00:15
Speaker 1
Good morning and welcome to the quarterly Data Liberation Front webinar. It is Friday, 26th September. Can you believe it?
00:24
Speaker 2
Well, the end of the year is upon us.
00:28
Speaker 1
Yeah, it definitely is. Before we get going with what we’re going to go through today, if this is your first time joining us, welcome. We always enjoy spending time with first newcomers. Who is Element8? Element8 is the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for the Ignition industrial automation platform, Sepasoft, MES and Canary Data Historian. We exist to ensure a data-driven and flourishing future for Industry. Our guiding principles are to humbly serve our community and industry, to learn from others and share what we’ve learned and what we provide. In other words, what do we sell? Intuitive and scalable industrial technologies to break down the barriers of cost and complexity. So, that’s a little bit about Element8. If we haven’t met yet. My name is Jaco. I’m the Team Lead at Element8.
01:22
Speaker 1
With me, is Gary Lowenstein, sales engineer, and local grey wizard, Gandalf the Grey. We also have Luan with us here in person who is our producer for the webinar and for everything else that we do. Morning Luan.
01:41
Speaker 2
Master of Digital.
01:42
Speaker 1
Your time is valuable. Thank you for spending this Friday morning with us. We promise to make it valuable. We’re excited to share another brilliant case study with you today, and joining us to showcase their work, and please forgive me, Dimeji, Monisola. You always do such an elegant job of pronouncing my name, but I always get it wrong. From Zip Automations, Dimeji, Technical Project Manager and Monisola, Software Automation Engineer. Good morning, and thank you for joining us and sharing your work that you’ve done with us this morning.
02:18
Speaker 4
Yeah, good morning. Thank you for having us.
02:22
Speaker 1
We’re looking forward to it, and I’m sure our community is looking forward to seeing the application as well. Before we get to that, just a couple of other things we want to go through. We want to give you a little bit of news from the ICC or the Ignition Community Conference, ICC in short. We want to introduce something called Solution Suites. Really, really exciting new offering. We want to just remind you of some upcoming events that you may find valuable to join as we round up the end of the year, and then we will look at the really amazing application that Dimeji and the team have developed for their customer in Nigeria.
03:07
Speaker 1
And then we’ve got Q&A. Q&A is always on the agenda, but I think we prefer some interaction. So we are known for sending gift bags to interactive people on the webinar. I think last our previous winner was from Business Connection. Yeah, Sam. Yeah, that’s right. Sam from Business Connection. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask at any time. We are here to be valuable and share information so there is by no means, need to wait until the end of the session for Q&A. So if you have any questions, please put it in the chat, and Luan will make sure that we answer those. So last week, a couple of us were fortunate enough to attend the 2025 ICC this year for the first time in Sacramento.
03:58
Speaker 1
It was really nice to have a bit of an African delegation going over. A growing African delegation that’s really encouraging, and Inductive Automation levelled up from past ICCs in several ways. This year, there were more than 1500 in-person attendees. Clearly, the biggest ICC yet. Many, many highlights. Certainly not enough time for us to go through everything this morning. But certainly first and foremost a massive ICC announcement. Congratulations to the local system integrator company, Concera on their Firebrand award-winning application for Sibanya-Stillwater. If you’re not familiar, Firebrand is an international award that celebrates the most innovative ignition projects this year. Out of hundreds of submissions. Concera’s ASM, Abnormal Situation Management. I always butcher that. Abnormal Situation Management ignition project not only stood out but earned one of the highest scores from the technical evaluation committee.
05:03
Speaker 1
And for the first time ever this award comes home to Africa. So just a huge congratulations to the Concera and Sibanye teams for their fantastic achievement and recognition for Africa’s first firebrand award.
05:20
Speaker 2
Well done to Craig, Roelf, Jaques, and the team at Concera. They are such a small team, and they’ve done a phenomenal job.
05:26
Speaker 1
Yeah, a growing team now. They’re not so small anymore. They are very much in demand at the moment so it’s fantastic to see their growth, as well as the award. So that was really big news coming from ICC, and we, we are proudly African with them for that award. Luan will be sharing links throughout the webinar. I think you’ve got the link out for the story. Cool. So if you want to have a look at that, look at the application in a little bit more detail. As well as some interviews to understand what the challenges were, some of the thought process behind the application they’ve built and the actual results. Click on the link and go check it out whenever you can.
06:14
Speaker 1
Of course, the long-awaited ignition 8.3 was also released on the first day of the conference—and it wasn’t the only release announced there. So yes, if you’ve missed it, Ignition 8.3 is live and available right now. Tian, I’m looking at you down in the Western Cape. It is available.
06:33
Speaker 2
I phoned him officially to tell him, “Don’t phone me; I’m phoning you.”
06:37
Speaker 1
It is officially available. There is very good comprehensive documentation and upgrade documentation. I think there are a couple of considerations with Upgrading, Gary.
06:47
Speaker 2
It is a fantastic upgrade guide, but if you are planning to upgrade, I suggest that you get hold of our Customer Success team and just talk it through with them because as Jako said, there are some considerations. There’s a minimum version that you should be on and in every webinar that I’ve attended, they kind of indicating that you should be as close to the current version as possible.
07:08
Speaker 1
Okay.
07:08
Speaker 2
Which will be out in the next couple of days. So yeah, you know, it’s. And it’s just worth talking through the process with the Customer Success team.
