have been manufactured, but the lab would maybe not necessarily know it’s there or to go, because you have to go and pull samples out so you can do your lab work. Um, they would then maybe take two or three hours longer, as they should do. Um, but now they get a prompt saying there’s something going on. Get your samples. You need to work on them when they’re done with their testing. The logistical team will get a prompt saying the goods are approved or disapproved. Either move it to the location to be sold or to a holding location, because they’ve got problems. Now, previously, that would sometimes take a day, two days, um, for someone to actually do something. Now they get prompted. So it just helps them flow more easily for us to manage. Um, and we can see where there might be a bottleneck. If not, maybe the lab is overworked. They’re too busy with R&D. They can’t get to QC. Maybe the logistics team need an extra member to start helping. It helps with, uh, personal planning as well.

 So you’ve got essentially you’ve also now have a workflow operational workflow that you didn’t have before. That’s fantastic. One of those unexpected benefits, which is which is great. Very nice. Um.

 Especially for you in a position.

 That you can sell everything.

 Right?

 Yes, one hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You don’t wait for three hours for a bit. You actually get a batch started sooner.

 So this is just a brief view of.

 The awesome visuals database interaction.

 The views that they have of the reactors themselves.

 Very nice and clean.

 And yeah, they’ve got a small overview of the reactor, but they can also, on the carousel, move to the three, um, variables. That’s more important for them while running a batch. But you’ll also see that, yeah, they’ve, they’ve got a batch configuration type system there that’s linked to those tables so that you only have specific values that you can enter. You make sure that it’s consistent throughout? And then on the right-hand side, you’ll have your interface with the operator, prompting him when to do what and giving him a chance to get that feedback.

 When accountability. Sorry. Just, just it’s when we were in a manual process, and you said about who was the guy here, that guy disappears. Now there’s some accountability as well. You can actually see who’s operator who’s doing logging. They confirm, yes, I have checked this. I have done this. So, that really helped a lot as well on the accountability side. Sorry for.

 No, that’s fine. I don’t get to see this screen. So I love it.

 Do you want to see them?

 No, he doesn’t.

 Yeah. Got other things to do. Yeah. I think the validation around operator kind of additions approval that validation is, is really, really nice to go back to, to see exactly who did what and who approved what. Um, it’s really simple stuff, but yeah, I mean, the ability to get that kind of insight is, is, is so nice.

 But the big thing is just to come back again to what they said, it’s even though it looks so straightforward and so simple, the big effect that it had on their outcomes and how consistent their product is to the variability that they used to see.

 Yeah.

 You know what the nice thing about this is? It now runs off the recipes.

 Yes.

 That’s it, fully. Um, so whatever I say there’s 10s in my recipe, this is the 10s. If I make that five hundred seconds, it changes here. So the guy on the floor just checks whatever he needs to do with his next step.

 Yeah, that’s very important. Yeah. There’s no manual decision making. Nothing. And it’s back to repeatability. What did I do last time that this batch was so good? Yeah. Keep it for every batch going forward.

 The big problem there is if there’s a stuff up where they look at you put two seconds. So yeah.

 That’s accountability, right? You can identify it at least. Yeah. Um, that SQL database doc is that kind of what sort of metrics are we looking at for those SQL databases growing? Is it, is it becoming a bit hairy or?

 Or the SQL? It’s, uh, on the SQL side or on the, the Microsoft, Microsoft SQL. So it’s, it’s one big entry per batch.

 Okay. I see.

 Yeah. So it’s, it’s not growing that large.

 Okay. All right.

 Fine. Um, we really try to streamline the way that we designed all of the tables. We made sure that it’s normalised.

 So that’s what I’m asking.

 Everything ties in together with decent primary keys, that type of thing. If you don’t do that, then it becomes a little bit unrealistic. Yeah. Fantastic. Um, and then if you just go back to that video. Yeah. Just go more to the end of it. Um, yeah. The one that showed the reactor. No, sorry. I don’t know if you can browse further in the video. I’ll scroll. Oh, hang on, hang on. I’m going to pause, and then I’m going to press next. Oh no.

