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By Luan Taute
07 July 2025

Data Liberation Front: See Concera’s Bold Ignition Application in Action

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Join the Data Liberation Front for an insightful case study!

This time, we’re bringing the community together with our special guests from Concera. These integrators understand how to turn big industrial challenges into scalable, practical solutions.

They’ve built a bold Ignition application monitoring critical infrastructure at Sibanye-Stillwater, and they’re giving us an exclusive look.

Expect a live demo, sharp insights, and the kind of Q&A that gets people thinking differently about industrial data.

Real voices. Real experiences.

SPEAKERS

Jaco Markwat
Team Lead
Element8
Gary Lowenstein
Sales Engineer
Element8
Craig Marsden
Engineer
Concera
Jacques Venter
Engineer
Concera

Transcript


00:22

Speaker 1
Good morning, Happy Friday and welcome to Element8’s quarterly Data Liberation Front webinar. I hope we’re live. I’m guessing we are. My name is Jaco Markwat from Element8. If you’re not familiar with Element8, we are the distributor for the Ignition industrial automation platform, Sepasoft MES, and Canary Data historian. We exist to ensure a flourishing future for industry. Our guiding principles are to humbly serve our community and industry, learn from others, share what we’ve learned and what we provide are intuitive and scalable technologies that break down the barrier of cost and complexity. So it’s a little bit about us if this is your first time joining the Data Liberation Front webinar.


01:06

Speaker 1
It’s a quarterly webinar where we cover all news and updates about Ignition, Canary, and Sepasoft. Very importantly, we also cover some amazing applications coming out of our community over the last little while, like we all have today. So I have Gary Lowenstein with me.


01:28

Speaker 2
Good morning.


01:29

Speaker 1
A Sales Engineer at Element8. And then I. We also have Craig Marsden and Jacques Venter, both directors and engineers at Concera. Gentlemen, good morning. Thank you for having us. I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve done and what you’ve developed. We’re really excited about the application, and we’ll get into it in a few minutes. And then of course, we have Luan as well. Luan is managing our behind-the-scenes. If you do have any questions, please do ask in the chat. We will either attempt to answer the question as you submit it or we will park it towards a quieter time or towards the end of the webinar, and we’ll answer any questions. We haven’t done a giveaway in a while, have we? We haven’t given away any socks or mouse pairs. Can I offer something?


02:16

Speaker 1
I’m going to offer something I want to say for the first question we get. And it’s going to be. There’s got to be some terms and conditions to this question, but for the first question we get to us or the panellists, we’ll. We’ll do a hamper, we’ll do a mouse pad and a pair of socks. And I don’t know if you guys are wearing your socks today, hopefully.


02:36

Speaker 3
Can I also ask the question?


02:38

Speaker 1
Sure. All right. Our agenda for today is we will share some community news. We will give you some updates on Ignition and Canary. Specifically, we want to introduce you to a new training offer available from Element8 that we’re really excited about. And then obviously, the highlight of today’s webinar is the application showcase with the gentleman from Concera showcasing what’s been done for store water. So that’s our agenda today. Some new partner certifications. The last two months really, we have Ignition-certified integrators new to the integrated program, and now also certified Artiflex Engineering and Hybrid Automation. The team down in KZN, well done to you guys! Advansys has achieved their Sepasoft MES certified status. Well done to you guys. I know it’s a lot of time and investment that goes into the certifications, so well done for getting it done.


03:39

Speaker 1
Right now we have over 200 certified engineers in South Africa, which is really encouraging and nice to see that the learning and the certification is prioritised. That’s always a good thing. We’ve got 15 gold-certified Ignition partners and 20 certified partners and that’s the most recent update. If you’re interested in the partner program, please reach out to Clarice, who’s channel partner lead. She will be able to help guide you along the process and through the process of signing up, and learning and enablement. There’s a little QR code. I hope it works. Haven’t tested in a while, but that should work. If you scan the QR code, it should take you to our partner page where you can get more information. All right, on to Ignition 8.3. Is it out?


04:28

Speaker 2
No, we’re all waiting, but don’t hold your breath.


04:32

Speaker 1
Right. We felt we had to give everybody an update on 8.3, the much-anticipated new version of Ignition 8.3. It is still in early access. It is not in beta yet. We do expect it to move over to beta any day. It’s imminent, but it is currently still in early access. If you haven’t been around, been living under a rock or you haven’t joined us for any of the updates about Ignition 8.3, probably the most prolific and significant update that Inductive Automation has released. Much anticipated 8.3, there’s a couple of new things. There is a brand new Historian and API module, which is a high-performance time series database, and completely new drawing tools. You guys must have loved some of the piping that we had to do. In perspective, there’s brand new tools, really exciting event streams.


05:28

Speaker 1
This is quite a significant new module which will allow you to essentially ingest vast amounts of event-driven data, either transform them or pass them on into what we call Handlers, which could be Anything, other databases, APIs, tags. This is really exciting. This will move data handling inside of Ignition, outside of the traditional boning that we’ve had with OPC UA. So that’s quite exciting. New forms component. A brand new forms component with lots of new additions that could be done on manual data entry and capturing. Working on it for the first time ever in Perspective offline mode. That is. That is also a much-anticipated new feature.


06:14

Speaker 2
That’s going to be very nice.


06:16

Speaker 1
Yeah, but it’s.


06:17

Speaker 2
It captures data when you’re not connected to the server, and I think that’s going to be a game changer.


06:22

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, we’re really excited about that one. And then, of course, Siemens S7 plus update symbolic addressing that’s been asked for quite frequently as well. That’s quite a big update. And then, of course, Twilio voice and WhatsApp. And this adds to the functionality that we currently have to interact with teams, Slack, and Telegram. There will be a native WhatsApp and Twilio voice module added as well. A brand new gateway UI that looks a lot more intuitive than the current layout and design of the other gateway.


06:57

Speaker 2
Common things are all in one place.


06:58

Speaker 1
Yeah, makes more sense.


07:00

Speaker 2
Which makes a lot more sense.


07:01

Speaker 1
Yeah. Simplified layouts and things like that. New deployment methods or deployment modes. Yeah. You can either deploy a specific project in a gateway as a. As a. As a dev, as a sandbox Q and A, or as a. As a live production application.


07:18

Speaker 2
Once you deploy it in those environments, it’ll automatically understand that if you’re doing it at dev mode, you might be connecting to a simulation rather than to live PLCs.


07:27

Speaker 1
Yeah.


07:27

Speaker 2
And it’ll understand how to do that. So you won’t be connecting to your live plant or your live databases necessarily in deployment. It’ll connect to the dev environment.


07:39

Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s going to be really nice, where right now you’ve got to manage that typically with maybe Docker containers or multiple VMs and things like that. So there’s a couple of highlights of 8.3 if you’d like to get more detail or a full view. We have a whole host of videos and recordings and live events, recordings that we’ve done on 8.3. There’s a lot to get into right now, still in early access. We do expect the beta to go live any day. It’s imminent, like we said. But that’s the update that we have on 843 right now. It will definitely be in Time for the ICC. The ICC has, of course, the Inductive Automation Community Conference, an annual Community conference that is, for the first time ever, not in Folsom, but in Sacramento.