07:19
Speaker 1
Absolutely. So 8.3 fundamentally modernises the core platform. It’s not a minor upgrade, and it eliminates years of technical debt, ensuring that Ignition is levelled up enough to facilitate massive scale deployments and systems. And there’s many highlights. We’re not going to get into those highlights now. I think we’ve covered the highlights of 8.3 over the previous webinars and sessions, but really, the keynote made it clear that 8.3 is not the finish line for Ignition, but actually a new beginning. And worth mentioning is the forthcoming MCP module. So, MCP, if you’re not familiar, I certainly wasn’t up until a couple of months ago, is short for Model Context Protocol, which is really a standardised bridge that connects AI systems to real-world applications and data sources.
08:12
Speaker 1
So this makes MCP different from, for example, an AI model, which on its own only knows the data that it was trained on. So MCP re-enables AI to securely access external tools, resources, databases, live data, and other systems, turning your typical isolated AI models into connected systems capable of real-world problem-solving. So this is a really big announcement from the ICC. And yeah, this makes building MCP functionality into your Ignition project incredibly easy. So if you’re experimenting with agentic AI applications, the MCP module provides that domain-specific context that those agents need. So, really big, exciting announcement. We say forthcoming. It won’t be this year, it will be early in 2026, and it will be a feature of a module of 8.3, hopefully early in 2026. I know of people are quite excited about MCP and the possibilities it promises.
09:19
Speaker 1
Also introduced at the ICC were the new Ignition Solution suites. So firstly, it’s a completely new novel way to purchase Ignition. Ignition Solutions suites are really a curated set of Ignition modules, but built around the most popular use cases for Ignition. So if you’re familiar with the modules that has been available, Ignition is of course modular. If you have been deploying Ignition and those modules, you know that very often there’s a very specific standard set of modules that you would typically deploy, and it makes sense to group those together in popular collections. So at first glance, it may just appear to be a bundle of modules, which is true, but it’s also different. There’s some commercial benefit, there’s some discount on some of the suites.
10:10
Speaker 1
But more importantly is when you purchase this Solutions suite with upgrade protection, you’re entitled to any and all upgrades for that suite in the future for free. So the solution suites will not remain as is. There will be models, modules and functionalities added to it over time. So that means you can take advantage of new modules without worrying about purchasing more.
10:38
Speaker 2
I believe the MCP module is going to be added to one of those suites.
10:42
Speaker 1
Correct. So the MCP module is a good example that will be added. So there are five suites in total that you can mix and match from. Starting with the Application building suite, which is really for building powerful responsive applications. So included there is the Perspective module and the Reporting module. Then we have the Industrial Historian suite, designed to optimise your time series data, with, of course, the powerful new built-in Core Historian, the ability to use multiple Historian types and built-in tools for trending and analysis. So a good example there, over and above the two current modules, in future, there will be ETL capability or tools that will be added to this Historian suite, and you will get that module at no charge when it’s available, provided you are on basic care. Correct. Or a care package starting with basic care.
11:34
Speaker 1
Then we have the Data Ops suite which really streamlines industrial data workflows with very specifically event driven data and logic, provides seamless SQL integration API enabling real time data sharing and reliable foundation for modern operations. So those are the currently the three modules that’s included with the Data Ops suite, the Alarm Management suite that also got a nice upgrade with 8.3. The Twilio module now includes WhatsApp capability. So the Alarm Management Suite gives you the power to take control of alarms and alarming philosophies with smart notifications and flexible escalation paths delivered through the workflow. And then finally the Enterprise Integration Suite, which gets your entire company working together essentially by connecting plant floor systems to Ignition, enterprise Systems to Ignition, MQTT and other native connectors, for example, MongoDB and Kafka Streams. So those are the currently the five solution suites.
12:41
Speaker 1
So whether you’re building your first Ignition project or scaling out your existing system, Solution suites are designed to help you move faster and stay future-ready. And of course, with the currently and always will be transparent pricing model, the prices are not hidden, and you can see the price for each one of these suites on this page, which is also on the website. And if you’re familiar with Ignition pricing, you’ll notice that there are also some discounts on selected suites. So it makes sense to buy one of these suites, and if you want to get started today, you can, because they’re available right now. In fact, they were available last week already upon announcement. And it is important to stress that you can still buy Ignition by the module that is not changing.
13:30
Speaker 1
Ignition is still Modular Solution suites are not replacing the modular pricing or ability to build your own custom gateway and modules, but they do give you a new way to buy and a new way to future proof your existing system so you can purchase these suites by themselves, the modules by themselves, as we have been doing for many years or a combination really giving you the flexibility and of course to stress again and reiterate the value of the solution suites with upgrade protection, you will get any future modules included in those suites at no charge. So that is Solution Suites. Check it out. I’m not sure if we’re sharing a link for that, but overall, for a guided tour of the new Ignition 8.3 features, be sure to register for Travis Cox’s webinar next week, on Tuesday. I think it is September 30th.
14:27
Speaker 1
Yeah, next week Tuesday, where Travis will take you through a guided tour of Ignition 8.3, which promises to be valuable or even better. Join us in person for our ELEV8 tour this October. Dimeji, we’re not going to go that far north to your part of the world.
14:43
Speaker 2
But you’re welcome to come down here.
