Grindrod TCM and Implats Customer Panel

00:00
Speaker 1
Good afternoon. Finally again, last time, this is our final session of the day. I’m really proud of everyone for still being here. It was a long day, but clearly there was something helpful and valuable from the sessions today. So thank you very much for sticking it out with us. Or it could just because it’s a Friday. All right, so the last session of the day, we did promise. We’ve been hearing about customers globally. We do have a very good, healthy, local install base that we’re grateful for. We haven’t done a very good job at sharing some of those stories and successes. We need to do a much better job of that. So we’re going to start doing that in quite a big way to spread the news and to build a community.

00:40
Speaker 1
So we do have two customer success stories we’re going to talk through today. I’m actually going to invite them to the stage. That’s probably going to be the easiest. So let’s welcome them to the stage after I’ve called their names. And the two stories that we have is, first of all, from Grindrod TCM, Mozambique. And the other one is implats, impala platinum implants. So from Grindrod TCM, Jacques Malan, Rudy von Arda from Dhana and Pedro stain from Implats and Brahm fenter from advances, we can please welcome them to the stage. And just while we’re waiting for them, there are a lot of questions about the content for today. Yes, we will absolutely share everything. What we typically do is even demos. We usually share all of those things.

01:32
Speaker 1
So we will share not only the PowerPoint presentations, but also the audio that was recorded with a PowerPoint presentation. So you will not only have the PowerPoint, you’ll actually have the voice that goes with it. And we will share that likely late next week. My singing? No, the singing. Absolutely. Kent singing. Yeah, he’s going to sing again, and Clark’s going to dance, apparently. So that’s something to look forward to. All right. But yeah, the singing is included, so there’s evidence. Kent. All right, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us today. It’s always lovely to hear directly from customers. It is the truth, it is the real story. It is why we do what we do. It is why this community exists, is to deliver solutions that solve. And your stories is very valuable part of that.

02:24
Speaker 1
So maybe I’m going to kick it off with Grindra. TCM is maybe just give us a brief description of your business, what you do, overview of the operations, if that’s okay.

02:34
Speaker 2
Yeah.

02:34
Speaker 3
Chuck.

02:35
Speaker 2
Hi. Thanks. Jacob. Yes, we’re based in Matola in Mozambique. We’re the coal terminal there. Do all the exports of coal and magnetite? Yes. And we get all the material from South Africa by train and by truck, then offload, store and load onto the vessels to ship out.

03:05
Speaker 1
Okay. Big operation.

03:07
Speaker 2
Yeah, that’s quite big.

03:08
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think once we see the application, we’ll get an idea of kind of scale. Cool, thanks. Jack and Implat. I’m going to move a little bit forward. I can’t see Pedro. Cool, thanks.

03:22
Speaker 4
Yeah. Look, from Impala’s point of view, our main operation is in Rustenburg. Most of our mines are in Rustenburg. We’ve got some in Zimbabwe as well, and also in Canada as well. And we’ve also just purchased royal buffooking as. Yeah, so most of the ore comes from the mines in Russenburg, which is in the northwest province, and then the ore will then go to mineral processes, and from there it comes to Impala in springs. The refineries is there, and then that’s where we process the final product.

04:03
Speaker 1
Okay. We lost our neighbors as a result of that. Pedro Robo King we shared in our office in our business park. We shared some office space with them, and all of a sudden the one day they said goodbye, and apparently they were relocating offices based on the acquisition. So thanks for taking our neighbors. They were nice people. Right, cool. Maybe it’s always try and figure out who’s going to share what first. And we figured out it’ll probably make more sense if we cover the one and then the other one. So maybe let’s look with Jack and Rudy, I’m going to label it, describe your requirements and what you needed from the system. I know there’s a lot more than that in terms of scope and how you landed with solutions and things like that, but Rudy just kind of what was the requirement.