08:27

Speaker 1
This year Inductive had to move the ICC to a larger venue just to accommodate the number of people so they don’t have to turn anybody away. We will be there. I suspect you guys may be there as well.


08:41

Speaker 3
We’re all planning to attend.


08:42

Speaker 1
Oh fantastic. Lovely. Yeah, we can paint Sacramento red. So that will be in September. If you are interested to join in person in California, do let us know. We can help you with arranging that. Otherwise, there’s also a live stream ticket that you could purchase. But really exciting for us about the ICC this year is the involvement of the Provit crowd, if I can call it that. So if you’re familiar with Walker Reynoldson Industry 4.0 and the good work that they’re doing there, just really educating about the unified namespace and interoperability between systems and platforms and a new way of doing things. The Provit Conference was hugely successful earlier this year and 17 of those Provit sessions are coming to ICC live, showcasing the work done around Ignition, the unified namespace, together with the Provit virtual factory. So that’s really cool.


09:43

Speaker 1
That was announced literally a week ago, I think just over a week ago. So the ICC is definitely something to look forward to in September. All right, Canary. Over the past two months, not only was version 25 released, but we were already on version 25.3. So, a lot of new updates from the Canary team. They’ve done some really good work. Some of the updates with 25 was built-in reverse proxy and Axiom support for MS SQL connections with integrated security, improved Historian validation performance and a fair amount of bug fixes in admin Axiom collectors, Historian across the board.


10:26

Speaker 2
Yeah, just general robustness around a couple of things. There were some nice little features that have been put in, like they could take into account Store & Forward. They’ve improved just the formatting of values inside of Axiom, the padding and those kinds of things, which are really just nice small little things that make a huge difference to the presentation of the software.


10:54

Speaker 1
Fantastic if naturally similar to Inductive automation with Ignition. If you do have an active and current customer care agreement with Canary, you can upgrade for free. Right now it is available. So we would highly recommend checking out version 25.3, the latest version and I.


11:13

Speaker 2
Would strongly recommend you contact the support team when you’re going to upgrade or give them a couple of days heads up and the customer success team can walk you through that upgrade.


11:23

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. Version 25 started with 24, which was quite a significant rewrite in many ways. Yeah. So the upgrade. There are some considerations with the upgrade. So yeah, please do contact Laura and the customer success team if you’re looking to upgrade to version 25. Over and above the good work that the team has done around just updating and upgrading. They’ve also produced a fairly large volume of new videos that’s on YouTube. Some really amazing new series of videos. You can see it on the screen here. There’s an entirely new getting-started series on YouTube with Canary. Really elementary, starting with considering things like architectures, install builds, client app install.


12:13

Speaker 1
There’s a whole new series on Axiom, on how to use Axiom charts, as well as a brand new, fairly recent Canary admin series helping administrators find their way around some of the configuration and maintenance of the Canary admin server. So, really nice videos. We’d recommend that as a starting point if you’re looking to learn more about Canary. It’s not very long videos, it’s a couple of minutes each, but really insightful and valuable. It’s always good to start there before you join us for training. Obviously, that’s also available, but we do recommend checking out the three new learning series on Canary’s channel on YouTube. Really, really nice. Nice new beautiful team. Spent a lot of time preparing those. Also, the Canary User Conference is celebrating not only Canary’s 40th year of existence. It’s hard to believe that it’s been around for 40 years.


13:11

Speaker 1
So it’s also the 40-year celebration, but also the first-ever user conference, which is amazing in 40 years they’ve had. So that will be early August, second week of August, at State College in Pennsylvania. We’ll be there. Not sure if you guys will be there for this one, but we will definitely be there. A couple of things to look forward to this. There’s three full days, there’s an entire day of training, but there will also be a sneak peek on some of the batch functionality and golden batch functionality reporting that’s being included with the next release of Canoe.


13:49

Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that’s going to be a very nice addition to the Canary.


13:55

Speaker 1
All right.


13:57

Speaker 2
It’s a nice feature to have.


13:59

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. Especially the golden ditch. Yeah comparisons.


14:04

Speaker 2
I think there’s also some nice customer success stories from what I’ve seen on the agenda.


14:10

Speaker 1
Yeah, I think they’re live streaming as well. Not mistaken. Okay, I’m not sure. I don’t think we need to verify that. But two really good learning opportunities are coming up. That is US-based, but nonetheless, if there’s live streaming, it would be valuable to join. I did include the little, is it Linux or Linux? How do we pronounce it? Little Penguin there, we’re really excited we received confirmation that there will be a Linux version of Canary late fall in US terms, which is kind of October, late October, November time frame, possibly early next year. We know the software releases are never guaranteed, but it is in development, and the team is working really hard to be able to showcase that at the conference in August or at least the early version of it.


15:01

Speaker 1
And I think the ability to run Canary on Linux will obviously be from a performance and maintainability point of view. Yeah, that’s also highly anticipated. The ability to run on Linux. That’s it with Canary. Anything else on Canary? It’s been so much over the last two months. Okay, not right now. You may have received an email already. We have started sending out a couple of notifications around our new training offer. So we’re calling it Enable. Essentially what it is if you’re an existing customer, an existing Ignition and Canary customer, or if you hopefully will become a customer soon, join the community fairly soon we are offering a free complimentary and free, the same thing, a training seat with every license it does apply to standard Ignition with a module. Unfortunately, it does not apply to Ignition Edge.


15:57

Speaker 1
Definitely not to make an additional, but we do include a free training seat to our Ignition core training and similarly with Canary, with the purpose of the Canary license, a free seat to the two-day Canary training course. We do believe in the power of enablement. We’re not entirely sure if the cost of training is a barrier. I’m guessing that it is for a lot of people. And although we have amazing online resources available for both Ignition through Inductive Automation, and Canary through the Canary Academy, we want to make sure that we get some face time or live training in as well. So to help with that and really just to empower your teams or at least a person in your team, starting from the 1st of June, this is already live.


16:45

Speaker 1
So every new license that we you will be eligible for a free training seat. So check out the training calendar which is that little QR code at the bottom right-hand side. And naturally, it doesn’t apply to just new licenses for every customer. So we will be starting a rechart campaign over the next Couple of days, making sure that everybody’s away. We do anticipate that the courses we do have available right now for the remainder of this year will fill up fairly quickly. So if you do want to take advantage of this offer, please reach out to us at traininglment8co za or go to the training page and make contact with us there to make sure you are in line to take advantage of the free training. Laura, the captain of Success team is going to be busy with training.