14:44
Speaker 1
You’re welcome to join us in South Africa, hopefully soon. We’ll see in Nigeria. But on the ELEV8 Tour 2025, we are touring around South Africa. Three major metros being Centurion, Pretoria, Umhlanga, KwaZulu-Natal and Stellenbosch in the Western Cape. Not only will we deep dive into these latest Ignition, as well as Canary and Sepasoft features, lots of updates over there as well, but we will also showcase a technical demo like you’ve never seen before. I think we do a lot of PowerPoint, and there’s always a lot to share, and PowerPoint is easy to facilitate that. But we really want to step it up at this ELEV8 Tour and give you an insight into the capability of Ignition. And we are putting together a phenomenal technical demo that will really impress.
15:40
Speaker 1
And then of course, together with our system Integrator partners and international speakers, we will present a collection of local case studies and also celebrate our top-selling system Integrator partners for the year. So seats are limited and it’s not to be missed.
15:55
Speaker 2
Yeah, make sure you register early.
15:58
Speaker 1
Definitely, we would hate to put you on a waiting list. We will share the link to ELEV8 as well. Are we good so far? Do you have any questions? No questions so far. Fantastic.
16:13
Speaker 4
Cool.
16:13
Speaker 1
So that is the end of the overflow of information around the ICC, Ignition 8.3, and some upcoming events. Now, we want to turn our attention to Dimeji and the Zip Automation team to see what they have developed over the last. Over how many years was the development for that, Dimeji?
16:38
Speaker 4
So we started in 2023. That was when the discussion started, and then the installation and implementation took place over the course of 2024. And it’s a live system, so new sites and features are constantly being added.
16:55
Speaker 1
Fantastic.
16:56
Speaker 4
Cool.
16:56
Speaker 1
So you are welcome to bring up your slides, and we look forward to seeing the application.
17:04
Speaker 4
All right.
17:08
Speaker 1
You don’t mind if we ask questions?
17:11
Speaker 4
Oh, of course, by all means.
17:13
Speaker 1
Gary and I are quite curious. I don’t want to, I don’t want to say inquisitive.
17:17
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah. So I’ll be happy to answer all the questions. I have Monisola with me here. Any question I can’t answer, she’ll step in to answer. So I’m just a mouthpiece. So, Good morning everybody. My name is Dimeji, once again, and Jaco pronounced it properly, Dimeji from Zip Automations. So this morning, I’ll walk you through the system we built for a client in Nigeria. I may not be mentioning some specific names, just, you know, just for confidentiality reasons. So the client approached us with a problem that they had. They had gas stations scattered in different parts of the country and some outside Nigeria that would require them to drive around to take manual readings to enable them to build their customers. So they needed a system that could reliably capture the information from all the different locations and transmit it to a remote server.
18:19
Speaker 4
And they also wanted to be able to remotely shut down customers in the event that, you know, maybe high-pressure situations or a customer that was defaulting on their payments. So they had this situation where they would be able to read the data sometimes, but if the customer defaults, they would not be able to. The customer might deny them access to their premises to isolate the gas. So they wanted something that could allow them to remotely shut down the data. So we needed bidirectional communication. So that’s just a little bit of context. So, just an overview of the project. They wanted it to be web-based.
18:55
Speaker 1
I didn’t do you justice. You’re not a system integrator, you’re a gold certified system integrator. I didn’t mention that. So sorry for that. I don’t know if you’re going to.
19:08
Speaker 4
It’s fine, it’s fine. And the interesting thing is that when we started all this, I realised that’s one of the things I love about Ignition and Inductive Automation. We did not directly have any contact with you. We just looked for a solution. And ignition was, I’d looked into it a little bit, but there was a lot, there were a lot of resources online to help us get started. So when we had problems, there was a great community, there were resources online, and we had already built a substantial bit of the application before we established contact with you to start talking about the licenses and the further help that you provided. So, we are gold certified. I think we have at least. I’m thinking of the top of my head, how many. I think we did three or four. I think we have three.
19:53
Speaker 4
Yeah, currently we have three gold certified, and then there are about three more that will be good certified once they complete the next perspective course. So hopefully we should have six good certified engineers. And that’s something we’re very proud of because, you know, it’s a pretty small thing. Yeah. So just to go into it, the client requested for a web based enterprise level SCADA system. They wanted to accurately monitor their pressure, to get alarms and all those kind of things to ensure precise billing because you know, this is a business exists to make Money after all. So they would need to accurately build their customers and they wanted to also be able to resolve disputes with inform with relevant data because you may give a customer a bill and they will complain you should have historical data to show their readings.
20:41
Speaker 4
Then I talked about remote access for monitoring, shutting down, and even updating the parameters of the meters on site. One last feature they requested was that the system be able to integrate seamlessly with their ERP for invoicing, planning, and billing. So there is a demonstration the demo at the end. So I will just quickly run through the slides, and I will talk more as I do the demo. So I’ve talked about the clients; they have stations in every part of Nigeria over right now we have like over 150 and counting. So then yeah, so and it’s still growing beyond that and we’ve not had any scalability problems so far. It has just worked as smoothly as it has worked from day one.
21:26
Speaker 4
So one of the things that most of the meters support is Modbus RTU, though in some specific stations, we had to work with Siemens PLCs’ Modbus TCP, depending on the location. So we majorly gather data through the Modbus RTU protocol, and we sent the information through the MQTT protocol to an MQTT broker in the cloud. So that is being self-hosted by us. The Ignition SCADA platform acquired data through the Cyrus Link module. So you have MQTT engineering to receive the information. Then, you can also use MQTT transmission to have tags in Ignition and send information back to your sites. So if you have any questions, I think people can. You can feel free to stop me at any point.