04:52
Speaker 3
So we’ve actually been doing work for TCM for quite a while. It was one of our colleagues, Kumara, to unfortunately can’t be here. Did a project there way back when.

05:05
Speaker 2
Was it 20 plus minus twelve years ago?

05:08
Speaker 5
Yeah.

05:09
Speaker 3
Where they put in a control system and it was just outdated. Happens. So there was a need to upgrade, and that was also when you came to see us fairly shortly after that. So we thought that’s a good opportunity to, I wouldn’t say trial the software. It’s been obviously proven, but for us as a company, to try and implement our first big ignition project, and by that time, we’ve already had some canary and flow installations. So we thought let’s suggest that they were happy with the presentations and the product from what they saw is really.

05:54
Speaker 1
Telling you that you were happy, Jack.

05:59
Speaker 3
It was actually a very long process from when we started talking about upgrading. I think we started talking was plus.

06:08
Speaker 2
-2018 yeah, think so.

06:12
Speaker 3
Training.

06:13
Speaker 2
Yeah.

06:15
Speaker 3
Then we started discussing upgrading and we only finished the implementation earlier this year, so it was a long road.

06:24
Speaker 1
So the technology selection. So it was upgrading of an incumbent aged control system.

06:33
Speaker 3
Exactly.

06:34
Speaker 1
On the hardware side, I see you. S seven 1500.

06:37
Speaker 5
Yeah.

06:38
Speaker 3
So they were running three hundred. S seven, three hundreds and we upgraded that to one five hundreds. But the Scada system was also very outdated. Started having issues with servers crashing and scared of doing downloads because you don’t know if the server is going to start up again.

06:55
Speaker 1
And that SCADA system remains unknown. The name remains unknown. I’m going to ask three or four more times and hopefully it lands somewhere. No, that’s fair. I think with any of those technology implementations, there is a cycle that needs to be appreciated for modernization, regardless of the platform.

07:17
Speaker 3
I think it was a good system. It lasted for ten years, but outdated. Definitely.

07:23
Speaker 1
And then of course the canary for the long term easterization.

07:26
Speaker 3
Yes.

07:27
Speaker 5
All right.

07:29
Speaker 3
I must think now. No, we implemented Canary with this. We did a little bit before we did the ignition rollout, specifically to get plant data on the old system so that we can eventually compare if there’s improvements on the new system. So Canary was done, I think, early 2022.

07:51
Speaker 2
Is that right?

07:52
Speaker 3
Still on the previous. I must make sure I don’t drop the name. I’m going to system lots of s’s. I don’t know why.

08:05
Speaker 1
All right, cool. That’s fine. I think it was Jax when we did this in the DLF, the description reads, a clean, modern system with expanded functionality, simplifying operational tasks while providing more in depth information. I mean, that’s what it is. And that’s lovely. It sounds valuable. So we’ve got a couple of screens here. Do you maybe want to take us through? I’m not sure how clear it’s going to be in the front for everybody but those at the back and maybe have a squiz on the screens right behind you. You want to take us through what these are? If you can see.

08:45
Speaker 3
Yeah. John, you want to go?

08:47
Speaker 2
Should I really carry on?

08:50
Speaker 1
Maybe. John, from a design point of view, I believe this was from a design look and feel perspective, there was a requirement to keep it fairly familiar with the previous design, right?

09:02
Speaker 2
Yeah. Mostly for operations operators not to make the change too big at once, but they have adapted quite well and quite fast. But that’s the basic layout of the plant. Coming in on your left hand side. Trains arriving at the tipplers gets tipped on your conveyors first, your belt feeders running through, then to your yard machines where the material gets stacked. And then, same with a reclaiming process, the yard machines will. This one, Sr. One, two and three years, they’ll start reclaiming and feed through to the vessel.

09:50
Speaker 1
Okay, and Rudy, the screens that we’re looking at here, what are these screens?

09:55
Speaker 3
So these ones are. It’s ignition edge screens. So these ones are on the machines. But we’ve also pulled it into the main scada.

