The Power of Community is Coming to a City Near You!
By Luan Taute
09 June 2026

Building What’s Next in Logistics and Warehousing Using Ignition

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If you’re working across multi-site operations and still dealing with fragmented visibility, reactive maintenance, and underutilised data, this one’s for you.

In our latest Industry Quarterly Webinar, we invited our partners at SyncSystems to join us and walk us through a real-world project built for a major e-commerce company that tackled exactly these challenges head-on.

SyncSystems built a centralised Operations Centre designed to support multiple client sites across DC distribution and e-commerce, giving teams a single, accessible platform for remote monitoring, performance tracking, and smarter service delivery.

Here’s what we’ll cover:
• A deep dive into the Ignition architecture and design decisions that made this project work.
• How the Ignition MQTT Engine and Sparkplug B specification enable structured data delivery, automatic tag creation, and seamless UDT integration.
• The latest updates across Ignition, Sepasoft MES, and Canary Data Historian.

This session is built for engineers, system integrators, and operations managers who want to see how modern SCADA architecture can solve real operational problems, not just in theory, but in practice.

SPEAKERS

Jaco Markwat
Team Lead
Element8
Gary Lowenstein
Sales Engineer
Element8
Dirk van Niekerk
Automation Engineer
SyncSystems

00:00:45.000 –> 00:00:57.000

Okay, good morning, are we live? Yeah, we’re live. Fantastic. Good morning, we can hear us. So, I’m never sure either. It always feels a bit awkward. And then, yeah, if everybody can hear us, just give it a thumbs up.

 

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Anybody can give us a thumbs up.

 

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Yeah, there we go. Cool. Fantastic. Who gave us a thumbs up? Yeah, we’ve got a few there. Good morning and welcome to the Building What’s Next quarterly webinar.

 

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I’m with Element8, my name is Jaco from Element8. If you haven’t joined us for these sessions before, it is essentially a quarterly update of all the latest and greatest on the product side, maybe some new technology features, some community news of what we’ll, of which we will share today.

 

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But more importantly, we also go through a success story, a case study showcasing some of the good work that our partners have done. And today is no exception. But before we get started, if you’re not familiar with Elma data, this is the first time joining us.

 

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Very briefly, who we are. We are the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor of the Ignition Industrial Automation Platform, Sepasoft MES, and Canary Data Historia.

 

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We exist to ensure a data-driven, flourishing future for industry. Our guiding principles are to humbly serve our community and industry, learn from others, and most importantly, share what we’ve learned.

 

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And what do we provide? In other words, what we sell is intuitive and scalable industrial technologies that break down the barriers of cost and complexity. So that is Element8. Thank you for joining us. You could have done many other things this morning. You chose to spend your time with us, and we appreciate it.

 

00:02:32.000 –> 00:02:48.000

So who’s with you this morning? As I said, Jakub, I’m the team lead. I’ve got Gary Lowenstein with me. Good morning, everybody. Sales engineer. And then on the showcase side, the clever people who joined us for the webinars this morning, we have Dirk.

 

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Dirk Van Niekerk, Automation Engineer with SyncSystems. Good morning. Morning. Morning, everyone. Nice to have you here. Thank you very much. You’re going to show us a couple of brag slides and some public work that you’ve done. Looking forward to it.

 

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Yeah, just a reminder: if you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

 

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We do have a couple of minutes at the end reserved for Q&A, but we are always happy to answer questions as they come in when we can. So if you have any questions, yeah, let us know, and Luan, thank you, Luan. We never have your photo on there, and you’re the one who kind of runs the whole show.

 

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Luan, who looks after our marketing and our content, will handle any questions that come through.

 

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All right, starting with a couple of product updates, most notably on the Ignition side, 8.3.6.

 

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That was released on the 21st of April. Is 8.3.7 due next week? I believe so, yes. Yeah, just can’t keep up with the updates. What’s great about them is they are small little updates.

 

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So, it’s quick and easy to get them in, and it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to have any negative effect on your organisation. You know, it’s not a big, major thing that you’re changing, going from 8.3.6 to 8.3.7; it’s a small update.

 

00:04:08.000 –> 00:04:23.000

Yeah, small incremental updates and additions as opposed to large unwieldy. Yeah, you don’t need to go out for 10 days. Pretty easy to do. So 836 was released on the 21st of April, and maybe some things that you would have missed between 835 and 836.

 

00:04:26.000 –> 00:04:40.000

I’m gonna say 3 highlights. There are quite a few, but the first one is GDS, which we call the Global Discovery Server. So you now have the ability to automate your certificate management from multiple OPC servers and devices.

 

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from a single GDS or global discovery server. So with this functionality, you can use an external GDS to centrally manage a dispersed system. And this is really helpful to strengthen security, industrial control system security basics.

 

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So that’s quite a nice little feature. And then the second is a file-based security provider.

 

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So, it’s essentially a new file secret provider that lets you read secrets and files on disks.

 

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disk, a disk, or disks, as opposed to storing them internally on the gateway installation directory. Um, so that’s quite a powerful little feature, and again, all around security and vulnerability.

 

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Yeah, that’s quite nifty. It’s quite handy if you have these large, complicated tag systems with heavy use of override.

 

00:06:04.000 –> 00:06:08.000

Quite cool. I think that was on the request list for quite a while.

 

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So those are some of the updates around Ignition. Do we want to show the demo?

 

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Yes, let’s quickly do that, yes. There is a brand new, well, not brand new, it’s been out now for probably‚..

 

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just over a month, I think, or two months? Two months. Um, let me quickly bring up… I think it’s worthwhile to showcase that for a few minutes.

 

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So let me stop this share.

 

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And then I will share.

 

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It’s okay.

 

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The troubles of Mac.

 

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It’s definitely not a Mac thing. So you guys won’t be able to see it. So the Ignition public demo has undergone a complete rework.

 

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Probably the beginning of the year, maybe December. I can’t remember. It was early in the year. It was early in the year that I saw it. It was on the back of the 8.3 release. Yeah. So what’s great about it is that they’ve reworked everything in the demo. So the old demos are still there.

 

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But they’ve added all the new features in Ignition 8.3, and going forward, every time there’s a new feature, it gets added into this demo. And it’s just a really improved look and feel.

 

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to the whole demo. Just to remind everybody that all of the demos are available for download.

 

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on the Ignition Exchange, together with the 500-plus other resources. Feels like there’s a couple added every week. Absolutely. I remember a couple of weeks ago, I was saying, ” Oh, there’s 499. Yeah. And then suddenly it went to 500. Now it’s the last time I saw 530 odd.

 

00:07:59.000 –> 00:08:15.000

Yeah, 140. That’s incredible. Absolutely. So all the traditional industry demos that were on the previous demo site are still there. You still have the data centre, the water treatment, BMS, and I think it’s a food.

 

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This is the new one. This is the agriculture one.

 

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So I’m going to open it up here.

 

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It’s a really nice demo.

 

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So the demo is quite different to some of the other demos that you would have seen. Um, and this one’s not available for download. No, it’s not available yet. It’ll be available soon. Cool. What’s really useful about this one is

 

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go procedurally, step by step. You actually, I don’t want to say commission, but you configure your MQTT devices, you do a little bit of work in the gateway, so they almost talk you through an example of how you would practically do this.