22:15
Speaker 1
So yeah, this wasn’t your first project using the MQTT protocol.
22:21
Speaker 4
Yeah, so we had played around. We started out with using Node-Red. I don’t know how many people are familiar with Node-Red. It was just a little open-source thing because I was a firm believer in not building everything myself and using open source as much as possible. But then we, at some point, just realized that if you are going to be building for an industrial system, reliability and a lot of other things come into play and the ability to rapidly develop features. So if something has already built an alarming feature for you don’t need to go out and build everything yourself. But Ignition, on the other hand, is also flexible enough that, apart from the core features, there are a lot of other features that we’ve implemented ourselves that are not part of the core functionality.
23:08
Speaker 4
So, if you have ideas and interesting things you want to do, Ignition gives you the opportunity to enjoy yourself.
23:16
Speaker 1
Definitely enjoy yourself.
23:19
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can do whatever you want. It’s fine. So I think I’ve talked about a lot of the features. The alarm management system is solar powered because, you know, green energy and all that, to ensure all the sites are solar powered. And we have. We introduce redundant power supplies. So, since these are devices out on the field, we ensured that for the solar system there are multiple batteries, multiple solar panels, multiple charge controllers. So in the event that something fails, the power phase can always switch over. Then there’s the automated reporting as well, which I’ll get into. They get daily reports, weekly reports, hourly reports, alarm notifications on Telegram, email, and a lot of other sources. So this is a simple architecture. It’s not very sophisticated, to be honest.
24:11
Speaker 4
It’s basically you have devices out in the field, including like a shutdown valve to isolate a customer. In some cases, they pass to PLCs; in some cases, they don’t. Then we have a Modbus to Spark Plug B gateway here that transmits the data, and you have encryption, username and passwords and all the standard security features that you would expect. Then that sends the information straight to the broker. Ignition connects to the broker through the MPTTT engine. Then we have a self. A hosted database somewhere in the cloud as well. So here you didn’t have your.
24:52
Speaker 1
Okay, yeah, you could overlay the kind of security layer over this.
24:57
Speaker 4
Yes, exactly.
24:59
Speaker 1
It’s essentially that the cloud broker is your DMZ located main broker.
25:03
Speaker 4
Yes, yes.
25:05
Speaker 1
Of course, MQTT is typically a single port for receiving data. It is, of course, bi-directional. So I would imagine that’s where the shutdown command requirement is.
25:20
Speaker 4
Yeah, okay, yeah, exactly that. The protocol being bi-directional was extremely important to us because they needed to be able to. They could only monitor, but they could not control. The Spark Plug B protocol made that really easy for us without writing a lot of complicated scripts. It was just built into the protocol for us.
25:46
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. And your mission server? Is that a private cloud, or where is it hosted?
25:53
Speaker 4
Yeah, it’s hosted on a cloud somewhere. I don’t want to mention the specific name, but it’s privately hosted on a cloud, A virtual machine. Okay, yeah, within the infrastructure. The same applies to the database. So yeah, so then you have different users. People join from tablets, laptops, and phones. Because most of the time, you want to have real-time information. If a station goes down or there’s a problem, you want to know right away, you should be able to log in via just a regular web browser on any device that you have. But a lot of the users have also used the mobile application so that they can just, they don’t need to keep entering the URL multiple times. A lot of them have the mobile apps installed on their phone.
26:45
Speaker 4
And you know, the perspective module made it very easy for us because it works with mobile responsiveness and all that. So we designed different views depending on the device that you’re looking at, and we try to optimise that for the different users. Yeah, so money. Feel free to say anything at any point. All right, so yeah, I’m just showing. So this is just a little overview, just to show you what the gas station looks like. We’ve even optimised the design to look a little better than this. So it’s web-based and you can access it from any part of the world on any device. Yeah, you have access to certain features that can be restricted. So you have role-based access.
27:34
Speaker 4
So here, you can see that there are certain actions that the user may want to perform, and you will see that the user is not authorized to perform that action until he reauthenticates himself.
27:46
Speaker 1
So, role-based access, maybe just to explain the different security access levels and types, is really popular. It is really popular to segregate specific access, even down to a tag level. You can restrict certain views and the ability to take action right on the tag level. So, role-based access is the most popular.
28:13
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we implemented it in a variety of ways. There are certain users who can view reports but cannot download the reports. There are users who can perform certain actions. There are certain pages, There are specific pages that are restricted. So there are a lot, really. And one of the things that was also very useful as part of the integration was that we integrated the identity provider, that’s whatever they used to manage all their users, directly into Ignition. So when a user logs into Ignition, we can read his roles, his user department, and a lot of information that comes straight from the identity provider without us needing to recreate users and try to start sorting them into departments and all that stuff afresh. So it’s already done straight from the identity provider.
29:08
Speaker 4
And if there is any change, for example, if a user is blocked out of the system, we don’t need to do anything extra on our side. The user won’t lose access to the SCADA system directly without any action from our end.
29:23
Speaker 1
Absolutely. Unlimited clients are incredibly valuable for that because if you have limited client access, you can’t do that. You have to generate role-based access users, meaning that you don’t have a comprehensive audit trail of user actions and access. So I think having unlimited clients available makes a big difference for that as well.