 There we go.

 Okay. But I don’t know if you can just forward them. Yeah. Forward to the end of it. Yes, I can. Close to the end of it. Sort of. Yeah. Okay. Okay. From the run of complete. So it’s just to show that if you go a little bit further on, you’ll see the reports that it generates. Okay. It’s fine. You can play from here. But this is a requirement from them in the beginning, that after the batch is finished. And that was nice. The functionality that we could also use in Ignition. It will automatically send out an email, an email with the batch outcome. Okay. And automated email. Yes. Automated email coming out. Um, as well as then it provides a chance for the operators you’ll see there if they took longer on a specific step to provide some feedback. Why? What happened. So this essentially replaces your typical process logbook. You know, where you kind of, yeah, very, very nice.

 If they consistently take longer on step four, then we know our parameters are maybe wrong, or is it the new material? You know, is there some difficulty at the site with ergonomics, lifting our bags? You know, what can we do to make that quicker, faster? And yeah.

 It might be different on our side. It might be the guy comes a bit and says, Listen, I had to go slower because the material feels like it’s wetter, for instance.

 At least you can add the commentary now.

 We do rely on the operators to actually visually look at it because sometimes they feel it as well.

 Yeah, yeah.

So, you do rely on them quite a lot to know what they’re doing, but they didn’t feed back into this. And we can then amend our processes.

The nice thing is, yeah, the nice thing is they can, they can concentrate on more things that are more important because remembering what I need to do next is gone. Um, they concentrate on a specific point. Um, I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It might be in my presentation going forward. Um, there’s a level indicator and stuff like that. Um, but we can get there if it’s, if it’s here, I think it might be here. Um, but yeah.

 And the, and this, uh, operator input or what does that look like? Is it a touch screen?

 So it used to be this small.

 Okay. Okay. Now it’s.

 Nice.

 And beefy. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah.

 Operators generally.

 Are they the people who know best what’s happening to get their input?

 Based on their experience?

 Yes. Sure. Yeah. So you always have a guy who’s been there for 20 years. He knows the best, and he’s the most difficult to change.

 Yeah, absolutely. But what is also nice about the system now is that, due to the investigation into why each operator is doing what they’re doing, you’re getting some of that experience back into your system. Absolutely. If you have that, employee turnover makes your system smarter. Yeah. They can just now follow the prompts. You don’t have to rely on that. That is 100 per cent just expertise.

 What is it apart from the touchscreen? We added some visual arts as well. Telling them it’s simple. Yellow green right. You know, knowing okay, this is the wait period because it’s on green. Um, you have to start doing something now, right? Obviously, there’s a boil over. You know, just some visual stuff in there. That’s something. And it’s very simple, but it really helps a lot. Yeah.

 Nice.

 And I can look at the computer on the camera and say it’s supposed to be green. And you know, he’s sitting there, and you know, yeah. So yeah, that’s also there. But yeah, it’s amazing. This thing. It works.

 Yeah. The operator input, once you’ve digitised that, is that the right word? Digitise or digitalise, digitise, digitise, digitised, because very often that would exist in a paper trail somewhere. It would be a logbook. People would make some comments, and you have per shift for a couple of days, you have a couple of these log books, and you leave them, leave them in a corner somewhere. And all of that knowledge and learning that you can get from the operator stuff is never entered or used. We saw that at that chocolate place. Yes. Billions of books. Yeah. And you kind of look at this and say, how do you correlate all of this? We don’t.

 You remember there was a problem like this before? Where can I remember? Yeah.

 Yeah. So it’s really valuable. About a third way through this. Look there. Yeah. Yeah. December 2023. Um, December the forty-third. It’s going to be video as well, I think. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is just basically some entries into the tables and so on. Okay. It’s just some interaction. I don’t have any more slides. So I’m not sure if the, if there were some others.

 With our slides that we put through to you.