10:05
Speaker 1
So from the architecture is actually a hub and spoke based on the edge going to the central.

10:10
Speaker 3
Exactly, yes. So they can access this from the main control room. See, exactly the same thing that the operators on the machines can see. But can you go back to that previous. Not that one. So on this screen, I also just want to elaborate a bit on this. Like Jock mentioned, this mimics. The colors are much better. I think Gary will be hopefully sort of proud on the HMI.

10:36
Speaker 1
Gary will not be upset.

10:38
Speaker 3
There’s a little bit of colors, but that’s actually important because that’s how the guys identify the routes. So we’ll discuss the roots now as well. But the layout of the screen is exactly the same as they add. It just looks a little bit more modern. It’s modernized a bit, but this is actually for that whole operation. And Jock, maybe you can say, I’m not sure what the tonnages are that you do per day more or less.

11:04
Speaker 2
Or per year, but it’s take it per vessel and that amounts to plus -100,000 ton.

11:15
Speaker 3
That’s done in what, about three or four days?

11:17
Speaker 2
Plus, minus two.

11:18
Speaker 3
So it’s quite a few days, two.

11:20
Speaker 2
And a half days.

11:21
Speaker 3
400,000 tons. So it’s quite a lot of material being moved. And with this screen, they actually only use this screen. They have two massive big screens in the control room. And this is all they have to use because they can access all the data. Everything that they need to see, they can see on the screen. They can start up their routes. That’s also something that we found a little bit challenging, but I think we came up with a very good solution for that. So you can see there on the left hand in the top corner, that’s where they do their route selections. So although this doesn’t look that hectic, there’s 108 possible routes. Routes that they can select. So you have to do all your interlocking everything based on these route selections. They can run up to ten routes simultaneously as well.

12:08
Speaker 3
So that interlocking that goes on behind the scenes. There were a bit of a challenge to do, but we’ve managed to with some.

12:17
Speaker 1
And the green line indicates the selected route.

12:22
Speaker 3
That’s a running route.

12:23
Speaker 1
That’s a running route.

12:24
Speaker 3
So that’s from some of the front end loaders. So you can see well, I can’t see that well from here, but you should be able to see quite nicely.

12:32
Speaker 1
I’m pretending I can’t see a thing.

12:34
Speaker 4
Yeah.

12:37
Speaker 1
Surprised you could see the green there, just nodding.

12:41
Speaker 3
I can see the purple better, but that’s also something that we’ve done on this. So you can run a route to a stacker, but you can run from that. It’s one machine that stacks and reclaims, so you can also recline from that. And with the previous system, it was not that clear to see whether a route is just stacking or if it’s going further. So that’s something that, with the colors.

13:05
Speaker 1
And the selection and the roots and the associated data, that’s all SQL database, background database.

13:12
Speaker 3
Yes, you’re right. With the previous system, that was all hard coded in the PLC. So the guy who did it knew what he was doing, but it was a very complicated system. So this system I think is much easier also if you have to change routes, because with that hard coded complicated system that was previously in the PLC, if you had to change a route or add a route or anything like that, to go through that code and try and decipher it and add a route without messing up all the other interlocking, that was challenging. And with this system, we have a root matrix. So it’s just a big basically excel file, but that we wrote as basically a string value into an SQL database for all your roots.

14:02
Speaker 3
And now with simple masking, with a Python script, you can check your interlocks, but we also do the control on that because you can just select a route started and everything will start as it should.

14:15
Speaker 1
It’s quite an advanced first ignition project.

14:19
Speaker 4
Yeah.

14:20
Speaker 3
But what I really enjoy about, what I liked about ignition is the modern tools that you have. Holy scale is probably not that modern, but with a lot of other ScADA systems, it’s actually not that easy to integrate. Even SQL and things like the python scripting, you have other scripting languages, but things like this, I think especially now with the new guys coming in, that’s the languages that they learn. They don’t really do that much C sharp or VB scripting, maybe, but for me, that was nice to take these modern language or scripting tools that you have and to incorporate that into ignition and just the ease of use and how easy it integrates. Like you mentioned earlier today, how nicely plays together with any other system.

15:17
Speaker 1
I think we wanted to show a couple of things here. So these are. Whoops.

15:25
Speaker 3
So, these are our analog pop ups. I think, again, Gary, you could have used our slides. This is coming straight from canary, the data that you see on the ignition pop ups. And again, it’s maybe something that’s trivial for some of the guys who uses ignition a lot, but because this was our first project on ignition, were so excited that you can pull your canary data straight into your scada, because normally you have maybe 720 days history on your Scada package. But anything more than that, you now have to go and open up another PC with axiom, review your data. So were very excited about that.

16:09
Speaker 1
This is the downtime. Sorry. If you haven’t noticed, I’m trying to rush you along a little bit.

16:15
Speaker 3
Sorry.

16:16
Speaker 1
I want to make sure we cover this slide, but, yeah, maybe on this one, the downtime classification.

16:23
Speaker 3
Yes. So the one on the left is just interlocking. The other one is our downtime classification. So what we do here, as soon as one of a big piece of equipment stops where we want to downtime reporting on, there’s a pop up. The operator can’t restart that unless he locked it.

16:42
Speaker 5
Yeah.

16:42
Speaker 3
He selects a reason, a stop reason. So, normally that is done in flow, but now we can just send that enumeration straight to flow, because we all know how operators like to not.

16:54
Speaker 1
It’s interesting. It’s either do it at that moment or perhaps at the end of a shift, or there’s different.

17:00
Speaker 3
There’s different ways to do it. But I don’t know, Jock, maybe you can elaborate on that if it’s working for you. This way.

17:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, this way it works well, because at the end of the shift, the.

17:12
Speaker 1
Guys, we know what happened.

17:13
Speaker 2
Yeah, good old story. So while the problem is there, they can decide. Okay, this was the problem.

17:22
Speaker 1
Yeah. And the selection, I mean, that’s obviously. Is that multilevel or is that single level?

17:29
Speaker 3
At this page, it’s only single level.

17:31
Speaker 1
Okay. So it could be mechanical engineering plus. All right, lovely. This one. Oh, these were your standards? I think they.

17:47
Speaker 3
Yeah. This is just a quick illustration of how easy ignition talks to the PLCs. And one of the speakers mentioned it earlier so we actually did use the OPC UA server on top of, well, on the 1500 to interface to canary, sorry, to ignition. And for us, it worked so well. So there is an issue with the amount of tags you can monitor on your UA, on your Plc. And we got around that by just making UDTs in your Plc as well. So your UDT ignition, so it sees it as one tag or one scan point. And that solved that issue for us. There is a little bit of a downside to that.

18:38
Speaker 3
So now, if you do a write or a read to that, to one tag in your UDT, it actually has to go and read or write the full UDT on your Plc.

18:48
Speaker 1
But there’s no performance issues.

18:50
Speaker 3
We did not have any performance issues up to this stage. There’s no problems for us on that. But that is something that maybe, on very big installations, it’s something that we might have to relook. But for this, it works so well. And the big benefit for us is just how quick it now is to engineer, because you create your DB, or you pull in your block onto your Plc, give it a name, just match that name in ignition, and it’s linked. It’s no compiles, there’s no downloads. It just works. So immediately it’s linked as soon as your DB on your Plc comes online. So, on engineering time, that definitely saves a lot of time.

19:36
Speaker 1
And, Jark, you’ve received your daily report yet? Yes. Good. Okay. Is it all green today?

19:44
Speaker 2
Not today.

19:48
Speaker 1
Is that why you were on the phone a couple of times outside? Okay. All right. That happens.

19:52
Speaker 3
Just for the record, it’s not the system.

19:57
Speaker 1
It’s the nature of our industry. Right. Better take note, Jack. This would be quite an important view for you.

20:07
Speaker 2
Yeah. On the maintenance side, we use that to reflect back on what happened, how we can prevent.

20:15
Speaker 5
Yeah.

20:16
Speaker 1
Okay. Learning lessons from what happened. Diagnostic. That’s right. All right, cool. Rudy, you did include some elements of utilization, performance, availability.

20:27
Speaker 3
Sorry, say again?

20:29
Speaker 1
Availability, performance, utilization. You did include. I can’t see either. I’m hoping I’m pointing at the wrong thing.

20:36
Speaker 3
Yeah. So we use that, obviously now to calculate your Oee. Standard stuff.

20:40
Speaker 1
A light oee.

20:41
Speaker 5
Yeah.

20:42
Speaker 1
Okay. Very nice. And then this one.

20:48
Speaker 3
These are just some dashboard. This is also.

20:52
Speaker 1
This is the engineering report.

20:53
Speaker 3
That’s the engineering report. To report on your amount of stops and what.

20:58
Speaker 1
And you’ve got some downtime reason codes, plus some time on that. Okay. That’s a very nice one. And I remember Lenny really liked this one. I can’t remember why he liked this one.

21:12
Speaker 3
This one. Just to quickly explain, that bar that you see at the bottom, that is the frequency of your train. So it’s an event, but every time you load a wagon, there’s a little line there. So now you can see the frequency of your loading. So if there’s a lot of green, then you know you’ve loaded a lot of. Sorry, you tipped a lot of not loading, so then you know you’ve tipped well. And if there’s big blank spaces, then you know the guys were sleeping on ship.

21:44
Speaker 1
And Jack, it’s quite unique when there is a vessel, a ship in harbour. Can you maybe explain to us why the system is very important over that time with regards to some of the commitments and potential penalties?

21:58
Speaker 2
Yeah, they call it demurriage. When the ship doesn’t get loaded within a given time. So anything affecting that will look bad on our side, because we’ll have to pay to marriage. And those costs are quite high.

22:16
Speaker 1
Astronomical.

22:17
Speaker 5
Yeah.

22:18
Speaker 1
So even if the system isn’t running, we all run with buckets and baskets.

22:22
Speaker 2
That’s it. So, yeah, it’s very important.

22:26
Speaker 1
Okay, fantastic.

22:27
Speaker 5
Awesome.

22:28
Speaker 1
Thank you for sharing. Any questions for Rudy and for Jack? No questions. No questions. Friday afternoon. I know it is a great application. Thank you. Okay, no questions for these two gents. Lovely. Thank you. Thanks very much. All right, then we have the PGM, we have implants. So maybe also by way of departure, I think we have a good view of implants. So the requirements for this system or application, it’s live.

23:09
Speaker 5
Yes, it’s life ish. Yes, the system is live.

23:17
Speaker 1
Okay, so let’s go back to the requirement. I’m happy that it’s life. Maybe it’s not such a friendly conversation today.

23:24
Speaker 5
No, it is.

23:25
Speaker 1
But Pedro, your requirements and what was the need for looking?

23:30
Speaker 4
Yeah, look, the refineries is quite old. So they bought a new plant. And the old plant, they said, okay, now we must demolish it because of safety. So they bought a new final metals plant. So during this new final metals plant, we decided, okay, we need some new technology. So the Siemens 1500 was decided on, because in another plant they’re using the summer codes as well. So we decided that we’re going to go with summer codes. So that’s what we decided. So we said, okay, for skater system, we decided that, let’s look at what’s on the market.

24:17
Speaker 1
You’re obviously at that time in the cycle where it was either upgrade or relook or just understand.

24:25
Speaker 4
Yeah. Because when we looked at the upgrades as well with the current SCaDA system that we’ve got, we looked and said, listen, it’s just becoming more expensive to upgrade with the current system. So we decided, let’s see what’s out there. So we consulted with our sis and they said, listen, this is what’s on the market as well. And we had a look at it and we came together with a couple of managers, engineers, and we decided that we want to go with.