 

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A step-by-step way of how to get your MQTT set up and running.

 

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But we’re not going to do that today. We don’t have the time. So we’re just going to skip right at the end to see what the end result looks like.

 

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This is essentially an overview of the application and the operations of this farm, which I see is in California.

 

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Do you have the ability to do a forecast?

 

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In terms of harvesting, harvesting times, ideal times, that interact with the SQL database, if I’m not mistaken. All of the weather add-ins are simply APIs that pull through. I really like this weather API.

 

00:09:48.000 –> 00:09:51.000

And they’re very similar to some of the other.

 

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ones that we would have seen, you can, on the fly, change your theme and your appearance of the application, which is always useful. And one of the great things is the standard ignition functionality of the dashboard, where users, authorised users, can go and build their own dashboards based on.

 

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The predefined widgets which are in the system. Blank dashboard, and you essentially, through the grids, you can add your components,

 

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Let’s do away with the forecast. We’ll resize it to that. Um, I’m not doing anything. Yeah, you can go and configure all of this stuff. It’s really such a great feature. Make the map a little bit bigger.

 

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There’s also the other thing that this includes. Of course, why are you playing with all your widgets?

 

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Oops.

 

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The Architecture Builder, which is also available for download.

 

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It’s got that whole architecture builder in the application, which is really nice to show you your architecture, what’s working, what’s not. It’s great. Yeah.

 

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And this is an overview. The architecture is actually live in terms of what is connected, sending, but it is an MQTT application as it is a distributed example of how we would typically use that. So it’s a really nice little demo, really.

 

00:11:18.000 –> 00:11:38.000

need to also help people understand what MQTT is. And then, of course, through the MQTT Wizard, of which we, of course, cancel all the steps, it really is a follow-along of how to configure on the Gateway client side, device side, how to eventually get a fully-fledged up‚ Yeah, charging us all the components that are involved, which is great.

 

00:11:39.000 –> 00:11:44.000

So yeah, nice new ad. Well, of course, we will share.

 

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Links of all of the resources that we’re sharing today. Any questions? I see we do have two chats. No, it’s our messages. Okay, cool.

 

00:11:56.000 –> 00:12:11.000

So that is a couple of highlights from Ignition. There’s a lot more. As we said, we are expecting 8.3.7 next week, um, Tuesday. It’s due for release, I think it’ll be Wednesday, our time.

 

00:12:11.000 –> 00:12:27.000

Then on the Canary side, version 26.2 was also released early April. And this is the latest version. I may have missed it as well. They’re also competing with Inductive in terms of updates.

 

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Um, so the latest version includes several announcements and security updates, but probably the most notable that’s been added is the Power BI add-in.

 

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That is essentially built on top of Canary’s Web API for consuming data into third-party applications. But very, very, very nice. It’s nice. What I love about it is that it’s well documented.

 

00:12:54.000 –> 00:12:58.000

Yes, the documentation around it is really fantastic.

 

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In fact, all of Canary’s documentation is really good. They’ve got the YouTube videos if you want to just get a quick.

 

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But the rest of the documentation is really, really good. Yeah.

 

00:13:11.000 –> 00:13:26.000

quite nice to have that native Power BI through the API. Just a note that you will need a trusted security with a private key for the VIN service that your users are connected to for that, but that’s pretty standard as far as security goes.

 

00:13:26.000 –> 00:13:38.000

And then on the collector side, um, not really a new feature, but the receiver service now has the option of writing data to a local store forward instead of directly to the historian. That’s more a‚Ķ

 

00:13:38.000 –> 00:13:56.000

backwards compatibility. Yeah, the store and forward service is much more robust than the old days we used to use. I say the old days, 2023, old days. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The way technology is moving. We used to use the sender-receiver service. Yes. And.

 

00:13:57.000 –> 00:14:11.000

With the upgrade to version 24, they changed all that to a single store-and-forward service. And now your receiver service can send to a store and forward, which is much more robust. So it’s a nice enhancement for‚Ķ

 

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You’ve got old mixed with new because you might have an old piece of equipment that’s still using the sender-receiver service. Yeah. And you want to upgrade to 24, 20, 26, too. You can write it to the new, to the new storm forward. Depends on what your architecture looks like and where you’ve deployed it.

 

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Cool. And then the store and forward time stamps are now the maximum one hour. Okay. Which is more efficient, I think. Less resources. Yeah.

 

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So that’s 26.2. As Gary mentioned, the Power BI connector is included with the Canary system. And it is very well documented. I think we’ll share the link to that specific resource, I think, for a lot of the Canary folks. That’ll be a nice one too.

 

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to read and understand, because Power BI is very popular‚

 

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end client for Canary data.

 

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Cirrus Link has announced Chariot 3.0. I think this was a week ago or recently, two weeks ago. Now, of course, if you’re not familiar with Cirrus Link, they are the developers of all of the MQTT modules.

 

00:15:21.000 –> 00:15:33.000

Um, that is native to Ignition, being the distributor, the transmission module, the agent, but they also have the Chariot server, which is really an enterprise and large-scale MQTT deployment.

 

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um, platform, and they’ve added version 3 of that. They’ve added a couple of nice integrations and performance enhancements. You know, they now have support for IoT Bridge for Snowflake.

 

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support for containerised developments like Docker. They have also improved their licensing flexibility, especially around redundant MQTT, the Chariot MQTT service. And there’s been some Spark plug B.

 

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Visualisation type enhancements as well. So yeah, that’s Chariot 3.0. And again, if you’re not familiar with Chariot, it really builds on the enterprise and large-scale MQTT deployment architecture and experience.

 

00:16:20.000 –> 00:16:37.000

Quick updates from our side. Very briefly, small things that you may have missed that are helpful. We have a pricing tool. I almost called it the new pricing tool, but it’s been out for a couple of months now. Massive thank you to Gary and Markus for building the pricing tool.

 

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This pricing tool is for us. We’ve always been transparent about our pricing and perpetual licensing costs. It’s always been public, but we haven’t had a local South African RAND-based pricing tool. So that is available now, version one of it.

 

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Version two will maybe be mobile-friendly. We’ll see how it goes. But it is available right now, and you can easily create your own RAND estimate through a couple of steps. It’s really simple and easy to select your product number.

 

00:17:09.000 –> 00:17:25.000

A number of different modules that will give you recommendations, work out the support and then you can also request a formal quote when you get to the end. So what it will do is that at the end, it generates a document for you, which gets emailed to us as well.

 

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And from that, we pick it up automatically, and we will generate a formal quote for you. Yeah.

 

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It’s not that we don’t like speaking to you; we love speaking to you, but now you’re going to help yourself, and then just request the final quote. Yeah, and if you’re not sure about what you need, reach out to us, and we’ll help you, we’ll guide you, for sure. I’ve also shared a link in the chat if you want to check out the tool.

 

00:17:49.000 –> 00:18:02.000

Fantastic. Thanks, John. And then the second tool, or calculator, or interactive tool is our total cost of ownership tool. A really, really nice, helpful tool.

 

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Modern future-fit aspects that you need to look at when considering a new SCADA system. We have also included this interactive tool that you can use to map your own infrastructure and requirements, and then you can get a bit of an idea of.