 There was another slide on.

 Yeah, that we sent through.

 Oh, okay.

 But I think we mentioned all of them. I think that was just from, from our perspective.

 From a visual point of view.

 So I don’t think we’ve missed anything major.

 It would be nice to, you know, it’s a pictures, it’s pictures of how it actually physically looks on the, on the floor.

 If there’s nothing, if there’s nothing proprietary there, that could harm your business, would you be okay with maybe sharing that picture? And we can.

 We can have a look and see if you’ve got the same.

 Yeah. Um, otherwise we can also share it off. It’s probably going to be difficult to find it now. I gave it some way. Yeah. We can, maybe we can, maybe do a kind of a version that would be.

 Because it’s always nice to actually see it.

 Yeah. To visualise what it looks like.

 Okay.

 The product itself and how.

 No, the actual, the actual, there’s a thing in here. It’s different. I mean, you see a recipe and it’s not the same.

 Yeah.

 I think the interesting thing is that I’ve just picked up on this is that there were a lot of unexpected.

 Gains from the project. You know, you set out to do one thing, but there were so many other benefits and things that came out of it.

 You’ve seen it. And then you don’t know what you don’t know. Yeah. Until you start looking at the data.

 You start out with the vision to say, I want to do this one thing. And whilst you’re doing that one thing, you realise, oh, hold on a second, we can add this and add this and add this. And it’s not much more effort, but the benefits are huge.

I think if you, when we sat down the first time around, we said, okay, what do you actually want to attend? And what we have now is 500 times bigger than what we discussed at the beginning. Um, and you can’t, you can’t think that far ahead. I’m sorry. It’s not a one-year process. Yeah. It will evolve, and it will evolve, and it will evolve constantly. And that’s the nice thing. So yeah.

 You can also see.

 That makes.

 Sense. You can also see the requirements that come from the clients. It’s, it’s a lot more directed at a specific thing than what it was in the beginning. Because I think they, they, they’ve seen what was possible. Yeah. What is possible and what they really want. Now you can definitely see the way that we approach everything, the way that we discuss. And once, once the fundamentals are ticked off, when I, when I say the fundamentals, I’m referring to the, to the compliance aspects, the safety aspects, the visibility, the validation, the lab one. Once all of those fundamentals are ticked off, then you start thinking about, okay, what’s next? Maybe a mobile view would be nice, you know, get the app on your phone, maybe look at something, um, you start thinking about broader utilities and energy usage in the facility. Um, somebody, somebody in not necessarily finance, but usually finance, they get to see a screen, and they go, ah, I would like a view of that somewhere, and you can do that. Now I don’t have the data, but also the consolidation of different systems into one system, because it’s now possible to have one version of the truth and one place to manage everything, even though it I mean, traditionally that would have been three different systems. Yes, it is the three different systems.

I mean, we had the whole thing that we actually did a trial on, on one of our batches. And you know, you get a guy that’s been there forever, says it’s not the same.

 Yeah.

 Okay, and you can physically see it’s not the same. Everything just takes way longer, although the process is the same. The product is not the same. Okay. Um, and then the big bosses, but what’s not, and that’s very difficult to explain. And actually, strangely enough, when I started with this new thing, I took by accident our trial with a standard product. And you can see the difference. There’s a huge difference in in the process, actually. It’s weird. Um, but now you can tell the guys, okay, the guys were wrong on the right on the floor because they say it’s not the same to see it. They minute by minute. It doesn’t make sense that it’s not the same. Yeah. But afterwards, it does make sense. Yeah. You put the tubes on top of each other.

Yeah.

 Amazing. That’s so nice to hear that there was a vision. Well, it wasn’t necessarily a vision. There was an initial requirement regarding safety. Um, and that evolved into something which is now serving you really well. That’s amazing to hear. Um, well done. I’m sure you obviously had to open the chequebook. That’s always the thing.