17:35

Speaker 1
Let us know what you think about that, if that’s valuable, if you find that it’s valuable, if that will make a difference to help get more people into classroom training. We really do believe in that. And then just a final update before we get to speak to the clever guys in the room. Our Elevate Tour 2025 venues and dates are confirmed. We had a great time last year with our community in the Western Cape and up here in Centurion, Gauteng. We’ve added Umhlanga to the tour as well, and maybe we can do another one. I’m going to try and see if we can do another one. I’d love to visit the Eastern Cape. We haven’t, we haven’t taken the elevator to the Eastern Cape yet. Places like Rustenburg cartoon.


18:24

Speaker 1
There’s so many venues and locations we can go to. But right now, this is what is confirmed. 21st October we are in Stellenbosch. 22nd of October, the following day we are in Durban, and 24th October we are at Irene Country Lodge in Centurion. It will be much of the same as what we did last year, but we really want to double down on the stories and the experiences. So real voices, real experiences, hearing more about what people have done, what they’ve built, why they did it the way that they did. We find that’s usually the most valuable interaction from these events, and so put it on your calendar if you are in any of those locations. We will be sending out the save-the-date emails fairly soon, I think.


19:17

Speaker 1
So, do put that in your calendar. We look forward to meeting you down in those cities, engaging, and just having great conversations. All right, Anything that we missed as far as updates, news, anything important that we’ve missed? I think we’ve covered all the bases. No. All right. That was really quick at 20 minutes. We wanted to be quicker. We really want to spend time with Jaques and Craig and see what they’ve done. But gentlemen, maybe I’ll hand it over to you guys to give us an introduction to yourselves, your business, and we’ll take it from there.


19:54

Speaker 3
Okay, perfect. So, yeah, firstly, thanks, guys for inviting us out. I think the exposure for us as a small team is amazing. So since Concera was started, we’re almost three years old now. Started by myself and Roelf Boshoff. Previously, we both worked as system integrators for about 15 years at Rockwell Automation. So we do have a long history of doing projects in this kind of space. And then very shortly after that, we managed to convince Jacques to come and join us.


20:29

Speaker 1
Took a lot of convincing?


20:34

Speaker 3
A bit of issues here and there, but we got him eventually.


20:37

Speaker 1
Did you promise some flexi-hours? No comments.


20:43

Speaker 3
So that was almost two years ago now. And we’ve now got a junior engineer, Stefan, on board as well. And another junior started the other day. So we’re growing, and you know, what we’re really looking to do is to provide the best solutions that we can to our customers, but not be tied to a particular OEM. So as you know, various customers have their preferred solutions, and we try to provide the best solution we can with those. Obviously, we will suggest the ones we prefer.


21:19

Speaker 1
Yeah.


21:19

Speaker 3
Which is why we’re here. But that’s really, you know, where we started and where we’re trying to get.


21:27

Speaker 1
Okay, fantastic. And as a small team, the focus would be on really specialised types of applications. The niche builds that kind of, kind of, as opposed to a massive turnkey type all-in-one type solution.


21:43

Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean, obviously, if someone came to us with the turnkey.


21:46

Speaker 1
Yeah.


21:47

Speaker 3
But yeah, we, you know, we recognize we’re a small team, so we need to provide value in the best place that we can. And that is usually when we’re using the experience that we’ve got to do that. That’s where the project we’re about to show you has come from.


22:03

Speaker 1
Okay, fantastic. Thank you. Great. Any questions so far? No questions so far. The QR code link didn’t work. Gets a page error. Oh, damn it. Okay, all right, which one? I think we’ll share the links in the email with the recording after. Okay, we’ll just do that. Yeah, thank you for that. Who told us about that now? It’s George Strydom. George. George. Thank you for highlighting that, George. We’ll. We’ll send you something. All right, so let’s talk about the project. So it was implemented. At least the Rustenburg Platinum area. And the overview that we have here is that it was to develop an application. You know, we talk TLAS in our industry. We often fall into the trap where we talk about three letter acronyms and lots of acronyms as well. And now there’s four and five letter acronyms.


23:04

Speaker 1
But the requirement was to develop an abnormal situation management, or what we call as in SCADA platform, to replace the legacy system, essentially, that wasn’t placed there. Maybe give us just the overview of what that requirement was, if that’s okay. Yeah, 100%.


23:23

Speaker 4
So that legacy systems in place. And of course, with legacy systems in place, it is dependent on legacy OS. And that of course, created risks, security risks, as well as risks of maintaining the system if it falls over. That’s how. But apart from going to a trusted technology or a new technology, there were also extra benefits that could be seen from going to a system like Ignition. It’s not just replacing the current SCADA system that they’ve got, but also putting something in place which is scalable, which is adaptable, as well as making it easy for future technicians and so on to learn the system and use the system, that type of thing.


24:14

Speaker 1
So apart from addressing the current risk, if I can call it that, and constraints, it was also a forward-looking view in terms of, you know, something that’s more future-fit and expandable in the future. Yeah.


24:27

Speaker 4
And I think what definitely adds to this coming out of the industry myself as well as with my colleagues, with their experience with clients, you don’t just want to provide a solution, but you want to provide that little bit extra because that’s what enables guys in the future to take the system just to the next level.


24:47

Speaker 1
Okay, perfect modernisation type of approach.


24:53

Speaker 3
Yes.


24:53

Speaker 1
Yeah.


24:54

Speaker 2
What’s nice to you guys, that it wasn’t simply a case of let’s rip and replace.


24:57

Speaker 3
Yeah.


24:58

Speaker 1
Yes. Oh, that’s horrible. Sounds painful. Saying that sounds painful.


25:02

Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s painful to do those projects as well.


25:04

Speaker 1
Yeah. I’m really glad that wasn’t the approach. It’s a sensible way not to. Not to do it. Yeah. So, some of the scope that we have here. So there’s this. Shafts, various compressors, and compressor areas or houses, various utility areas that was included, and it was really to provide this efficient system overview and operation of all of those areas and provide that data essentially to anywhere from anywhere as a view from multiple locations.


25:35

Speaker 3
Yeah. I think the nature of this particular site. So a lot of these sites that you mentioned are so geographically dispersed that they’re trying to fit everything into a traditional single server model, which is just never going to work. Yeah, so we managed to use a lot of the. We’ll get to it when we get to the architecture. A lot of the Ignition products are built in a way that everything works wherever it is, but you can see everything from anywhere.


26:02

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.


26:03

Speaker 3
There’s real value in that.


26:05

Speaker 4
Also I just want to add the. The nature of the beast, especially with the guys at the air compressor section. Those guys are on the road on the way to a compressor and now you enable them to not just rely on what you hear from a central control room, but the possibility exists to expose your SCADA to a handheld unit so the guys on the road, while busy can see what’s going on at a different section.


26:30

Speaker 1
Yeah, that’s just the visibility of. And having access to that data is such a significant. From just having that awareness is such a significant enabler. You know, being blind to whatever the data is that you need to do your job and having access to that data from wherever you are is a massive enabler. So, some of the problems you had to solve. We spoke about the cumbersome features lacking through some of the prior systems we’re using. It was difficult to manage and maintain because of the complexity, infrastructure and time perspectives. And then the various sites also different standards making cross usage of operators and cross usage for operators and technicians difficult. So that’s typical what you have with a legacy system that’s been in place for a very long time.


27:24

Speaker 1
Some of the requirements you’ve already spoken about are the simple interface, universal interface. I want to ask about some of the admissions across the piece of the solution that needed to be implemented rapidly. So we’re going to get to the challenges, but you’ll see at the bottom right-hand side, you’ll see on your screens, at least to be joining us, you’ll see a project start date of October 2024 and an end date of December, not 2025. Also 2024. And I know those things have a kind of variable end date, but in this case, there was a fairly hard target on the end date.


28:06

Speaker 3
Yeah, we had a few sleepless nights, almost three months. The challenge was to get all the bulk of the development done and everything rolled out on site within their financial year. Obviously, we spent a little bit of time after that tweaking things, but now there are a few long days.


28:25

Speaker 1
Did you FaceTime for Christmas with the Family?.


28:30

Speaker 4
Oh yeah. And regressing airlines during that time.


28:36

Speaker 2
I didn’t tell you the fixed attitude from 12 to 12.


28:42

Speaker 1
We have a question here. Yeah, did costing play a role in the decision of system upgrade? So what’s the cost? And I would imagine the overall cost from a licensing, from an engineering as well as a longer term total cost of ownership. All of those things are costs that need to be considered.


29:03

Speaker 4
So there was an in-depth cost analysis that the team at Sibanye did with other technologies before we introduced this. And of course then we put our, I had them in the ring and we tried to show them that, how you can actually save a little bit more and not just with direct costs, with the financial, the financial commitment that you have to make, but also the indirect costs that’s associated with it. I mean if you get to disaster recovery type system, how long does it take to implement, or to do a disaster recovery? On current systems, it might be in the duration of a day and a half, sometimes two days. Especially due to some constraints that you might get. The big thing is what we could have, what we could show them, apart just from the direct financial savings that you can get.


30:00

Speaker 4
Also, the uptime that you can get with the system, the real redundancy that you have between the gateways. You know, all of that added stuff.


30:11

Speaker 1
That’s not necessarily directly measurable, or you’re able to understand the cost of it, but there is a long-term aspect.


30:17

Speaker 4
Yeah, it’s usually something that only your specialist teams know, the guys who work behind the scenes and yeah


30:23

Speaker 1
I’m disappointed we didn’t include the iceberg view now, I saw it this morning, but you guys had a very nice way of, you had a visual where you showed the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the total cost of ownership. So there was a really nice way of, visual way of explaining that. Yeah. So, outside of the development timeline, which was obviously a very tight timeline, you, we mentioned the multiple and different PLC standards. There was also a requirement to maintain a similar look and feel, which is obviously quite important from a familiarity point of view. That’s, that’s quite important. Familiarity is a very strong driver of things. And then I don’t think we’re going to look at it today.


31:11

Speaker 1
But there was also very specialized search curve graph which you had to develop that was quite critical for the compressor maintenance and operation, which was probably mathematically quite tricky.


31:27

Speaker 3
There’s a bit of a challenge with that.


31:30

Speaker 1
All right, and I know everybody’s probably quite excited to kind of look at some of the stuff that you’ve developed, but maybe just as a recap of the results. So it is still ongoing, but essentially what you delivered was a high-performance ASM, abnormal situational management, SCADA, that is simpler. Simpler to maintain, requires fewer computing resources. I guess we’re going to cover a little bit of that when we look at the architecture, and allows access to a broad range of people to the application. The unlimited license model. So if you’re not familiar with the unlimited, what we call the unlimited licensing model, typically within Ignition, if you go with a package, you are not limited in terms of clients, tags, designers, or number of device connections. All of those aspects are unlimited.


32:19

Speaker 1
Which, if it’s a fairly large application rollout like this is, then it’s quite valuable to have that. We did speak a little bit about the total cost of ownership, so the annual support costs has significantly decreased as well. We didn’t mention the new IT policies that can now finally be applied. I suppose when you’re trying to maintain a good security posture, it’s quite important to be able to implement those security updates. And then very excitingly, which I think is where the ongoing is coming in, is that some of the benefits that we realised was outside of just visualisation, and now there’s some other functional areas that we’re looking to implement as well. Yeah. Okay, fantastic.


33:15

Speaker 1
Well done. Lovely. Let’s have a look at the architecture. So this is an interesting one. We. I don’t know if this is an enterprise with redundancy, hub and spoke. It’s a bit of everything. It’s a bit of an everything kind of architecture, but maybe talk us through it.


33:21

Speaker 3
Okay, so like I mentioned before, a lot of these areas that we needed to gather data from and provide views to were very heavily geographically dispersed. So what we decided to do is you can see on the top there we’ve got a bunch of edges. So those are used in the compressor houses. So those are generally out in the middle of nowhere. They need to work if the network’s down. So that’s why we used an edge there with a tag provider there, and it provides the views if you happen to be there.


33:52

Speaker 1
So the Ignition Edge is a lightweight, watered-down version of Ignition. It’s still unlimited in certain ways, but it is limited to how long you can keep data for. Yeah. And it is limited to the number of views that you have. So really full edge of network type applications where you don’t necessarily want to store the data there for a long time, but have a local view, if you need it. Yeah, the edge is a good, It’s a good client to have there. Yeah.


34:23

Speaker 3
So, what we did with those as well is you’ll see there it’s linked to a main gateway. We found a method to keep the project in that top gateway and push it down to the edges. But the edges only see the pages that they need to see. Then, we gather all the data through remote tab providers into that one gateway, and that’s sort of the.


34:46

Speaker 2
They’re using MQTT or PC, those ones.


34:50

Speaker 3
We’re using the gateway network. So they’re remote tag providers to the edges.


34:55

Speaker 1
So it’s gateway to gateway.


34:56

Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s gateway to gateway for those.


34:58

Speaker 1
And this little orange server there or node that we have here indicates where the redundancy is on the Ignition side.


35:04

Speaker 3
Yes. So we did good for redundancy on those gateways. We’ve also got OS redundancy, which is quite nice. So the one is on Windows, one’s on Linux, just in case, you know.


35:14

Speaker 1
You never lost it gives you that ability to do Windows and Linux.


35:18

Speaker 3
Yeah, so that was great. Yeah. And then, moving on to the other main gateways, those are on the various shafts. So that’s where you’ve got a lot higher concentration of data. The control rooms are there. So for each shaft, the guy’s in the control room. They only have two perspective licenses. So that’s for the two screens in the control room. The idea being is that’s a cost-saving measure. If the whole network goes down, you can still run your shaft by itself. We’ve got your two views. But what we did then as well to make life more interesting and to give us a bit more features was we pushed all four of those gateway projects up to a central hub, which is the one down in the bottom, and then that one has an unlimited view.


36:04

Speaker 3
So then all the other screens in the control rooms can just connect there and see all the same data. As well as that, you’ll see there’s a firewall there. That other gateway is sitting on the IT side. That way all the managers in their offices, wherever they happen to be, if they really want to, they can connect to the scanner as well.


36:23

Speaker 1
But there’s a clearly defined security separator.


36:26

Speaker 3
Clearly defined, so only certain ports are open. We started with everything off and opened up as we needed to make sure that’s as secure as we could get it.


36:37

Speaker 4
I just want to add something about redundancy and feedback that I actually got just this week from the client itself. We plan downtown, and they had to shut down the one system. While viewing the SCADA in the control room, they could actually see that while you’re viewing it, at the right bottom corner, it just popped up and said, “Throwing over to backup system.” It was like a 1015-second type thing.


37:07

Speaker 1
Yeah.


37:07

Speaker 4
It went over to the news scanner, it started up, and as soon as.


37:10

Speaker 1
It running whilst it’s reaches and yeah it’s.


37:14

Speaker 4
It’s always nice talking about it, but I mean, it’s nice, actually seeing it.


37:17

Speaker 1
Live that unless it’s planned, you never want to see it.


37:21

Speaker 4
But it’s just. Yeah, well, that’s why you don’t see it.


37:23

Speaker 2
But it’s nice to hear that it actually worked in a real environment. So often, we sit and test these things in our little ivory towers. We test the redundancy, and we say it works great until the day that you actually need it.


37:39

Speaker 1
Redundancy is really valuable for. For upgrades, if you need to update or upgrade. Really valuable.


37:46

Speaker 4
Also, just on the views with the unlimited views and how it opened it up. So, I mean even if you’ve got limited views inside your engineering space, you still have the availability of your unlimited views on the central app space. So you can still have unlimited views within your engineering environment.


38:07

Speaker 1
Yeah. On all your different scatter, you’ll always have that unlimited.


38:11

Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did that just as a cost-saving measure. You know, we put two clients everywhere and one unlimited, taking advantage of the unlimited nature.


38:23

Speaker 1
In these gateway instances, you’ve got a PostgreSQL running, for I would imagine not really for a long-term data store.


38:31

Speaker 3
Yeah. So that’s just running the Ignition tag historian. The idea behind that is we push everything in there. That’s your production, your daily reports, fault finding, all that kind of thing and then all the lot. The data that you want to keep.


38:44

Speaker 1
Logged in goes to the push back.


38:46

Speaker 3
To the canary in the top.


38:47

Speaker 1
Okay.


38:48

Speaker 3
Again, as a cost-saving and, you know, efficient use of the modules that we have to use.


38:55

Speaker 1
Yeah.


38:56

Speaker 4
It’s also a lesson learned, sort of thing, because I mean.


38:59

Speaker 1
Yeah.


38:59

Speaker 4
Using Postgres as opposed to your traditional other SQL service, which is a financial investment that you have to maintain every single year.


39:09

Speaker 1
Yeah. And you’re referring to Microsoft. Yes.


39:18

Speaker 4
But, also not using SQLite because SQLite is definitely nice for smaller applications, but you are limited to the amount of access to that database.


39:27

Speaker 3
And Postgre opens that up again.


39:29

Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. Once you start getting into the paper side of the licensing, the Kel type views then it could be quite expensive. Yes, yes. You know, is it. Is it CPU based? Is it. Number of clients could become quite painful to manage. Yeah.


39:45

Speaker 3
First grade, you install it and off you go.


39:47

Speaker 1
Yeah. And then that long term data store is Canary. And so how many tanks are. What sort of visualization do you have there?


39:58

Speaker 3
So on Canary, I think the last time we looked at it was sitting somewhere around 8000 tags at the moment. Okay.


40:05

Speaker 4
It’s a 15000 license.


40:07

Speaker 1
Yes. Okay.


40:08

Speaker 3
Yeah but again like we said we don’t. We’re not pushing absolutely everything up there. So it is way more. No, I’m just important stuff.


40:18

Speaker 4
If you look at it on the engineering type system, all of those combined is, it’s close to about 500,000 tags type thing. But I mean, but everything’s open on.


40:27

Speaker 3
The tag historian side.


40:28

Speaker 4
Even if not everything.


40:30

Speaker 3
Not all log all of that.


40:31

Speaker 4
Not the tags are locked, but there’s definitely more tags that’s locked on the tag historian placed on at each gateway.


40:39

Speaker 1
Okay.


40:39

Speaker 4
It’s only the more you’d say important reporting type tags and so on that are locked on this side.


40:46

Speaker 1
So we’ve got three minutes. I do want to make sure we look at the application. I have just two final questions here. We. I know mobile. Mobile view was mentioned at some point. Was that designed or built for? Not yet.

 

 

41:01
Speaker 3
So we have built our standard cater for it. So all our views or the main view that we use and we’ll get to how we do that.


41:10

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah.


41:11

Speaker 3
So we do have the initial view as a breakpoint, so we can change it to look at, you know, the sketches of the mobile views. But the focus of this project was just the main screens. But we did add the capability. So later on we can do a mobile without reinventing the wheel.


41:28

Speaker 1
At least designed for that in mind.


41:30

Speaker 3
Yes.


41:31

Speaker 1
And then in terms of other system interoperability, I see there’s some connection. Connections. What are we interfacing with?


41:41

Speaker 3
So they’ve got about 50 odd Adam Bradley PLCs here.


41:46

Speaker 1
Okay.


41:47

Speaker 3
Some of them are. There are a few different PLC standards so we had to develop templates and UDTs for. For those. But what we did is we tried to make it such that when the operator is interacting with those objects he doesn’t really know which one it is.


42:01

Speaker 1
Okay.


42:01

Speaker 3
I tried to make them look almost exactly the same.


42:04

Speaker 1
Okay, well done.


42:05

Speaker 3
So that was cool.


42:08

Speaker 1
That’s a bit. I’m gonna stop sharing here while you get ready on your side. Craig, any other questions? Yeah, we’ve got four questions here.


42:17

Speaker 3
Oh, wow.


42:17

Speaker 1
Okay, so the first one is by Mervin. How did the customer decide on Ignition edition rather than InTouch WinCC or other traditional SCADA systems?


42:31

Speaker 3
Should I take a stab at that? So, you know, we have known this, the guys at Sibanye, for quite some time, and we’ve done a few of those systems ourselves, and they, have you mentioned they had one of those already? And we really went in and showed them that if we go to an Ignition system, that first of all, the cost is always huge. So we’ve touched on that earlier. But the nature of the behind-the-scenes costs is what they would say. So, particularly for the guys who are developing and the guys who are managing small things like the live development views, the free, not free, but unlimited licensing costs on the clients. And another major thing in my mind is that with traditional SCADA systems, you need a lot of software installed and in a lot of places.


43:29

Speaker 3
If anything goes a little bit out of kilter, then things fall over. So, because Perspective runs in a web browser, if you want it to, that really reduces the amount of software we need installed everywhere and has a very small footprint. Yeah. And you know, when it comes to things like disaster recoveries and you know that’s a significant time and then, you know, time is money. Thank you.


43:55

Speaker 1
So maybe to summarise, there was a commercial aspect, there was a performance aspect as well as an extension. Is it extensibility or extendibility? I’m never sure what the word is, the ability to, to do more outside of just the traditional schedule.


44:15

Speaker 4
But I think you can also summarise it into, you can say rapid rollouts.


44:18

Speaker 1
Yes.


44:19

Speaker 4
Because, like I said, it’s browser-based, it’s a quick installation. If you want to use the Perspective workstation, or if you don’t, you just use your browser, that type of thing. And I mean, they’ve got a team of specialists who need to look at not only this system but systems worldwide. So yeah, it’s saving them time.


44:41

Speaker 1
I think if you’ve ever designed inside of Ignition design and perspective, you would know that if you know, if you, once you press that save button, it’s live, it’s instant, which is quite nice. To see and it saves some coffee-making time. Mervyn. Yeah, I hope that answers your question. I see there’s also Anonymous. Anonymous asked; What IT hardware are you running the system on? So I would imagine a certain kind of brand of servers and VMs.


45:11

Speaker 3
Yeah. So all the gateways are running on Stratus Edge 250s, I think they are.


45:17

Speaker 1
Yeah, Stratus. Lovely.


45:20

Speaker 3
So all redundancy is there as well.


45:22

Speaker 1
Yeah. So fairly good. Not only hardware runs, but also software.


45:26

Speaker 4
Yeah, it’s Stratus on them, as well as some of the infrastructure they already had in place.


45:33

Speaker 3
So the edges are all the machines that they had beforehand, but we put Stratus on all the gateways.


45:42

Speaker 1
Okay. Also, Anonymous, would management monitoring be a view only or control as well? I suppose it could be both, but what did you guys do in your case?


45:54

Speaker 3
The security we implemented here is all done through the client’s Active Directory. It’s based on the management individual’s group. If they put him in a role where he is allowed to change, he.


46:08

Speaker 1
Can change because that could be defined not only per user group, but also per user. And you can take that down to a tag level.


46:19

Speaker 3
I’ll show you that later.


46:21

Speaker 1
Well, I’m going to get to the two questions before we run out of time, if you actually show us what some of the visual looks like. I think the server hardware platform. Windows or Linux? We just heard that it’s both. So that. That was also from Anonymous. Thank you.


46:42

Speaker 3
And then the choice between Postgres and MariaDB, to be perfectly honest, Roelf made that decision.


46:49

Speaker 1
Okay, so sir, you need to speak to Roelf.


46:52

Speaker 3
Can you answer that in the chat?


46:54

Speaker 4
It was basically a discussion because I did an online course a few years ago and it covered PostgreSQL as well as SQL, and I saw some benefits.


47:02

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, we do see. We do see both. Well, we see all three. We see a lot of Microsoft, and the variants of Microsoft, and we see both. A lot of the other two as well. Correct. Thank you. Excellent.


47:17

Speaker 3
So should I just.


47:19

Speaker 1
Good question. Pleasure.


47:21

Speaker 3
Let’s do that. I think.


47:26

Speaker 1
This is little.


47:28

Speaker 3
Everyone can see it.


47:30

Speaker 1
I am going to just make sure that we can see it over here as well. Okay.


47:36

Speaker 3
Yeah.


47:37

Speaker 1
Well, there we go.


47:38

Speaker 3
There we go. Okay, perfect. So this is a demo version of the application that they have on site. Obviously we don’t want to show their sites and their IP and whatnot.


47:52

Speaker 1
Understandable. Yes.


47:54

Speaker 3
You know, the bulk of it is very similar. So, as we mentioned earlier, we went with an ASM scatter, the idea being that only the abnormal situations jump out at you.


48:05

Speaker 1
So just maybe to explain that. Drawing attention to something that needs attention.


48:10

Speaker 3
Needs attention. Yes.


48:11

Speaker 1
Okay.


48:12

Speaker 3
As you can see on this page, there’s a lot of grey and a lot of white. We went with the approach of grey being off and white being on. But neither of those is potentially an issue. And then, when there is some sort of scenario that the operator needs to react to, we start introducing colour. As we can see here already, there’s a little bit of colour here. This motor, in particular, happens to have a drive interlock.


48:38

Speaker 1
Oh, I like that little. And there are no pop-ups.


48:40

Speaker 3
Yeah. Leading on to that, the idea was to not ever take away the view of the operator of this site.


48:48

Speaker 1
Always have a full view.


48:49

Speaker 3
Always have a full view, but still.


48:51

Speaker 1
Have the drive drill down capability. Yeah.


48:53

Speaker 3
We put all the traditional pop-up content down here in the bottom. So you’ve got a control pane in the middle with all your buttons and stops and starts and whatnot. All the various information is on the left, depending on what you clicked on. We’ve got a little alarm window as well. And even a little trend. This one’s not the most interesting trend, but that’s a little trend there that we’ve got for the guys.


49:21

Speaker 1
Lovely.


49:21

Speaker 2
You know what’s nice about that is that it’s not more than two or three mouse clicks to get to where you need to.


49:27

Speaker 1
Yeah.


49:27

Speaker 2
Where you need to be. And that is so important, you know, with anything. If you’re browsing a web page and I’ve got a click, click. Ten clicks. Ten clicks later. I’ve lost interest.


49:38

Speaker 1
Yeah.


49:39

Speaker 2
This is one click, and I’ve got the major information in front of me directly.


49:44

Speaker 1
Well, never saving a sight of the overall process.


49:47

Speaker 2
And I don’t lose sight of what’s going on.


49:48

Speaker 3
Yeah.


49:49

Speaker 2
That’s so important because those pop-up.


49:51

Speaker 1
Usually distracting in that sense that it removes you from that overview.


49:57

Speaker 3
And leading on from that, I know there’s probably some guys thinking sometimes it’s useful to have two pop up to open and maybe you want to watch something while you change something else.


50:07

Speaker 1
Yeah.


50:07

Speaker 3
So what we did to get around that was you can right click on your icons, add it to the dock and then you get a little thingy on the side there to show you it, whatever it is you dock there and it’s fantastic. So then you can watch that and it’s Live. And it’s real, live data, especially when.


50:25

Speaker 2
Sequences are starting and things like that. It’s really nice.


50:28

Speaker 1
Yeah, so there are certain values and labels that you can dock on the right-hand side to always see the effect of a dependent action. Yeah, that’s amazing.


50:40

Speaker 3
If you need to.


50:41

Speaker 4
A nice thing. Even if you dock some objects from this window, and you move to a.


50:46

Speaker 3
Different window, it still stays docked.


50:49

Speaker 4
So you can. You can either clear it or you can just minimise and add extra variables.


50:54

Speaker 1
Yes, that is really nice.


50:57

Speaker 3
So I’m trying to drive using the. Sorry. Okay. And then something else that we did is we’ve got now the pages for the. Well, sorry, not the pages, but if we like navigate to the window, you’ll see you’ve got a face plate to the bottom for that area. So in a lot of traditional scanners, you’ve got all this extra info clutching the page that you don’t necessarily need to look at all the time.


51:23

Speaker 1
Just because you can put everything on the page doesn’t mean you should.


51:25

Speaker 3
Yeah. And a typical example in this case with a conveyor is your totalizer values. So by using that bottom face plate, you can get rid of a lot of that data that they sometimes use but don’t always use and still give it to them. But it doesn’t clutter up all the.


51:43

Speaker 1
Pages, but still have a shift in the daily performance. Yeah, that’s. That’s amazing. Very nice.


51:49

Speaker 3
So then, another key thing for us here, and Rolf spent a lot of time on this, I have to mention it for him. Is our tree on the left?


51:58

Speaker 1
You can pay Craig later. Yeah.


52:00

Speaker 3
So this tree on the left is.


52:03

Speaker 2
It’s.


52:04

Speaker 3
It’s built from our tag provider, so it automatically builds this for us. We don’t need to go and do it.


52:10

Speaker 1
It was designed that way.


52:11

Speaker 3
It was designed to do that. Yeah. It is both your navigation. So at the moment we’re on the bank, we click here, there’s our vent fan. And what it also does is that our alarm goes off. That’s where the real clever stuff comes in. So I’m going to use this instrument as an example, and I’m just going to put it in simulate, and you’ll see now it’s in simulate, and we’ve got some blue going on the SCADA because we know there’s a problem there. Little tool tip. Yeah. Just to give the guys some extra features. And we’re going to put it into an alarm State. So you see, we’ve got our alarm on the bottom right. You’ll see the port. Okay. The border goes purple on the object. So it’s drawing your eye to that object. There is an issue there.


53:04

Speaker 3
As well as that we have our alarm counters on the top and you’ll see here in the tree you’ve got a navigation to go and find where that issue came from.


53:18

Speaker 1
Typically, it would be. All you would have is at the bottom right-hand side. Yeah, yeah.


53:23

Speaker 3
Or you’d have to go and find it on an alarm page.


53:25

Speaker 2
It might be at the bottom or in your alarm banner, but you’ve got to go and do a lot of it.


53:30

Speaker 1
So you can follow the breadcrumbs.


53:33

Speaker 2
That’s very nice.


53:34

Speaker 1
Very, very.


53:34

Speaker 3
And you know if we cause I’m going to cause another sort of keep driving on there and sort of a struggle. So I’m going to cause another alarm somewhere else with a different priority. So we’ve built in four priorities which you can change from the face plate if you’ve got the right access. And I’m an admin here, so I’m allowed to cause chaos. Sorry, I picked the wrong thing there. So if we go and cause an alarm here. So this is a different priority. So you’ll see that one’s red instead of purple. But if you follow our tree here, you see now the red breadcrumbs go up to the top, and it inherently shows the colour of whatever the highest priority is in that area.


54:18

Speaker 1
Long count. And you’ve also used different shapes.


54:22

Speaker 3
Yeah.


54:23

Speaker 1
As opposed to just kind of just a colour.


54:26

Speaker 3
Just an extra way of differentiating everything.


54:28

Speaker 1
Yeah.


54:29

Speaker 3
And. And like we said, this all builds itself from the tree from the tag provider. Sorry.


54:35

Speaker 2
Well done roof.


54:36

Speaker 1
That’s. Yeah, yeah, that’s beautiful.


54:38

Speaker 3
Had a few sleepless nights with that one. And then you know, something else to mention on the tree is if we’re say on this page and we want to see what’s causing an alarm on their bank driving there, you can see here it’s appeared in our tree. So PT101 can click that, and we get the face plate at the bottom for the object that’s on the other side on the other page. If we don’t want to leave, we’re busy with something here, we can quickly click on it, see what the problem is, reset it and carry on without actually having to navigate. There’s a whole bunch of other features, like filters and searches and whatnot, in here as well. I won’t go into that too much, but. Well, there’s ways of filtering everything in.


55:22

Speaker 4
There, but in essence you can decide what you want to see in your tree at a specific point in time.


55:26

Speaker 1
Yes.


55:27

Speaker 4
Especially for somebody that needs to do fault finding. They want to go to specific instrument, they can go and search it.


55:33

Speaker 3
It will show everything. Yes, that’s everything. Every control module on that page is there. Now if you don’t want it, you just.


55:42

Speaker 4
Now it only shows the one that’s in alarm.


55:44

Speaker 1
Yes. So, as far as an ASM design goes, she definitely ticks all the boxes, but over and above, just also the fault finding, the ability to understand, you know, without having to really try and dig and search. You just follow the breadcrumbs. Did you focus on any kind of alarming, advanced alarming notifications? Is it all inside of the SCADA at the moment, or the notifications?


56:15

Speaker 3
For the time being, it’s still in the SCADA. We do, though, have plans to integrate that. Currently I think it’s just going to SMS, but with 8.3 we’ve got a few more options there and we can. Will definitely be looking at plans in.


56:31

Speaker 4
The pipeline at the moment.


56:32

Speaker 3
Yes.


56:32

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. WhatsApp could be. What I like about the. The WhatsApp view is that. Or integration is that it allows for some collaboration. You know, we’re an SMS or an email or even Teams. It allows for not only the view of an alarm with group environment, but also the ability to discuss that specific alarming question as a group to decide what the. What the next action is going to be, which is so much more intuitive than an SMS or an email. So WhatsApp is quite popular in South Africa, so I’m guessing the WhatsApp will be. Yeah, will be a nice one for sure.


57:17

Speaker 3
So I just remembered one other thing because someone mentioned security earlier. So what we’ve got on every control module, you’ll see there’s a little tab hidden in the corner here. So. And this is per instance. So this is the security for this instrument. So if we change it here, it doesn’t change for every single instrument. And we can go and define what these are, the four levels that we’ve built in. We can go and define. What are those individual people allowed to do?


57:47

Speaker 1
Well, those defined inside of Ignition or.


57:49

Speaker 3
Inside the Directory, they are. I believe they’re defined in Ignition, but they’re linked to Active Directory roles. But we can go and then change what they’re allowed to do for this instrument, which we found in. In certain places you want for example say a mole. You want the operator to start that with the sequence. So you don’t want the start button available to the operator on the mill motor itself stuff. And by doing this instance level security we give the customer that kind of flexibility to define what he wants to do differently.


58:26

Speaker 4
Another good example is on the compressor side. I mean, those are big pieces of equipment with a lot of risk when you go and set them up and do your search codes and so on. So you might not even want to give anybody inside your site access to it but only to your OEM who comes out and needs to do that. Then you lock that specific control, and it’s.


58:51

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s so very focused on real-time operator fault finding uptime. Is there a view on focusing more on historical data long-term trends reporting? Is that something that you’re busy working on?


59:11

Speaker 3
Yeah, that’s currently in progress at the moment. We do have couple of production reports available on site. You know the typicals that they use. But there is definitely a planning or in the pipeline to start building out those axiom reports for the. The management level guys and more production reports for the guys on site.


59:31

Speaker 4
Yeah, that’s actually already the guys are using it.


59:35

Speaker 1
Yeah.


59:35

Speaker 4
At the moment.


59:36

Speaker 3
Yeah.


59:36

Speaker 1
Fantastic. And repeatability or the. Or the. I can never say that word, you say so nicely. Not repeatable.


59:53

Speaker 2
I don’t know, but how easy is it to roll this out to more sites?


59:58

Speaker 3
So obviously we need to create a CMS for the particular site, choose a way.


01:00:05

Speaker 1
We find the need.


01:00:06

Speaker 3
I mean, there’s no way around that. We made a few tools to avoid doing everything ourselves. But because of the way we’ve set up this tree and the tag provider, you could repurpose. We can repurpose that quite easily. And because we don’t have to spend all these hours linking navigation buttons left, right, and center, it’s fairly straightforward to solve words.


01:00:32

Speaker 2
One of the nice things you mentioned is that the look and feel are always the same regardless of the standards being used. Yeah, that’s so important because from a cross-training perspective or from a center of excellence perspective, it’s one standard that you’re looking at.


01:00:51

Speaker 1
Yeah.


01:00:52

Speaker 2
And it all behaves in the same fashion.


01:00:55

Speaker 3
Yeah, that’s something I didn’t mention. The way we achieve that is by using inherited projects within Ignition. So our ASM styles and the Basic icons and whatnot in one project, are inherited down to the PLC standards. All of that’s embedded in the ones we want. So that’s why, again, we’re taking advantage of. We change something in one place and it ripples through all the standards.


01:01:20

Speaker 4
The big advantage is that you can have. You have one gateway hosting the ASM standards.


01:01:25

Speaker 1
Yes.


01:01:26

Speaker 4
PLC standards. And if you have other PLC standards that should ever be added, then you can just go and add them. But you could link all of your other gateways to that gateway.


01:01:35

Speaker 1
You.


01:01:36

Speaker 4
You can inherit those projects, and it makes future development so much quicker.


01:01:41

Speaker 3
Yeah. We didn’t mention that. We’ve got EAM running in all our gateways, pushing things where they need to.


01:01:47

Speaker 4
Go and then just again on the navigation side, everything. Yes. Built to. What’s it, the S95, S88 type structure, which also then goes through to. Even when you go and look at your trending, then you still have that type of view.


01:02:04

Speaker 1
Hierarchical view. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very nice. As you mentioned, there’s another one of those three-letter acronyms: Enterprise Administration Module. It gives you the ability to do things like that, not only remote backup and install, but also dictate, reset, and other things.


01:02:22

Speaker 2
Essentially manage your entire.


01:02:24

Speaker 1
From a single gateway.


01:02:25

Speaker 2
Your entire system. All of those gateways are from a single gateway.


01:02:30

Speaker 1
Yeah. Including all the edges.


01:02:31

Speaker 2
Yeah.


01:02:32

Speaker 1
Yes. Which is. Which is phenomenal.


01:02:33

Speaker 3
Yeah.


01:02:34

Speaker 1
Yeah. I think I can answer the next question. The next question was from Laura who said, aren’t you guys just the coolest? Oh, yes, Laura, definitely they are trying. We’ve had a snippet of the application and very, very well done. I think it certainly, from an ASM perspective, ticks all the boxes and the way the design was done. It definitely is the foundation for whatever else you want to build on top. The mobile, I think, would be a good view. Very happy that you did that with mobile in mind because it’s very often it’s not the case and to kind of retrofit that afterwards based on what you’ve designed is always quite difficult. Yeah. But amazing. Well done. Thank you for sharing. Any questions for John and Craig? Any other questions? I didn’t see anything. We are out of time. We in fact.


01:03:27

Speaker 1
A couple of minutes over already. Nope.


01:03:36

Speaker 3
Either means we did really well or really.


01:03:41

Speaker 1
We did have some good questions around design, I think. Yeah. If there’s no other questions, Craig, thank you very much.


01:03:49

Speaker 3
Stop sharing. Sure.


01:03:50

Speaker 1
Yeah. Button’s gone. You’re still with us. Thank you very much for. For the five minutes we’ve. We’ve gone over. Albertus says Great and thank you for using Stratus. Albertus! You’re a lovely guy, but I don’t think it’s because of you. It’s because of the hardware. We love seeing the applications with Stratus ZTC or Stratus R in general. It’s really good stuff. Cool. So that is all that we have for you today. I do want to, if I can get it right. How do I do that? Now I want to do that, and then I want to share again something that we’ve mentioned in the past but we haven’t really focused on and I want to make sure that I get everybody’s attention on it, which is this you can hopefully see is we do have a community impact program.


01:04:53

Speaker 1
I’m guessing we can see the screen.


01:04:56

Speaker 2
Yes.


01:04:58

Speaker 1
Essentially, what it is if you’re involved with a community, a person or a group of people that is either a non-profit or a charity. And now that you have a little bit of a better idea of how Ignition could be utilized and as a community in need, we would love to donate Ignition licenses, we would love to donate our time as well as the time of whoever else would want to volunteer to help see if Ignition can make a positive impact on that community in some way. There are some amazing examples of this elsewhere in the world. There are a couple of homeless shelters that are being run, completely run and managed on all fronts, logistically, commercially by Ignition. There’s also some food locker in the UK, some food locker-type applications.


01:05:50

Speaker 1
So, if you’re aware of any community that needs technology to help improve lives and processes and improve its clarity, please let us know. We’d love to donate some Ignition licenses and, more importantly, some of our time to help make that happen.


01:06:05

Speaker 2
And some of yours.


01:06:07

Speaker 1
And some of yours. Yeah, that was the only request we had for you today as part of the deal. Thank you very much. Vian was complimentary about the application you guys supported. Thank you for your time.


01:06:20

Speaker 3
Thank you.


01:06:21

Speaker 1
As should we. Thank you very much for your time and for sharing. I know it’s always difficult to find a couple of hours to do thatabout sharing., and people are always a little bit apprehensive of sharing and I do understand the sensitivity when you show other people what you’ve done for other people, but we really appreciate your time this morning. Thank you for doing that. Yeah.


01:06:41

Speaker 3
Thank you for inviting us and everyone for joining in.


01:06:43

Speaker 1
Yeah. Any closing thoughts from anybody before we call it all good. That’s it. Yes. Thank you very much. We will see you in, I’m guessing three months. Time for the seminar for the next course of the webinar. Have a good Friday. Have a good weekend. We’ll chat to you soon. Thanks very much.

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