 

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Based on‚ I could probably say some of our competitors. No one specific, just kind of legacy stuff. We’ve done a mapping to kind of do a comparison, and this is quite useful if you’re trying to do a business case.

 

00:19:10.000 –> 00:19:24.000

Um, on the back of just risk mitigation of your legacy stuff that’s old, ageing, you need to potentially address that and migrate or modernise with something new. This is a resource that will really help with that.

 

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Pretty cool. Yeah, that’s beautiful.

 

00:19:27.000 –> 00:19:43.000

And then before we get to do it, maybe just the last little update, which is absolutely worth sharing. Massive congratulations to INTEG System Integrators, Jaco and Brian Cooper and the INTEG team.

 

00:19:43.000 –> 00:19:59.000

Their Head office is down in Paardvallei in Somerset West, which has become Ignition Premier Partners. There’s a yes, definitely. It’s a celebration. Don’t know who celebrated there, but it’s definitely worth celebrating. They become the latest Ignition Premier integrator.

 

00:19:59.000 –> 00:20:15.000

It is a phenomenal achievement, especially for a South African integration business. And it’s a testament to all of the hard work that the team has done and some of the phenomenal applications that they’ve developed. So massive congratulations to INTEG.

 

00:20:18.000 –> 00:20:24.000

Any. No other comments. No. Okay. I see it popping up on my screen. So thanks.

 

00:20:25.000 –> 00:20:41.000

Anything else before we do the Spanish Inquisition with Dirk? Let’s get on. Dirk is also showing us a couple of screens of some of the applications and project work that Dirk and the team have done.

 

00:20:41.000 –> 00:20:50.000

And then he said, no, he wants to show it live. And I thought he’d be very brave, but it’s always amazing to be able to show something live.

 

00:20:50.000 –> 00:21:07.000

So the context of this, and Doug will talk through it. This is a central operation center that was developed with Ignition. In this case, there’s no Canary or Sepasoft. This is a pure Ignition application developed by the team at Sync Systems.

 

00:21:07.000 –> 00:21:10.000

And it is really, essentially, in the kind of‚

 

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end-to-end warehousing logistics through to, kind of, end-consumer, kind of, industry.

 

00:21:17.000 –> 00:21:34.000

So that’s the background of this application. But Dirk, we probably want to kick it off with you and SyncSystems, who you guys are, what you do, and kind of your experience, if that’s okay. Perfect. Thank you, Jaco and Gary.

 

00:21:34.000 –> 00:21:43.000

So yeah, my name is Dirk van Niekerk. I’m an ECNI engineer at SyncSystems. I’ve been with SyncSystems since 2021, so about five years now.

 

00:21:43.000 –> 00:21:51.000

Um, just a brief summary on Sync Systems as a company. We were established in 2010, in the

 

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Mining and Heavy Industry as LSDK Project Delivery Company.

 

00:21:56.000 –> 00:22:04.000

Our core business module was there for the electrical control and process automation for the mines and that environment.

 

00:22:04.000 –> 00:22:13.000

Only around 2010 or 2018, we started looking at the unit handling space. Okay.

 

00:22:13.000 –> 00:22:25.000

The logistics side, the warehouse management‚ Is that what it’s referred to in logistics unit handling? We would refer to it as unit handling. Okay.

 

00:22:25.000 –> 00:22:41.000

Those are all sort of the same thing. Okay. So by 2021, we started a strategic partnership with a company called Interol. They were the mechanical providers to the roller belts, to the conveyor systems, and we became their.

 

00:22:41.000 –> 00:22:48.000

I would call in-house electrical and automation partner for the jobs.

 

00:22:48.000 –> 00:23:06.000

This really strengthened our position in the package handling sector. And by 2023, we became a fully fledged mechanical, electrical and control integrator. We started a second company called Sync Systems Automation.

 

00:23:06.000 –> 00:23:11.000

They started doing what Intel was doing as well.

 

00:23:11.000 –> 00:23:21.000

supplying the mechanical stuff. Okay. And this package of supplying mechanical, electrical automation really helped us to become a.

 

00:23:21.000 –> 00:23:23.000

a…

 

00:23:23.000 –> 00:23:40.000

partner to our clients. So we started becoming a strategic partner to the likes of Takealot, Courier Guy, Shoprite, Foschini Group, just to mention a few. And since we were now no longer just providing them with a project or a product, even.

 

00:23:40.000 –> 00:23:53.000

we were providing them a solution and a partnership. It’s not a hit and run. It’s a horrible term, but it’s not that. Yeah, it’s not a drop-and-disappear. Exactly. Our clients were used to having.

 

00:23:53.000 –> 00:24:03.000

They have to deal with their own mess. So we really saw the gap in the market where they needed some.

 

00:24:03.000 –> 00:24:12.000

Robust automation, more operational awareness and visibility, and long-term technical support, so they can rely on.

 

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This shifted our business model from cradle to grave.

 

00:24:19.000 –> 00:24:21.000

Approach. Yeah.

 

00:24:21.000 –> 00:24:37.000

Doing that, our maintenance team started seeing some gaps in visibility, and that’s basically where we started thinking of this operation centre and how we got a flow rolling. Well, we need some visibility, more visibility here, more visibility there.

 

00:24:37.000 –> 00:24:46.000

And yeah, that is really as opposed to having eyes on the screen at the site. Exactly. And in the next couple of slides, I’ll start.

 

00:24:46.000 –> 00:25:03.000

Talk about the problems we start seeing and where we think the operation center actually started showing value. Nice. So yes, just a couple of things that we’ll talk about during this presentation are the operating challenges we saw, and what a typical site would look like.

 

00:25:03.000 –> 00:25:20.000

any of our clients, what architecture we selected and what criteria we had to go through to select it. And then, really, what value we started seeing from our service department, from SSA and from our clients themselves.

 

00:25:20.000 –> 00:25:31.000

And then the last kind of thing, I just quickly want to talk about what we see in the future, expanding what works to our operating centre, a forward-looking building. Yes, very nice.

 

00:25:36.000 –> 00:25:46.000

like I mentioned, the main problem we started seeing on site was that the local control system and reporting system is quite‚

 

00:25:46.000 –> 00:25:48.000

Well, it works well, but‚

 

00:25:49.000 –> 00:25:59.000

It’s all in silos. At each site, even multiple sites for one client, we’re working in silos. Is that because the sites are very often so different?

 

00:25:59.000 –> 00:26:08.000

They’re different in architecture-wise, network-wise, and just the physical locations all over South Africa, and sometimes even international, so‚

 

00:26:08.000 –> 00:26:15.000

Different managers, all at the same company, for example. Therefore, the sites‚

 

00:26:15.000 –> 00:26:27.000

are built in, I want to say, silos is the right word. Yeah. They look and feel a little bit‚ It’s unique. It’s unique, yeah. And they’re built at different times. Built at different times, different engineers from our side even had.

 

00:26:27.000 –> 00:26:30.000

Well, different sites, so it doesn’t always

 

00:26:30.000 –> 00:26:45.000

relate in the same naming conventions or the same look and feel. Yeah. And some sites may have, for example, if I look at the ignition site, some of those sites may have a gateway. Maybe there’s an operation that runs an ignition edge.

 

00:26:45.000 –> 00:26:57.000

For sure. Um, it’s, it’s all very different from that infrastructure point of view as well. We try to, to uniform in the way that we rolled out our engaging gateways, but for sure.