 So I think systems traditionally in our company are very old school, very, very old, driven by traditional books. And then maybe the younger generation, we would see that there are so many more benefits in having systems in place for so many other things. So it’s easy. It’s actually easy. So once the results come out, you can actually see it was worth every cent.

 But the technology is just an enabler. No. Yes. No, no. You know, but it’s it’s a if, if you if you have the vision, you do it properly. It’s an incredible enabler, um, of people and all the benefits that you’ve spoken about. So it’s a big step to do that. And you’re not alone. Most, most run like that.

 The nice thing about this whole thing is our sister companies, um, starting to look at it. Maybe that’s a good idea. Yeah. So yeah.

 There’s one of you. Maybe just give them a view, and then it’ll be nice to understand some kind of standardisation across multiple, because then you can start comparing apples with apples. You know, once you have standard sets of reports and things, then across different facilities, you can start comparing do comparisons. Yeah. I mean, if you can see consistency in another process throughout the batch, what are you guys doing differently? Yeah. Because you’ve got something to compare with now. Amazing. Well done. We will if it’s okay, we will get the other view and share it. So it’s not it’s not. Yeah, it’s not uh, uh, available to steal, if that makes sense. Uh, but I think it would be nice to also get that, that visual view give people the visual view. We can share that often.

 Got any.

 Questions? Yeah. We’ve got two minutes left. Yeah. No questions, no questions. Just a monologue.

 From the Six of us. It’s an easy one. Yeah. Um, and everyone’s, uh, everyone’s a free, a free gift. That’s interesting. Nobody needs socks. I always say there’s no such thing as a silly or stupid question, but sometimes we get silly questions just because people know the first question gets a gift. Um. Uh, well, if there are no questions. Okay, fantastic. So, a comment or a question? Let’s see. If you could quantify, what would you say the ROI has been on the business as a whole? By the sound of it, the operators are most efficient because of the system as well as the system being more consistent. So the operator benefits. But in terms of ROI, could you provide a guesstimate percentage? If you don’t want to talk numbers or percentages, is that possible?

 It is a very difficult thing. Um, you know, when you have failed batches in our industry, you can actually work it away easily. We can always rework our batches, but with less of that to do, your productivity obviously goes up because you don’t have to rework any old stock at all. If you want to get into your business. And we could visibly see that. That we don’t have a lot of failed batches that we now need to rework because. Of the system to put it in a random value. It’s very difficult. We are still working on it. I think eventually we will have an answer. But as we’re still evolving, still getting data. Still looking at it. Okay. There is no.

 Well, let me explain to you quickly something that we. Have seen it is a manual process, um, that we had in the beginning, um, to do two batches a day. Took twelve hours.

1. Yes.

 Sometimes more. Okay. Um, now if I started at six o’clock, ten o’clock. The first batch is done.

 Wow.

 Okay. So okay, um, we also saw that last year, when we had huge orders for products, we nearly doubled our output. Um, which I, I think might not, uh, be one hundred per cent, uh, because, I mean, you can double the output.

 Yeah. There’s some margin.

 Of. Yeah, of course, but it is easier to do for batches than it used to be to do for batches.

 Before, with what you’ve got, rather than actually investing in it.

 Get go. We say this project is not necessarily intended to have a return on investment. It was obviously for safety first. Yes. But then the other benefits came around. So, so, um, those benefits I think outweigh anything else that we can do.

 I mean, they, they, the question was also asked how long it takes to run off? Okay. Um, now you can see it. It is constantly exactly the same.

Um, and then they say, But how do you do that? How can it be that quick? Um, it’s because of the system. That’s the fact.

 Really good question, Stefan. Thank you for that. I always like it when people try to understand the return on something. The great thing about these, the software portion of it is the licenses, obviously perpetual. So you have the system in place.

 Um, sorry. Maybe what I can add is that, because we replaced some of our systems, we saved on software costs, since we no longer have the QC system running for the lab. Yeah, that’s now been replaced with the full suite of what we’re doing now. So there’s savings in terms of some of our software licenses. Definitely.