29:53
Speaker 4
Oh yeah, yeah. That was actually a very big feature because we don’t really need to worry about how many users are trying to log in. The unlimited tags has allowed us to scale. So there are times we have some interesting ideas like oh, why don’t we try to manipulate this data this way and storage this way. We are not thinking about a certain limit on the number of tags. So it has just given us complete freedom to do whatever we want. So that has been very helpful to us. Well, in cybersecurity, there is a standard TLS we use, like for MQTT, there are TLS usernames and passwords. Obviously, for the Ignition SCADA server you have your typical encryption before you log in, authentication usernames and passwords. Also, you can apply different levels of authentication.
30:44
Speaker 4
For example, you can require some users to have multi-factor authentication. Some need to log in with authentication apps, and some need to log in with one-time passwords. So any sort of authentication can be configured from the identity provider. And Ignition is going to integrate well with that and make sure that it enforces that before the user logs into the application. We have a lot of dashboards. I’ll go into this. We have performance metrics as we are getting raw data. We can now look at how a site is performing over time against many other benchmarks. But I’ll go over that in the presentation in the demo. So we have alarms just like a standard SCADA system. You want to know if a site is down or up and stuff like that. So we have location-based monitoring for maps.
31:41
Speaker 4
You can have it. We even integrated it to Google Maps and the weather to it as well to know exactly what’s happening on site. I’ll go into that a little later.
31:53
Speaker 1
You try to use all the components that are available in perspective.
31:55
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah. We use. So the interesting thing is that you, for us, well, the first time we integrated this map, it literally took us about, let’s say, 10 minutes. I just discussed with my colleague, why don’t we have something that can integrate directions with Google Maps? And she literally just went on Google Maps, copied something from the API, plugged it into Ignition and linked it to a button. And it was just that easy for us to show the Google Maps location. So, yeah, you have the standard reports that are automated, users can download, you can view and love other stuff. And then I also mentioned that reports can be sent on schedule to any specified email or Telegram notifications. We have embedded reports, we have all sorts of different formats of reports that I may not even.
32:47
Speaker 1
Telegram integration, that’s different. Different applications are popular in different parts of the world, like WhatsApp, which is now included with the Twilio module. Telegram was a request a couple of years ago, and the integration with Telegram is fairly straightforward.
33:06
Speaker 4
Yeah. So it didn’t take us a lot of time. Once you understand basic APIs, it’s really easy, actually. And Ignition, just like. That’s one of the things I mentioned that we thought about the client just mentioned, why can’t we have something that can send to Telegram? And we just went and looked at it. There was the API documentation. We plugged that into Ignition, and it works straight away. And we still use the fact. I’ve muted my notifications because I am sure I will get notifications on Telegram during the presentation. We’ve installed over 100 sites, with more than 400 installed devices. I’m sure the SQL rules are not. Some of the information we put here has even changed. We have over 30,000 tags at this point. And the beautiful thing is, we don’t really have to worry about our tag counts.
33:57
Speaker 1
So, yeah, the only consideration around tag counts and SQL size is obviously you want the system to be performant. So although you’re not limited by any of those limitations, you do want to make sure that the resources available to the system is performant.
34:18
Speaker 2
Yeah, the hardware.
34:19
Speaker 1
Yeah.
34:20
Speaker 4
So that’s one thing. You know, like I said, have servers hosted in the cloud, so we have the ability to scale as needed. So, in the initial provisioning of the server, we looked at the maximum memory side Ignition is likely to consume and a lot of all that, and we scaled much more beyond that. So we have, even with all these tags that you have seen, we have not even hit, I don’t even think we’ve hit 50 of the available capacity. Yeah, yeah. All right, so, all right, so, okay, so this is the time for the demo. Let me, I’m trying to. Let me unpin this while you do that.
35:04
Speaker 1
I just want to check that there are no questions so far. I missed a couple of people this morning. It was very rude of us. People even said good morning. Morning Ryan. I’m happy that you could join us. Caleb. Yeah, thank you. No other questions, though. We’re all happy so far. Yeah.
35:24
Speaker 4
Cool. All right, so this is. This is the interface of. I hid the URL, but this is the interface for the system. So you can see you have different customers in different parts of the country. This is Lagos. Some people don’t know Nigeria very well, but this is one region. Then this is a different region. One thing you would notice is if I switch from one region, you can look at here and see that the graphics here is for a specific type of site. If I switch to a different type. Let me see.
35:58
Speaker 1
This is.
35:59
Speaker 4
Let me see which one can I use? Let me see this one. Yeah. So the graphics will change and update based on the kind of sites you are looking at. Some are single stream, some are dual stream. And we were able to use some of the session properties and a lot of that to update this behind the scenes. So once you go to a site based on the drop-down, it can give feedback and say, “Okay, what site am I looking at? The session props also allowed us to ensure that if I change something here, it does not affect another user looking at the information. And it is not. We also made it easy for us not to have to redesign. You don’t want to redesign 100 pages if you have a hundred sites.
36:44
Speaker 4
You can have a specific set of site types and just feed based on those types of sites. Here, you can see all the standards.
36:54
Speaker 1
That’s a very good fundamental design philosophy. If you’re building for one side, it’s easy. I think in your case, when you start getting into the kind of scale and numbers that you’re talking about, it is incredibly important to build with that in mind, and those kind of session properties, like you mentioned, definitely help.
37:17
Speaker 2
Yeah, one of the problems is that you do a POC and say this POC worked beautifully for one site, but then when you get to scale it, you need to have that automatic discovery propagation.
37:30
Speaker 1
Oh yeah, of course. Copy and paste, all kinds of inheritance, all of those lovely value adds that you get.