 

00:26:57.000 –> 00:27:08.000

Different budgetary constraints would make us need the edge license here. Yeah. Some clients don’t need the full gateway solution; they just need some small visualisation.

 

00:27:08.000 –> 00:27:20.000

Um, but yeah, so not all of them look the same. Yeah, of course, yeah. Other problems we also started seeing is, um, what we call a reactive maintenance team.

 

00:27:20.000 –> 00:27:35.000

If the client reports a problem, we could look at the problem and solve it. Or if we by chance log into a system and see there’s a problem, we’ll try to solve the problem. We didn’t really like this reactive system. It’s costing downtime.

 

00:27:35.000 –> 00:27:50.000

Yeah. And we’d prefer to have a proactive system. So that’s another point where we thought, well, the operating system will for sure allow us to be proactive. Some kind of early warning systems, even getting trains on recurring problems. So we can start.

 

00:27:50.000 –> 00:28:05.000

Nailing down where little bottlenecks happen due to problems or faults really started. We started seeing the value in having something that can tell us instantly, so we can be proactive and long-term.

 

00:28:06.000 –> 00:28:22.000

Absolutely. And if you have the ability to, whichever one of these clients or scientists, the ability to solve a problem before they’re even aware of it. Yes. That’s ideally what. Well, in the next slide we speak exactly about that. It’s called.

 

00:28:22.000 –> 00:28:30.000

Did you go to the next slide? Oh, there we go. Situational awareness. So, yeah, exactly what you said. If we can tell the client before they even know.

 

00:28:30.000 –> 00:28:43.000

Why this is important is that we need to know where it happened, why it happened, how serious this is, how we will need to respond, and then, obviously, how long this has been happening, and how long we have been impacting our client.

 

00:28:43.000 –> 00:28:46.000

We try to do this‚

 

00:28:46.000 –> 00:29:03.000

through the right pipelines. So we don’t necessarily have to bother the engineer if it’s something technical that the technician on site needs to handle. And we definitely don’t want to tell the client until it’s resolved so that they can be assured that we’re on top of the problems.

 

00:29:03.000 –> 00:29:19.000

Because part of being in this partnership with these clients of ours is that we want to push the throughput as much as possible. We want to see them grow. We want to have control over the maintenance and make sure they don’t have unnecessary.

 

00:29:19.000 –> 00:29:28.000

During downtimes, we want them to be as good as they can be. Yeah. Pushing their socks to maximum capacity all the time. Yeah. Part of that is‚

 

00:29:28.000 –> 00:29:43.000

They’re solving the problems before they need to worry about them. Absolutely. And I like the alerts and notification chain of command that you mentioned. Yes. Making sure that the relevant people are alerted at the relevant time, as opposed to just.

 

00:29:43.000 –> 00:29:46.000

throwing it out to everybody.

 

00:29:46.000 –> 00:29:48.000

bring the right people in at the right time.

 

00:29:48.000 –> 00:29:50.000

Yes, that makes sense.

 

00:29:50.000 –> 00:30:04.000

So, a typical site would start with the Ignition server. We’ve got databases, client databases, our own databases. We’ve got Oracle on most of our sites. We’ve got multiple.

 

00:30:04.000 –> 00:30:15.000

areas that we need to connect to. Whereas I’m a historian for tracking throughput, we’ve got barcode scanners that we need to maintain. Commission is great for trending.

 

00:30:15.000 –> 00:30:32.000

Where a package is in a frame for a barcode scanner, we can see over time if a package starts shifting downwards, we know that the barcode scanner has been bumped, or that it needs to be realigned or recalibrated, which really helps us do the preventative maintenance that we need.

 

00:30:33.000 –> 00:30:46.000

What do you want? It means a new cable tie. You could say so. Just means we need to double operate this. This section here, don’t come here. Yeah. You’re bumping up our scanners too much.

 

00:30:46.000 –> 00:31:04.000

And then the PRC is also the main control system of the site. So we need the visualisation to show which conveyors are running, which e-stop has been pressed. And yeah, I like what you said. The data usually already exists. The challenge is extracting, structuring, and making it useful centrally.

 

00:31:04.000 –> 00:31:18.000

Yes, that’s so true. The data is… without context, it’s just data. It’s nothing else, until you add context. That’s with everything. With every single industry, you see that they’ve all got all this data. Yeah.

 

00:31:18.000 –> 00:31:35.000

But they can’t use it because they don’t understand. Yeah, you need. You need to create context between data sets for it to be valuable. And there is also the potential. I don’t know whether they call it manufacturing or mining. They call it kind of like.

 

00:31:35.000 –> 00:31:45.000

plant operations, balance of plant. There is absolutely an opportunity to include other disparate but relevant and.

 

00:31:45.000 –> 00:31:50.000

Data silos, other data silos from other types of systems, include that, because the more you add.

 

00:31:50.000 –> 00:31:58.000

With context, not just throwing it in a data lake, but the more you kind of add together with context, the more useful all of that becomes.

 

00:32:00.000 –> 00:32:16.000

It also becomes useful when you can compare sites to each other. So if you’ve got a recurring theme on one site, well, chances are you’ve got the same recurring theme on a different site. You just didn’t know about it because again, we’re working in silos. We’re not talking to each other.

 

00:32:16.000 –> 00:32:32.000

And that even happens within a single client across different sites. That happens as well. So bridging this connection between sites, having apples for apples all the time, really shows us, oh, we’ve made these mistakes on these sites, but we fixed it. Here’s how you fix it on this site.

 

00:32:32.000 –> 00:32:48.000

Yeah, yeah, that’s so important, you know, uniform, unifying and making it all look the same on one central point is very important. Yeah, I think that’s the 1st point. They’re different site architectures and naming conventions. Make it look all the same. Yes, somewhere. That’s the 1st point. Yeah.

 

00:32:48.000 –> 00:33:08.000

Yeah, sometimes that’s a bit of a disaster, depending on what that naming convention looks like, by the‚ I don’t know, maybe the engineer at the time that designed or developed? It could be quite a Well, it’s mostly different. Yeah. And the luck‚ the nice thing about the operating set there is, well, I don’t care what it looks like on a different site. Correct. I know what I want from that site.

 

00:33:08.000 –> 00:33:25.000

I’ll just send it through MQTT to my gateway, and it’s going to look the same every time, thanks to the Spark Rugby. I know how to; I can create multiple UDTs based on the information, and it will all look the same for me, even if the sites look different themselves.

 

00:33:25.000 –> 00:33:27.000

That’s such a, that’s such a.

 

00:33:28.000 –> 00:33:38.000

Nice thing to hear. I’m going to make everything look the same. I’m not going to panel beat it. I’m just going to use standard functionality to make it look the same.

 

00:33:39.000 –> 00:33:44.000

Um, network restrictions under reliable connectivity, that’s always a challenge.

 

00:33:44.000 –> 00:34:04.000

Yeah, there’s always this OT versus IT fight. I’m pretty sure everybody has that fight all the time. But we’ve also lived in South Africa. Connection is not always that reliable. The client mostly doesn’t have a network that they can provide us. It’s all a local network that we provided ourselves. Sometimes the client asks us, what can you‚

 

00:34:04.000 –> 00:34:26.000

Help us with using the net, the architecture that we’re using, it kind of bypasses most of those problems. If the idea doesn’t have a problem, because of MQTT. Is quite secure. So they usually don’t have a problem using that. It’s essentially one port. Yeah, it’s allowing one port to go through. And you can configure your own security around it.