 So that’s, that’s a good point.

It’s nice to hear. So I just want to add a few. You’re talking about reduced runtime on your boilers, less maintenance, consistent product quality, less waste, and the ability to run more batches. And then, as well as saving third-party type costs.

 Oh, there’s got to be a clever finance guy somewhere who can start, maybe spend a day, and run a couple of numbers.

 To give it up then.

 But I’ve saved you so much. Um, I think it’s another question for John. Got two more questions. The first question from Juan. How do you manage the life cycle of your plant through the system? So that would be in terms of asset life cycle, I would imagine. You could probably start doing that in terms of hours run. You could start doing things like.

 Look, I think you can do that. Maintenance all depends on, um, look, we, we don’t just make, you know, after Covid, people don’t just keep stock. Okay. So there’s also safety, safety stock, um, forecasts and stuff like that. So if the plant needs to run, it runs; if it needs to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, that’s what we do. If it doesn’t, we shoot it off. So it’s very dynamic. Um, the nice thing is you can start, switch it on after a week, and have exactly the same thing we had a week ago. Okay. The same product, the same quality, the same thing. So it’s the consistency of it that’s more important.

 Okay, so you could probably, if you’re tracking the kind of production times, the run times, the machine state times, you could probably start tracking things. Yeah, yeah, it might be a nice next thing to do. Great question. John. Stefan. Sorry, you did ask the first question. So we will definitely send you. Those. I’m just distracting because I can’t remember the name. Uh, gift box. Uh, we’ll, we’ll definitely do a nice. We’ve got some new T-shirts and some new socks. Stefan, thank you for the question. We’ll send you something. And the one you mentioned. And John, thank you for your question. You mentioned there was another one. Yeah. Last question from anonymous. Why did you decide to use Jock and his team when this project started? So in the selection of Sarah and Jock is the.

 So that was really tough. People in the industry are asking, Do you know someone who could do this and were the first to come up? Okay. Um, and we didn’t really, after that, start looking anywhere else. You know, I think we clicked immediately. They understood what we were trying to say. Um, so, so it wasn’t like a Google search. It was word of mouth. Okay, that’s good. And then yeah, it we just click as a team immediately. So, so yeah, we could have gone out in the market and try and run around, but I think once you’ve got a comfortable feeling with someone who understands and talks the same sort of principles and what you want to do, you stay with that.

 Same values as well.

 I think, um, on my side, it’s because he had, um, experience in our industry. Yes. Although it’s mining, it still makes a difference. You know, the guy who was on the finance put something together, uh, as a finance team, for instance, and did not know about the factory. He knows what the factory does look like and what the issues is. And, um, learning from these mistakes. Previously, um.

 That’s the value you.

 Get, correct?

 Absolutely. Yeah. Word-of-mouth referrals are always the best. Yeah. And it’s most authentic. So well done, Juan. Um, thank you so much for your time. Um, I don’t think we have any more questions. No more questions. Oh. That’s it. All of them are really good questions. Thank you to everybody for joining us. Um, thank you, gentlemen, for being here. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, so, um, passionately, but also candidly and openly about the journey that you’ve been through. Um, it looks like there’s lots more to come over the next little while. We can only wish that your facility is healthy, flourishing, producing, and adding to our economy. So, so thank you for that.

Last lot from us as we leave you today. Do not forget that you get free training. If you have a canary license, an Ignition license. Training for us is not a revenue stream. We want to ensure people are enabled and trained. We run training every second week um at the moment. Um, so if you’re interested in training, please start with Inductive University or Canary Academy. But if you want to take it a step further, join us, uh, virtually online every second week, uh, or here in the office, if you have a team of people that you potentially want to bring for training. Um, but there is a little link there to check out our training schedule for the rest of the year. And that’s it. I think we’re six minutes over time. It’s not too bad. No, it’s not too bad. It’s been twenty minutes in the past. So, that was pretty good, and I think there are no more questions as well. Yeah. No more questions.

Cool. Guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks.