- 40 min
On 22 and 25 October, the Ignition, Canary, and Flow communities gathered in Hazendal Estate in the Western Cape and Irene Country Lodge in Gauteng for the 2024 Elev8 Community Conference. This year’s theme, “Building your Digital Infrastructure,” promised attendees big news, customer showcases, and specialist guidance, and, as you’ll read in this recap, they were not disappointed!
International Guests: Fireside Chat
This year’s Elev8 Fireside chat offered a view into the current state of the automation industry and how it’s changing. The panel, with Travis Cox, Chief Technology Evangelist at Inductive Automation, Ken Wyant, Director of Business Solutions at Canary, Kyle Kensigner, Director of Partner Programs and Strategic Accounts at Canary and Rikus van Rensburg, Software Engineer at Flow Software, touched on many important topics, such as the importance of a data strategy for digital transformation, how customer pain points have changed, bringing OT and IT together, and more.
However, the main topic was what technology and trends are breaking through and reshaping the future of automation and how customers are adapting to these advancements.
Exciting new Features with Ignition 8.3, Canary 24 and Flow 7.1
Travis Cox took the stage to describe why “Ignition 8.3 is the most substantial and ambitious release we’ve ever done.” He divided the new improvements into three broad categories: Applications, Historian, and Infrastructure and explored upcoming features and how these powerful new tools can inspire users to achieve their next significant breakthrough.
In the Ignition 8.3 Technical Deep-dive, Travis introduced project-level resources and other features available through the designer, including new Perspective features, changes to the Tag Historian Module, and the brand-new Event Streams resource.
Then, Ken Wyant discussed new Canary 24 features and enhancements related to Licensing, Axiom, Calculations, Store and forward, Identity Service, and more. To date, version 24 is Canary’s most significant technology refresh.
Ken’s Canary 24 Technical Deep Dive explained which fundamental services have been removed while new services have been added. The configuration for certain aspects has been moved within the Canary Admin client, mainly those concerning security, which is now handled by the new Identity service. Ken discussed these features in more detail, discussed upgrade considerations, and explored the future roadmap and feature requests.
Flow 7.1 Optimises Data Transformation for KPIs, Batch Reporting, OEE, and Beyond. Using the Flow OEE template as an example, Rikus van Rensburg demonstrated how to streamline Ignition projects by minimising complex coding and scripting. This approach focuses on scaling data processing while establishing centralised data management and engineering governance. Each new KPI calculated, event detected, and batch processed is sent back to Ignition, an MQTT broker, and the enterprise data warehouse.
Flow 7.1 is a Service Pack for the major 7.0 release. It uses .Net 8 and includes several new features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes. In the Flow Technical Deep Dive, Rikus explored what’s new and what you may have missed, including a new modern Config Tool, Multi-platform support, new Data Sources, and Consumers!
Customer Showcases demonstrate Technology and Application Excellence
This year’s Customer Showcases were narrowed down to four excellent customer presentations. The projects illustrated innovative and powerful ways to deploy technology, increase efficiency and enable data-to-information transformation.
Reproplast, a leading force in the circular economy for polyolefins, has integrated digital solutions to streamline their production processes. In doing so, they have gained more profound insights into operational performance, with data-driven approaches helping them track production metrics and optimise resource management. In this video, Damian and Michael discuss their efforts that emphasise the importance of transparency in their processes, enhancing their ability to plan and adapt to changing production demands in real-time.
Customer Showcase: Devil’s Peak
Devil’s Peak Brewing Company, founded in 2012 in Cape Town, has grown from a small microbrewery into one of South Africa’s leading craft beer and cider producers. With a strong focus on product quality and availability, their popularity skyrocketed. They’ve become a significant player in the craft beer industry, blending innovation with sustainability. We will discuss the challenges faced in this growth process and highlight the solutions utilised, including integrating Flow dashboards into the Ignition platform, all of which will empower the operators to make informed decisions based on valuable information.
Customer Showcase: Clover South Africa
Clover Industries, a leading group in branded foods and beverages, has adopted Ignition, Canary, and Flow as their digital infrastructure to address essential technology requirements. In this video, Deon discusses their initial needs, provides an overview of the architecture, and explains their multi-site implementation approach. This includes the establishment of new standards and templates as well as the coordination of several system integrator partners. Deon also shares valuable lessons learned and the challenges they have overcome over the past four years.
Customer Showcase: City of Cape Town
The City of Cape Town Bulk Water Department produces approximately 1,000,000,000 litres (1000 MLD)of water daily, serving one of South Africa’s largest cities with geographically dispersed infrastructure that includes modern facilities over 80 years old. How do you manage such a complex strategic portfolio of assets? In this video, Zutari will explore the Bulk Water Department’s ongoing journey to build digital infrastructure to support better decision-making and discuss the impact of the Cape Town Day Zero scare in initiating this process.
Building Your Digital Infrastructure: The Foundation
The Elev8 2024 Business Track shared the foundational aspects of building a data-driven and scalable digital infrastructure, the key components, and the value derived from each building block solution.
How Digital Transformation Starts with SCADA
Laura Strydom from Element8 touched on the significance of a robust and modern Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system and how SCADA systems are at the heart of operational technology (OT), where we find the data needed for Digital Transformation. Laura shared the necessary elements that define an effective SCADA system, whether upgrading from a legacy system or aiming to leverage advanced solutions and discovered how Ignition addresses traditional pain points.
Digital Infrastructure: The Role of the Industrial Historian
With the advent of MQTT, Sparkplug B, and Unified Namespace Architectures, Process Historians have become critical business tools for manufacturing companies. Kyle Kensinger discussed replicating the Unified Namespace hierarchy in our Process Historian using an ISA-95 compliant Asset Model (like with a Canary Labs Historian) to simplify data retrieval mapping.
Digital Infrastructure: Information Management with Flow
Gary Lowenstein from Element8 discussed the difference between Data Management and Information Management – And why we should care. Gary also shared how Flow eliminates silos, scales your analytics, and securely delivers actionable information.
Celebrating Community and Social Fun
In addition to the sizable number of sessions and formal presentations of industrial insights, there was social networking fun over a beer or glass of wine, offering equal amounts of informal interactions.
The discussions and much-needed in-person catchups closed in the late evening, signalling the end of a valuable community conference, where we celebrated learning, sharing and building the new data-driven and scalable digital architectures of tomorrow!
See You in 2025!
With so many new features and big announcements, Elev8 lived up to its promise. You can still watch all the recorded sessions if you missed the conference. You’ll also find photos from Elev8 here!
Next year’s Elev8 takes place the week of 20-24 October 2025. We’re also adding a much-anticipated Elev8 event in KwaZulu-Natal, so mark the week on your calendar! We can’t wait to see you again next year. Until then, keep learning, sharing, and building amazing applications!