 

00:34:26.000 –> 00:34:38.000

Yes, that’s the big thing to remember, is that with MQTT, you can configure your own security around it. So whilst it’s one port, you can apply other security postures to that MQTT environment. Yep.

 

00:34:38.000 –> 00:34:56.000

And if it’s unreliable or disconnected, you’ve got the still-forward capability as well. So your data may be late, but it’s not lost. But you’ll see in the next slide when we talk about the architectures, if MQTT is luckily super lightweight, you can run it off.

 

00:34:56.000 –> 00:35:16.000

very small, um, computers, or even Raspberry PI’s, that also gives us the ability to put 4G SIMs hats on the PI’s, so we don’t even need reliable infrastructure, we just need a cell tower. Small, cost-effective, like, small-footprint, cost-effective architecture that you need. Yes. That’s the MQTT-enabled cell.

 

00:35:16.000 –> 00:35:25.000

And it needs to be repeatable. You need… You need a standard thing you put on the Pi, and just ship it to the site; someone plugs it in, and it just works. Yeah.

 

00:35:25.000 –> 00:35:33.000

Once you get permission from it to plug in. Yeah. Yes.

 

00:35:33.000 –> 00:35:48.000

You mentioned avoiding unnecessary changes to the PLC logic. That’s obviously critical. Yeah, that’s the important thing for us is we can’t have downtime on our sites ever. This MQTT solution is very non-intrusive.

 

00:35:48.000 –> 00:35:49.000

Yes.

 

00:35:49.000 –> 00:36:00.000

Implemented on-site, PRC doesn’t even know anything happened, the ignition server doesn’t even know anything happened, and the operators don’t know anything happened.

 

00:36:00.000 –> 00:36:03.000

And that’s great because every time you touch something.

 

00:37:10.000 –> 00:37:15.000

Ok.

 

00:37:16.000 –> 00:37:29.000

Notas.

 

00:37:29.000 –> 00:37:34.000

Too concerned, we’ve got their hardware doing the work for us with their permission.

 

00:37:34.000 –> 00:37:39.000

Um, going through a third-party MQTT transmitter.

 

00:37:39.000 –> 00:38:00.000

to a MQTT broker in the cloud. I’ve not given any specific names, because there are multiple you can use in the future. Part of what we would like to do is use Ignition as our MQTT broker itself, using the distribution model. We’ve got it. We would just.

 

00:38:00.000 –> 00:38:01.000

Hmm.

 

00:38:01.000 –> 00:38:17.000

During the proof of concept, we started just using the MQTT broker in the cloud. It’s just super easy to do. There’s nothing difficult about MQTT at all. Yeah. There are a number of MQTT brokers today. But either perpetual licensing or subscription.

 

00:38:17.000 –> 00:38:22.000

scales fairly easily as well. There’s no shortage of MVTT brokers, yeah.

 

00:38:22.000 –> 00:38:37.000

And then from the intricacies broker, we can go to our in-house Ignition server, where we’ve got the reporting module, we’ve got‚Ķ This is based at your office, yes? We’ve got our database where we’re storing information, and we’ve got some cloud database that we’re also using.

 

00:38:37.000 –> 00:38:48.000

I’ll show you in the live demo where we need that. And then we’ve got a third-party ignition module to help us with notifications to WhatsApp and email.

 

00:38:48.000 –> 00:38:54.000

All those nice, kind things. Is that Twilio or something different? I think it’s Twilio. Yeah.

 

00:38:54.000 –> 00:38:56.000

Fantastic. Okay.

 

00:38:56.000 –> 00:39:11.000

And the nice thing about this architecture is it’s easy to replicate. So we can plop down as many of those sites as we want. Yeah. Wait until they get to the broker’s work done. And for the monitoring of a site, it’s a really nice, lightweight solution. Really.

 

00:39:11.000 –> 00:39:14.000

It’s not a good solution. Nice.

 

00:39:14.000 –> 00:39:25.000

So this is the first version of your operation center at your office, eh? Yes. Okay. So you recognise our boardroom, we’ve got our service manager, Cindy Love.

 

00:39:25.000 –> 00:39:31.000

Quickly modelling for a few photos for us. The system was

 

00:39:31.000 –> 00:39:39.000

Made to assist her in her job. So she gets the phone calls from the client saying, we’ve got a problem. Can you send the engineer?

 

00:39:39.000 –> 00:39:41.000

We started seeing that it’s

 

00:39:41.000 –> 00:39:49.000

a lot of the same things over and over again. Yeah. And it takes her a lot of time to see who’s available, who she can send.

 

00:39:49.000 –> 00:39:52.000

Who’s the right person to send?

 

00:39:52.000 –> 00:40:08.000

Now we’ve kind of taken that off her plate, saying, well, here’s a dashboard. Here are all the sites we currently have relationships with. If something happens, you’ll see a little notification saying, go look at this. She can already pre-emptively send the technician, or the technician will.

 

00:40:08.000 –> 00:40:16.000

Get the WhatsApp, but she’ll know. She’ll be up to date on what’s happening, which site is down, and why the site is down.

 

00:40:16.000 –> 00:40:19.000

And Andrew, that really helps her. Yep.

 

00:40:20.000 –> 00:40:21.000

Nice.

 

00:40:23.000 –> 00:40:38.000

So we were talking about the pipeline for the right people getting the right messages. So, here’s an example of our WhatsApp messages we sent to a client about on-site events. So we’ve taken an East or pressed as a.

 

00:40:38.000 –> 00:40:44.000

example for this one. We can have the first layer, which is the on-site technician from SSA that’s.

 

00:40:44.000 –> 00:41:02.000

permanent base there. All the logic in terms of notifications. Yes, the nice thing about Ignition is that it handles all that stuff for us. We’re using different alarm pipelines; we’re using, um, Unity-specific alarms. Nice. There’s… there’s little effort I have to put in once everything is set up.

 

00:41:03.000 –> 00:41:09.000

And since everything is pulled through MQTT, the Spark plug B already formats everything.

 

00:41:09.000 –> 00:41:31.000

and pulls automatically detects and pulls attacks for us. So it’s it does it. Auto birthing. Is that the right term? Yeah, yeah, re rebirthing. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, it’s amazing. I can delete my entire MQTT folder by accident and just wait a couple of seconds. That’s actually what’s demonstrated in the Agri demo as well.

 

00:41:31.000 –> 00:41:46.000

So that’s really helpful. So the first notification is assigned to the technician on site where something happened, and then they need to go look at it. It gives the site name, the area and how important this site is.

 

00:41:46.000 –> 00:41:48.000

Cool. Very nice.

 

00:41:48.000 –> 00:41:53.000

Let’s say we didn’t have a technician on site

 

00:41:53.000 –> 00:42:06.000

Of course, he’s busy with other stuff. We’ve got an hourly downtime summary, so we can tell the manager or the operating manager on site, “Listen, your sorter has been down for an hour already.

 

00:42:09.000 –> 00:42:25.000

We rarely see this message because our technicians are quite on the ball. But let’s say it’s something not as critical as an e-stop, something very low priority. An important sensor has just been.

 

00:42:25.000 –> 00:42:35.000

misaligned a little bit. You’ve got down, or you’ve lost a little bit of throughput in the last hour. Maybe you need to send someone there just to go take a look.

 

00:42:35.000 –> 00:42:47.000

We won’t necessarily send our technicians for non-critical items. They need to be ready to handle the big stuff. And then the daily, or we can even do weekly reports to the.

 

00:42:47.000 –> 00:43:03.000

to the site managers or even the higher-ups, saying, listen, your site’s been running well or not well. Sometimes we can’t solve the problem immediately, and we need to tell them, well, your throughput has gone down for X, Y, and Z reasons. This is what you can expect.

 

00:43:03.000 –> 00:43:12.000

Most of them won’t even have to log into any of the sites to look. They just look at the summary, and they already know who to call and ask why.

 

00:43:12.000 –> 00:43:26.000

And that really just helps them know what’s going on. That’s the visibility that we’re trying to create. Definitely. You’ve got the causes of downtime, which is exceptionally, if you’re a manager, for example, the causes of downtime‚

 

00:43:26.000 –> 00:43:33.000

to identify who to involve to fix something. Yes. So that’s, that’s really useful to understand where.

 

00:43:33.000 –> 00:43:54.000

where the main downtime has happened. But also, this has been sent to him. Yes. Rather than reactive, he’s got to go and physically remember today, I’ve got to go and look at my report, or it’s Monday, I need to look at my report. He doesn’t have to log into anything. He’s getting this automatically on his device. And you become dependent on that daily, you know, if you don’t get it every day. That’s the one thing you saw.

 

00:43:54.000 –> 00:43:57.000

Clients who’d never had something like this.

 

00:43:57.000 –> 00:44:18.000

and had to do it the manual way. If they don’t get it, they start panicking. Why have I not got my report for a week, and they switched it off and what is dependent on it? We find it’s becoming increasingly popular as an alarm notification.

 

00:44:18.000 –> 00:44:29.000

No, it’s perfect. It’s an amazing tool to get just a quick notification. Oh, this has happened, like I can read it when I’m travelling, or whatever the case is.

 

00:44:29.000 –> 00:44:45.000

I don’t have that much access to my emails all the time. So getting an email report even is less useful than a quick WhatsApp every day or every week. It’s really pervasive. It’s really popular on WhatsApp. So I think most people already have WhatsApp.

 

00:44:47.000 –> 00:44:53.000

All right, yeah, I saw a statistic, 97% of users in South Africa are using WhatsApp.

 

00:44:53.000 –> 00:44:55.000

Yes, yeah.

 

00:44:55.000 –> 00:45:00.000

Dirk, thank you. Do you want to show us? Let me see if I can.

 

00:45:03.000 –> 00:45:06.000

I’m not sure how to share this one.

 

00:45:12.000 –> 00:45:14.000

Shit.

 

00:45:18.000 –> 00:45:20.000

I think I’m sharing‚

 

00:45:22.000 –> 00:45:37.000

Possibly started. Okay, let’s just drag it across so we can see it. But yes, you can work from your screen. So you’ll notice that I’ve just.

 

00:45:37.000 –> 00:45:53.000

removed any client-specific names and a small demo. It’s just to showcase what we can do. So you’re not. You’re not. There’s no risk that you’re exposing anybody’s operations or no risk.

 

00:45:53.000 –> 00:46:05.000

So we’ll first meet with a nice map from the Ignition Options at the WinRebel. On this, we are met with.

 

00:46:05.000 –> 00:46:07.000

Some of the sites.

 

00:46:07.000 –> 00:46:10.000

Obviously, as we grow, we’ll have‚

 

00:46:10.000 –> 00:46:15.000

Most sites are visible, but for now, I’ve got two sites as an example.

 

00:46:15.000 –> 00:46:35.000

You’ll see one of them has just gone black. That’s the alarm just being dealt with. If it’s got reds, that means you’ve got an active alarm on the site, and we can see the site in Durban doesn’t have any alarms. One in Johannesburg has been solved. Okay. Um, it’s back again, though. So, so, so just a bit of situational awareness, just through the colour of the pin.

 

00:46:35.000 –> 00:46:44.000

Yes, it’s already just this can be your home screen, the hover screen. If all the pins are black, you can go on today without having to worry.

 

00:46:44.000 –> 00:46:53.000

But we also have the native ignition alarms page, where we can actively go look at actual faults happening.

 

00:46:53.000 –> 00:47:06.000

So all of them are currently critical with sorting out what the customer deems important and whatnot. The alarm rationalisation tool may be‚

 

00:47:08.000 –> 00:47:12.000

Depending on alarms, what it looks like, and how busy it gets.

 

00:47:13.000 –> 00:47:19.000

Especially if you’re pulling in a lot of potential, a lot of alerts, highs and lows.

 

00:47:19.000 –> 00:47:34.000

Well, that’s also where the pipeline starts being useful. If you know that all these motors will fault on an e-stop, use the pipeline to make the launch easier for you to understand. That’s kind of what we started doing as well.

 

00:47:35.000 –> 00:47:41.000

Um, then, a quick thing I want to show is, so, I mentioned in the architecture that we’ve got

 

00:47:41.000 –> 00:47:53.000

a cloud database as well, which we connect to our home. So, we’ve got all our engineers and clients on a database with time schedules on who is currently.

 

00:47:53.000 –> 00:48:04.000

on standby. Fantastic. We can use this information directly in Ignition, so we can use it with the scheduling service from users.

 

00:48:04.000 –> 00:48:20.000

and start scheduling who needs to get the Twilio notifications. It’s essentially managing your desk of people who are available and checking. I don’t have to tell Cindy who to tell. She already has the schedule of who’s on standby, who needs to get a notification immediately.

 

00:48:20.000 –> 00:48:37.000

We are also expanding this to handle all the technicians on-site as well. So this is going to be just for the engineers. Lovely. But that makes it nice. So, not a SCADA in this case, but just managing resources to make sure that you’re available now. And it also has permanent.

 

00:48:37.000 –> 00:48:46.000

contact information for the customers, which helps on Twilio’s side. I don’t have to manually enter anything. It pulls it directly from this database, which resides in the cloud.

 

00:48:46.000 –> 00:48:53.000

Um, it gets updated by our service manager. Amazing. Lovely. Then, just for an example, one of the sites, so

 

00:48:54.000 –> 00:48:58.000

Another thing that clients don’t have that‚

 

00:48:58.000 –> 00:49:11.000

Create a visualisation of it, well, what’s all the information doing on the site? What is my throughput on site? They’ve got the local version, which is giving the same information, but this is not being.

 

00:49:11.000 –> 00:49:17.000

It’s not easy for them to access. They need to go for a walk or open a browser. They don’t have this at their fingertips all the time, necessarily.

 

00:49:17.000 –> 00:49:35.000

Um, us having the information locally means we can send enough information over WhatsApp, we can send them reports every week, it just makes their lives a little bit easier. Um, for this specific site, we’ve also got starting tracking on what the main causes of their problems are, and we can see on.

 

00:49:35.000 –> 00:49:45.000

On this specific system, the small sort on this side, we’ve seen the most problems, where the gap was closing too much. Well, now we can start looking at why.

 

00:49:45.000 –> 00:49:52.000

That answers the question of why we have shortcomings in this system. I just want to show you another page.

 

00:49:52.000 –> 00:50:03.000

I mentioned that we’ve got barcode scanning, um, position, so this table will show you actually where your packages are being positioned.

 

00:50:03.000 –> 00:50:13.000

You’ll see over time because we can do this for any time range that we’ve got. Okay. So, let’s go back to April.

 

00:50:14.000 –> 00:50:20.000

There was a noticeable difference in April somewhere. So you can see that some of the barcode scanners are now.

 

00:50:20.000 –> 00:50:33.000

It’s not necessarily the barcode scanner, but some package. So we know this on this site, specifically on this. But it’s a nice visual trend to understand if it’s moving, if it’s opening. We noticed that one of.

 

00:50:33.000 –> 00:50:48.000

The aligning diverters weren’t aligning all the way they should have. And we could see, well, over time, the packages started moving from this visual trend. You can see the barcode is going to give you the information that this is what’s happening.

 

00:50:48.000 –> 00:50:49.000

Pretty cool.

 

00:50:49.000 –> 00:50:50.000

Nice.

 

00:50:50.000 –> 00:50:56.000

And yeah, that’s the next thing. The volumes of packages that have been moved.

 

00:50:56.000 –> 00:51:14.000

And in the last slide, I’ll talk a bit more about how downtime actually can have a great impact on us. Yeah, it’s a lot of units. So quickly want to show, okay, this is the long page.

 

00:51:14.000 –> 00:51:18.000

And our engineering page, so this is typically where we

 

00:51:18.000 –> 00:51:21.000

have all the possible alarms for a site.

 

00:51:21.000 –> 00:51:34.000

And who is supposed to look after it? I’ve just redacted all information. That’s fine, that’s fine, we get the idea. Very nice. I just want to show on the other side that we also have a history of all the incidents that happened.

 

00:51:34.000 –> 00:51:39.000

Yeah, so we can go back for as much time as we could go and say, well.

 

00:51:39.000 –> 00:51:54.000

What happened last week? Because last week, something happened, and we didn’t get through. You can see in the trends that our throughput has gone down significantly. Well, we can go back and see, well, oh, this shoot has been full. And we can go look at all the instances of this shoot. This shoot’s been full a couple of times.

 

00:51:54.000 –> 00:51:58.000

Just in the last 8 hours, you see this shit has been full.

 

00:51:58.000 –> 00:52:01.000

About eight times.

 

00:52:01.000 –> 00:52:07.000

So that really gives us a lot of information about what’s happening outside because of all the visualisation that we need.

 

00:52:07.000 –> 00:52:13.000

And then lastly, I just want to show us this one page. I think it’s this one.

 

00:52:17.000 –> 00:52:27.000

This also gives us a nice indication of when the peak time is in our client sites. Visually, you can see our client start running.

 

00:52:27.000 –> 00:52:37.000

8 o’clock in the morning and stopped running at 4 o’clock. So we can see that is their peak time. When does the system need to perform its best?

 

00:53:09.000 –> 00:53:21.000

Publish the Ignition sites to our clients, so they can actually access their own information. See what you’re seeing. Seeing what we’re seeing in real time. That will also really help them. Nice. Lovely.

 

00:53:21.000 –> 00:53:24.000

Yeah, that’s what I wanted to share. Fantastic.

 

00:53:25.000 –> 00:53:38.000

Thank you for sharing. I know it wasn’t difficult, but it was tricky to avoid sharing your customer’s IP or information. So thanks for that. Appreciate it.

 

00:53:38.000 –> 00:53:40.000

That’s always the sensitivity.

 

00:53:40.000 –> 00:53:55.000

I’m just going to bring the slides back up again. Yeah, Ui design is very nice and intuitive. You know, it seems very easy to navigate. Yeah, yeah. And on the alarming, you could probably you would.

 

00:53:55.000 –> 00:54:00.000

Maybe want to start looking at, I say, one-on-one kind of alarm.

 

00:54:00.000 –> 00:54:09.000

philosophies and things like that, once you start focusing on it. I mean, one of the huge opportunities here is to start analysing.

 

00:54:09.000 –> 00:54:14.000

When these regular alarms come up, what is done?

 

00:54:14.000 –> 00:54:23.000

And start using something like the resolution was. Yeah, well, what the resolution is important, but also what that resolution was.

 

00:54:23.000 –> 00:54:27.000

In order to build up a database, you can then start using all these.

 

00:54:27.000 –> 00:54:43.000

the likes of machine learning and AI, so you can start reducing that time-to-resolution and maybe take more preventive measures around it. Yeah, that’s where the information becomes wisdom.

 

00:54:43.000 –> 00:54:45.000

Hmm. That you can learn.

 

00:54:45.000 –> 00:54:48.000

Yeah, they said information wisdom.

 

00:54:48.000 –> 00:54:56.000

I’m back up here. Thank you for sharing that live.

 

00:54:56.000 –> 00:55:08.000

Um, I think we’ve already spoken through most of these things. I think, I believe you’ve been through it, yes. You’ve just mentioned a stronger base for proactive maintenance discussions. Yeah, definitely.

 

00:55:11.000 –> 00:55:30.000

This is the impact, as you mentioned earlier. This is the impact. So a typical client would handle about 3000 packages an hour. Some of them handle a bit more. And if you have only four hours of downtime a month, that is 80,000 packages. But I would like you to think of it as 80,000 people being influenced.

 

00:55:30.000 –> 00:55:42.000

per month, by not getting next-day delivery. I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but some of the big package companies have started delivering to offices.

 

00:55:42.000 –> 00:55:53.000

5, so it’s still 7 o’clock. Yes. Most of us like to deliver our items to the office, where we spend most of the day. Correct, yeah. After 5, we’re not at the office anymore, so

 

00:55:53.000 –> 00:56:06.000

These are the kind of influences that having downtime has on real life. People cause a less-than-ideal user experience. Just look at the straight costs. So.

 

00:56:06.000 –> 00:56:16.000

You’ve got it. I see they run a shift. They run a shift from 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM. They run that shift. If they lose time in that shift.

 

00:56:16.000 –> 00:56:38.000

They now either have to run an overtime shift, which is significantly more expensive. We kind of looked at it, and the problem is that they never really catch up. That’s the problem. It’s like a run rate in cricket. Once you’re behind, you’re behind, and it’s difficult to catch up. So they do have time to run an overtime shift, but it’s so expensive.

 

00:56:38.000 –> 00:57:04.000

You don’t want to do it. You may not be able to do it in terms of the labour laws. You may not be able to run that overtime. So you lose 100 packages, you lose 100 packages. And what we see is the example I had was a shift where this company specifically runs from 8 to 4, but most of the companies run 24-hour shifts. You don’t get to catch up; you take the loss.

 

00:57:04.000 –> 00:57:12.000

Yeah. So having uptime is really important. And it’s all that confidence stuff. I saw something the other day. Confidence lost.

 

00:57:12.000 –> 00:57:17.000

It’s easy to lose confidence, but it’s so difficult to regain it. Yeah.

 

00:57:18.000 –> 00:57:37.000

Some of the future stuff you’re looking at doing? So yes, we’ve mentioned some of them. What some of our clients now started thinking is, well, it’s great that you’re showing us your system, but can you show us other systems that we’ve got? We’ve got a building management, we’ve got HVAC stuff, and we’ve got potentially a forklift.

 

00:57:37.000 –> 00:57:53.000

charges that we need to look at the batteries, I’m sure all of those have some API of some form. Some API, or some OPC server, or something that we can connect to. We can connect to all the information, and Ignition is great, because I think I mentioned that.

 

00:57:53.000 –> 00:58:11.000

How agnostic Ignition is: it doesn’t care how it connects; we can use Ignition for it. And having Ignition as a center gateway on all of these sites just makes well, I’ve already got the MQTT network available, so Infrastructure already exists. Infrastructure already exists.

 

00:58:11.000 –> 00:58:27.000

Connect me, and I’ll gather all the trending information and show it to you. So this will almost be a, you need to come up with a name for this thing, like an operations, like a three-letter acronym that sounds like an AI name. Yeah.

 

00:58:27.000 –> 00:58:43.000

Your system to manage your operation. Not a UAC, not a UFO. No. Call it a value-added dashboard. VAD. VAD, yeah. Maybe add an L in there, and then it can be VLAD. VLAD. For something.

 

00:58:43.000 –> 00:58:58.000

But absolutely, and I think once that infrastructure exists, it’s so easy to pull other things in. You would just have to, from an MQTT side, you’re fine because it’s fairly lightweight, but from a resource intensity, you would just obviously need to keep an eye on, you know, that health.

 

00:58:58.000 –> 00:59:04.000

Incorporating, for example, the Ignition that’s running on a site, incorporating that system.

 

00:59:04.000 –> 00:59:18.000

health, CPU, kind of availability, RAM, all of those things. It’s so easy to just pull all of those things in. Yeah. And we’re lucky that most of these sites are using great hardware.

 

00:59:18.000 –> 00:59:26.000

Great natural infrastructure locally. So it’s not. I don’t think we’ll ever have a problem. Yeah, those wires. It’s just running. Yeah.

 

00:59:26.000 –> 00:59:33.000

I think these are some of the screens that you shared. I think we’ve looked at all of these. That’s divert to fails.

 

00:59:34.000 –> 00:59:39.000

Bill, I’m sure you can share this afterwards for what we haven’t looked at.

 

00:59:39.000 –> 00:59:41.000

Closing thoughts.

 

00:59:42.000 –> 00:59:45.000

That’s your thoughts.

 

00:59:45.000 –> 01:00:01.000

As I said, centralised visibility creates faster support, better client conversations, and a stronger base for proactive maintenance. Definitely. And there’s so much more you can add to this. I know you’ve shared much more with Inductive Automation than this. They’re quite excited about this.

 

01:00:01.000 –> 01:00:16.000

So hopefully over the next couple of months, we’ll see the final result and the story as a case study, as a video case study. But thank you for sharing what you could. Really, really helpful and yeah, fantastic.

 

01:00:17.000 –> 01:00:36.000

Very thought-provoking. Yeah. Because it just shows what I can do. I see there are a couple of people who are giving you applause, dude. Well done. Thank you very much. Yeah, nice. Thank you. And again, thank you for sharing. I know it’s often sensitive stuff, so you could only share little bits and pieces, but it’s a very nice little project. It’s a very nice project.

 

01:00:36.000 –> 01:00:45.000

It is essentially little in terms of infrastructure, cost, and retirement. It’s not cheap or little, but I think the value that it’s adding.

 

01:00:45.000 –> 01:00:47.000

is huge.

 

01:00:47.000 –> 01:00:56.000

Yeah. And that’s always what people look at. They look at it and say, ” What value am I going to get out of it? Absolutely, and it doesn’t necessarily always mean a massive‚

 

01:00:56.000 –> 01:01:13.000

spend on infrastructure and related items. If you have the right security considerations and security hygiene, you could use really lightweight things to make it happen. Absolutely. Well done. Thank you. Thanks for sharing. And please thank your team as well.

 

01:01:13.000 –> 01:01:30.000

for allowing you to share. We are over time. Sorry about that, as usual. One minute, not too bad. We’ve been 25 min over. But that’s why we have these things on Fridays. We find that you are usually a lot more patient on a Friday.

 

01:01:30.000 –> 01:01:46.000

Just a very last note from us. I think we’ve mentioned this in the last couple of webinars, so you don’t forget, if you have an Ignition Gateway license, a Canary license or Sepasoft, you have free training if you’re not aware of it.

 

01:01:46.000 –> 01:02:04.000

We’ve tried to send as many emails as we can and mention it to people as often as we can. Um, you do have a free training seat. We would love for you to use that training seat. And what’s more, if you want to bring more people on training, we’ve now, incidentally, also added a few in-person training sessions, um, in Johannesburg.

 

01:02:04.000 –> 01:02:06.000

and Cape Town.

 

01:02:06.000 –> 01:02:24.000

If you do want to bring more people along, we want to meet you halfway. If you have a team of 20 that you want to bring on the two-day canary or the five-day ignition, if you pay for 10, we’ll do the other 20. We’ll match you one for one.

 

01:02:24.000 –> 01:02:39.000

Absolutely. We’re very passionate about making sure that you are enabled, and you are familiar with the software and the platform, and that you can help yourself. So if you have any questions about training, please let us know or scan that, but we’ll also share a link.

 

01:03:20.000 –> 01:03:23.000

But then, as well as we’ve got

 

01:03:23.000 –> 01:03:39.000

filters sent in for criticality. So not all our alarms are critical. You really have to be mindful of what is a critical alarm or not. And using the pipelines, we kind of filter off, well, we know all of these alarms are critical, but they happen.

 

01:03:39.000 –> 01:03:52.000

in the cascading mode. If I know that this first-up alarm will cause 10 critical alarms down the line, well, I won’t alarm the 10 critical alarms until this one’s dealt with.

 

01:03:52.000 –> 01:04:07.000

That kind of keeps the technicians from being overloaded with constant alarms. And of course, because that’s the case. Nothing. Nothing is important. Everything is critical. Nothing’s critical. So you’re using.

 

01:04:07.000 –> 01:04:16.000

Almost first up, alarming to identify that he only gets one notification. It’s through the pipeline if identifiable. This is the first alarm.

 

01:04:16.000 –> 01:04:21.000

Okay, standing up for logs that haven’t done a log yet. Very nice.

 

01:04:21.000 –> 01:04:23.000

I hope that answers the question.

 

01:04:23.000 –> 01:04:28.000

Thank you, Anonymous. Good question. Nice practical question.

 

01:04:28.000 –> 01:04:31.000

Any other questions? No, no real good admissions.

 

01:04:31.000 –> 01:04:48.000

Fantastic. Dirk, thank you very much for sharing. We will share a recording of the presentation if you want to share it with anybody else. If you want to get in contact with Dirk, we will share the Sync Systems contact information as well. But thank you very much for joining us on this Friday.

 

01:04:48.000 –> 01:04:59.000

Yeah, have a super weekend. Wherever you are in South Africa or Africa, it’s pretty cold in Joburg, so wherever you are, stay warm over the weekend. And until our next webinar! Goodbye!

 

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