37:38
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah, exactly. We had to learn that because when we started, just like you said, we started with one Location for a proof of concept. But as we went on, we had to think about how we would scale to over a hundred locations without redesigning everything. And that’s where Ignition also has a lot of resources. There’s almost nothing that you want to ask that has not already been answered. And if such a thing exists, there is somebody to answer you on the forums or you can go and watch the videos. And there was a time we ran into an issue with the database. We reached out to Element8, and they were happy to help us. All right, so here we have all sorts of trends, and we have pressure. Can everybody still hear me?
38:29
Speaker 4
Just to confirm. Sorry, can you still hear me? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. All right. We have pressure and temperature. We have all sorts of graphs, you know, just user-specific data. So here. And like I mentioned already, I can go from region to region, and I have different sites in the different regions. So here I can show you. We have historical data.
39:13
Speaker 1
Who will use it to measure? Yeah, it seems like Monisola as well. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, me.
39:19
Speaker 2
The link to Nigeria is gone. Our cable to Nigeria broke. Let’s see if they get it.
39:30
Speaker 1
Let’s give them a couple of minutes. Yeah, I still have many more questions, but I fear we won’t give them enough time to go through his entire demo. If I ask more questions, but if anybody online has any questions so far, let us know. It really is, as Dimas mentioned, a very intuitive presentation application. Visuals weren’t necessarily their big focus initially, and they spend a bit more time on them now because they are incredibly important as well.
40:04
Speaker 2
But I think for them up front, the important thing was getting the billing right for their customers. I think that was the most critical thing: getting that billing right and getting the integration to SAP.
40:14
Speaker 1
Yeah, the balancing.
40:15
Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.
40:16
Speaker 1
Because money drives everything, and for every day that they couldn’t do that, they were losing money. We haven’t even touched on the billing part, but let’s see if he can get back online. We can’t really tease them. We didn’t have power this morning, and all of Fourways was down.
40:42
Speaker 2
Yeah. I came.
40:42
Speaker 4
Yuck.
40:43
Speaker 2
Luan and I came to work in the darkness and left to go and find other coffee shops.
40:55
Speaker 1
All right, I see. Seems to be back. I see somebody has a hand up. Caleb. Caleb has a hand up.
41:10
Speaker 2
I think everybody’s muted.
41:15
Speaker 1
Caleb no longer has a hand up. Yeah, sorry, Caleb. I don’t think you can ask a question, but you can type one. All right. Oh, dear.
41:28
Speaker 2
We should probably continue with the rest of the important things we have in case we get to meet you again.
41:36
Speaker 1
We’ve got a couple of things that are not really important, but we can do that. Let’s do that. I’m just afraid that we may not get them back. Oh, thanks, Caleb.
41:50
Speaker 4
Your hand about that? We just had a little network outage there. Give us five minutes, okay?
41:56
Speaker 1
Sure, no problem.
41:58
Speaker 4
No problem.
41:59
Speaker 1
Caleb, I think just for. Just for being brave enough to put up your hand, admitting it was my mistake. Let’s send you something.
42:08
Speaker 2
Here’s Dimeji.
42:09
Speaker 4
Yay.
42:10
Speaker 1
And connecting to audio.
42:12
Speaker 4
Can everybody hear me?
42:15
Speaker 1
Yes.
42:16
Speaker 4
Yeah, sorry, I don’t know. Something happened. I don’t know what happened. I’m back. No problem. Yeah, yeah. So let me try to share my screen again. Can we see my screen?
42:42
Speaker 1
Yes.
42:43
Speaker 2
Here we go.
42:45
Speaker 4
Okay. Sorry, I panicked a little just now.
42:51
Speaker 1
No problem.
42:53
Speaker 4
All right, so I was trying to show you the historical data, I think. Last thing you heard.
43:01
Speaker 1
Sorry to interrupt you. If you don’t want to expose the URL, feel free to go full screen.
43:08
Speaker 4
All right, yeah, I was trying to do that. Yeah.
43:10
Speaker 2
F11.
43:15
Speaker 1
There we go.
43:16
Speaker 4
Thank you. All right. Yeah. All right, so what was I saying? So, yeah, so we have the historical data that just shows you. You can make it as granular as you want. You can decide to go back a day. I’m just going to update this was. I’ve gone back to the 24th and you can see the historical data. You have station alarms and a credit balance. This credit balance is very useful when you have. Let me look at it. Let’s say you have. You have some customers that you can look at their daily targets. And let me see, there are some customers that have, let’s say prepaid meters and all that. You can look at how much they’ve consumed over time. So one interesting thing that we did, and I’m. I’m skipping ahead here. We have a maintenance page.
44:06
Speaker 4
So basically we have devices out on the field and you may want to get. We have different management platforms for them. But at some point, I realised I would be on the SCADA, and I would have to log out or I would have to switch tabs and go to this management platform for the routers to go and view the status of the routers. The network operator and all that. That was when we started looking into APIs and could integrate the API from that platform directly into Ignition. So here, now you can see the network provider. I don’t know if you can all still see it. You can see the network. You can see the signal strength. If I switch to a different location. Okay. All of them are, for some reason using the same thing. Yeah.
44:51
Speaker 4
So you can see a different provider here, and the information has updated as well. If I go to a different site, you see something else here. So this allows us to see a lot of information without leaving Ignition. That’s actually one of the things I like the most about this. Yeah. So we have panel drawings. You know, I don’t know if it points to it. S you can even create panel drawings for the sites. So for a particular site, if somebody is going to site, you may not want them to start taking the documentation with them. And all that. It is right there on the SCADA.
45:30
Speaker 1
PDF is inside of Ignition.
45:33
Speaker 4
Yeah, inside Ignition. Everything’s inside Ignition. So we have, you know, we have manuals. I don’t want to go into all that, but we have manuals and all that. One interesting thing that we also did. Let me go to. Let me go back. So here if you look at this, we have a. We have something called the power dashboard. So on those sites, I told you that they are solar-powered. So one thing that we also did was to integrate the solar systems directly into the platform as well. So, for example, I can look at the station and I can look at the battery voltage, look at how much load, how much power is being generated or consumed. I can see the voltage and current and all that stuff. So.
46:17
Speaker 4
If I go to a site that does not have the special charge controller, you don’t see that it’s grayed out, so you have that level of customization. Just before I leave this page, I mentioned something about Google Maps. Right. Let me just show you something. I click this button, and you may want to go to the site. I can literally just double-click this station location button, and it takes me directly to my Google Maps.
46:47
Speaker 1
Wow, that’s amazing.
46:49
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah. So my starting point is my location. And like you can see I don’t need to do anything from here.
46:59
Speaker 1
So major for as somebody who’s experienced the. The traffic in Lagos. Are the directions useful?
47:07
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah, of course they are very useful. I’m just going out, I tell the guys, just check what is happening because you know, you have. It may even be a route you know very well. But there might just be traffic, or there might be a construction, or something just happened, you know, so it’s always better to check.
47:25
Speaker 1
Really, really useful.
47:26
Speaker 4
Even using Google Maps, you know, it rains a lot here in Nigeria. So there are times you want to go to a location and most of them are outdoors. So you want to know what the weather is like or what it is going to be like when you are there. So can you still hear me? Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, so we had to. We thought about it. Okay. Now we have Google Maps. Then we thought about integrating the weather as well. So you have the weather here. You can see what the current temperature is. You can look at the humidity and a bunch of other stuff. And then you can even look at the forecast. If you are trying to plan. There are times we have maintenance activities. So you can look at what the weather is like. So let me try this other place. Okay.
48:13
Speaker 4
The weather is pretty good. I thought it was going to be raining. There are times it rains in some places. So you can see the weather changing from location to location and you can basically see what is likely to happen if you are trying to plan your maintenance activities. So we have. I feel like I’m saying a lot. I will try to round up. Just give me like two or three more minutes. So we have our dashboards here where you can look at how much a customer has consumed over a period of time, previous day, current day. We even have our own, let’s call it oee. It’s not the standard ignitions oee, but we came up with something to look at the performance of the site. You can have metrics to see, okay, what’s the maximum flow, minimum flow.
49:00
Speaker 4
And you can even change it. You can change the dates. So if you look at it, the values would update as you change the periods. Yeah. So you can even print this. But let me skip ahead. So the last thing that I’ll be mentioning is the maps. So you have different customers in different locations. So you can see the distribution. I could zoom in. There are a lot of sites for Ignition. Also, if you look at this graph or if you look at this map, you can see that there are some that are blue. There are some that are deep, harsh. So we’ll use that, we customise to say if a customer is not consuming gas, then the colour should just be this grey.
49:46
Speaker 1
So the colour is the status indicator.
49:48
Speaker 4
Exactly, Status indicators. And if you double click on anyone, you can see what the. You can see the real-time parameters of the Customer. We also included the direction. So if you are here, you can also, from the maps you may also want to see the directions. So you can do that. I will not click it, but if you click it’s going to do the. Basically, do the same thing. And this is dynamic for every station that you click on, every single station that you click on. So it’s. Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. The last is the ERP.
50:23
Speaker 4
So I don’t have access to the ERP now, nor should I, but we are able to take data from the SCADA through an API to send it through to their ERP, and that is very useful to them for invoicing, you know, a lot of all that stuff. Then there are reports, the hourly reports for pressure monitoring, which is very important for a site like this. Daily reports to look at the consumption, weekly reports, and monthly reports, depending on how they want it to be. So just to round up, I’ll say that Ignition has given us a very tough platform out of the box. What I love most about it is that it offers even more flexibility beyond what you get out of the box, giving you the freedom to completely customise it how you want.
51:10
Speaker 4
And we’ve been able to do a lot of interesting things because of the flexibility and the tools that have been provided for us within Ignition. So I’ll stop talking. I think I’ll just quit.
51:24
Speaker 1
It’s really valuable. There are so many from a functional point of view. I jokingly said earlier that it looks like you try to include every component that, that you had available. Still, it’s all valuable to have and all valuable information to have on hand. And obviously, every application is unique and the requirements are different. I think what you mentioned about the ability to do the validation of the financials, if I can call it that, with the erp. That was obviously a big drive to see the status indicator. A quick glance of just purely looking visually at the color to get a status indicator of each one of the sites. That’s incredibly valuable for an operator. The historical data, of course, having the ability to see raw data. Very often, you just want to see raw data, not necessarily a trend.
52:21
Speaker 1
The automated reports are rudimentary but valuable, and they are delivered every day. This is a really, really nice functional application. Dimeji. We were really happy when we saw this the first time, so well done.
52:38
Speaker 4
Yeah, there’s a lot more stuff I didn’t mention, but you know, let’s just say I can’t see everything in one day. So it’s fine.
52:45
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, definitely. And, you know, your comment that you made earlier is never going to be finished because when it’s finished, it’s perfect. So there’s always the addition of extra functionality, the desire to make it more visually appealing and that stuff you do over time. But at least you know, the initial requirements were met with this version. So really well done.
53:13
Speaker 4
Yeah. And I also want to thank you guys for coming. Let me turn on my camera. I also want to thank you guys for your support. I think that was without that support. I really believe so. We started out with a fair idea of what we were doing, but then we ran into some serious issues that could have caused some problems. But then, when we reached out to you, you were very happy to help us. And that is one thing I don’t. I just feel I need to say it so that everybody can hear on the other projects that we tried to work on, you’ve given us all the support we’ve needed to push us over the finish line. So I just feel I need to say that publicly.
54:01
Speaker 1
It’s a pleasure, and that’s why we’re here. We just want to see African system integrators grow and deliver successful projects. But that’s my video. Thank you. Thank you for the kind words.
54:13
Speaker 2
It’s easy to help the major and his team because every time you get on a call with him, you see this smiling person who is so enthusiastic about Ignition. How can you be grumpy with that?
54:26
Speaker 1
Yeah, for sure. Definitely. We do have a question. As the requirements grew, did you ever find that you had painted yourself into a corner and had to rework something or change your approach?
54:45
Speaker 4
Yes, yes. So initially, when we started out, just to. So that you understand how we started, we didn’t know anything about. At least I didn’t know anything about UDTS. So we had the data coming in from MQTT engine and had to manually historize every station and all data and everything manually. So at some point we discovered that, you know, when you start, when we started having many new sites. Can you still hear me? Yeah, my network is a bit on. Okay. Yeah. So, at some point, we realised that we could not continue manually historizing for every new station. And there were features that we wanted to implement that would require us going through every tag in our MPTT engine.
55:32
Speaker 4
So what we had to do was to leverage the power of UDTs now to basically say, okay, I would push all these data that has come from MQTT engine, put it in a UDT and then whatever action I carry out on the UDT templates then applies to all the sites. So that was one major change that we had to make. And like I said, I didn’t know there were UDT. So it was later I started doing it. I just actually took the time to start going through the resources one by one. And when I came across that, I told my this is the solution to the problem that we have been facing. So, yeah, I would say that was a major point.
56:13
Speaker 1
Yeah. User-defined types. UDTs really is a very large component of scalable design, I suppose.
56:24
Speaker 4
Yeah.
56:25
Speaker 1
So that’s a good one to mention. It’s funny that there are so many good design fundamentals and documents available. But we find that, you know, with us, with most engineers, we kind of start developing and visit those guides when we are already a couple of months into the project, but those guides are available. It’s maybe a lesson learned for others who are embarking on their first project. But UDTs are incredibly powerful, for sure.
56:58
Speaker 4
Yeah. Yeah. It was a game changer for us because now when we think about a new feature, it’s easy to implement without having to go through all the stations. You can just implement it on the UDT, test it properly, and then deploy, and then it just kills all the services.
57:15
Speaker 1
Yeah, no, for sure. Good. I don’t see any other questions. Any questions from your side, Gary?
57:25
Speaker 2
No. It’s a beautiful application.
57:28
Speaker 1
Thank you for sharing. We’re looking forward to seeing what you are building in the northern part of Nigeria over the next little while. We’re going to share your contact details with the, the presentation if that’s okay, if somebody wants to contact you.
57:44
Speaker 4
All right, that’s fine. That’s fine.
57:46
Speaker 1
Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing your good work with us. I know you’re busy with several other applications, and I know it’s not going to be the last Ignition application we see, but thank you very much.
58:01
Speaker 2
Thank you to your team.
58:02
Speaker 4
Yeah, yeah. We are constantly looking for more things, you know, with Ignition.
58:09
Speaker 1
Definitely. No, we look forward to it. Thank you very much. We’ve got one minute left. How’s that for timing? Well done, Dimeji.
58:19
Speaker 4
Yeah.
58:21
Speaker 1
So really just the last things from our side this morning as we wrap it up, a reminder again about our training. We do have Free training available if you’re an existing customer. We have reached out, we have spoken about it. We know that people typically don’t read emails. If you have an existing gateway license, please get in touch with us. We do provide free training, virtual training. The training courses are very full very quickly. So please make sure that you schedule your training as soon as possible. And then finally, our invitation for our Community Impact program is still open.
59:02
Speaker 1
If you are familiar with any charity or non-profit NGO where you feel that Ignition could deliver value to the lives or livelihoods of a group of people or a business that is doing good work improving the livelihoods of individuals or communities, please let us know. We’d love to work with you on that, and we would also love to donate an Ignition license for the purpose of doing that. So, yeah, that’s all we had on our side. Gary Luan, anything else?
59:36
Speaker 4
No.
59:36
Speaker 2
Thank you all for joining.
59:38
Speaker 1
Fantastic. So we will share a recording. Yeah, we’ll share a recording with as well as all the relevant links that we’ve discussed. And the next time we will see you will either be next week, on Tuesday’s webinar. We’ve got the standing demos, Wednesday and Thursday, the first week of the month, and ELEV8 towards the end of October. Otherwise, if you have any other questions, please get in touch with us. We’d love to chat further. Division team, thank you very much again and have a lovely, safe weekend, everyone. Thank you very much.
01:00:13
Speaker 4
Thanks. Bye. Bye.
01:00:14
Speaker 1
Thank you.
01:00:15
Speaker 4
Bye.