24:56
Speaker 1
Fantastic. I remember hosting your team at the office. The bus arrived.

25:02
Speaker 4
Correct.

25:02
Speaker 1
That was a good session. So, summary of the application, if we can call it that, brahm. It’s a site or the project. We spoke about the Siemens s seven, the canary. You have the unlimited tax canary.

25:17
Speaker 5
Yes, correct.

25:18
Speaker 1
Okay. All right. And there was obviously not a requirement from the go, but perhaps it made sense from a longer point of view to just opt for the unlimited from the beginning.

25:27
Speaker 4
Correct. Because we’re going in phases as well. We started with our utility side and we’re going to go to the next phase as well. So we looked at the future as well. So of course we looked at unlimited tax. Definitely.

25:39
Speaker 1
Okay, cool. So I’ve got a little bit of information on the scope, brah. Maybe you can give us a scope and then we could look at the architecture.

25:48
Speaker 5
Yes, 100%. We’ve been working with Impala, that particular plant, for quite a few years, and way back they’ve actually asked us, their current skaters, if we can help them to put it onto a non standard Plc, which was quite a bit of a challenge. But we managed to do that and we did one plant as an example for them. And then what they did internally, they just rolled it out themselves, which was quite impressive. And we know that they can do their own work. We just need to make sure that design is solid and then makes it so much easier for them. At that time, we already knew about the new plant that was coming. It took a few years.

26:38
Speaker 5
And when they approached us and said, okay, guys, you need to quote on this, obviously, we soon realized, listen, we’re going to have to do an upgrade on the current system. Looked at the numbers and we said to them, you know what? What if we do look at another solution? I mean, we’ve been through this road with you before. Upgrading your skater or move from one skater to another skater, we know what the functionality is that ignition can provide. We know that canary, we’ve been working with Canary at that stage already as well. We were quite familiar with it, happy with what it’s been doing. We knew it can do the job and I think at the end of the day, it was simply, let’s put the numbers together. Just have a look at what’s the real saving here, because there’s obviously a risk.

27:28
Speaker 5
Risk in any. If it’s a greenfield, the risk is less. But maintaining two skater systems on the same plant, it’s not always great. So obviously, we need to make sure that the skater had to be able to also serve the other plant in the future. So that was all that in mind. We then said to them, okay, fine, let’s tackle this project with ignition. The costing was actually, we did a ten year plan. Because it’s one thing to say, yes, you’ve got capex now. You look at numbers now, but the real business case is actually in the long term. So in the long term, it was quite interesting. I think it was something like 17 m for their current system. If they would just do the upgrade and roll it out with the current system.

28:19
Speaker 5
With this system, including engineering, getting an unlimited historian, plus the year on support over a ten year period, that came down to nine and a half. So it was.

28:34
Speaker 1
Pedro, that sounds a bit steeper.

28:42
Speaker 5
I think we waited quite a long time for them to decide to go and build this plant. Every year we’re like, when is this happening? And like, no, we still don’t have budget. Still don’t have budget. So to point they’ve been through a longer process, we show them the numbers, that process just shortened. Like that. Done. Okay, let’s do time.

29:03
Speaker 1
Pedro, I’m quite interested in two things. Sorry, Brian, if you don’t mind. So the first thing is, I mean, that selection, that decision. I know your team is quite multidisciplinary, your ot team. Sorry. And I know it. The decision, that kind of a decision. Maybe if you can give us a brief idea of what does that look like internally, to make that decision to do all of this, and then over and above that, which is actually my second question, decide that you want to go with something that is, you want to take the opportunity and do something that is actually situationally aware. So not only is everything new, but it’s going to look different as well. What was that process like?

29:48
Speaker 4
Change is something different. So what we decided was, obviously, the cost was the biggest drive to go with ignition. Look, ignition was news in South Africa, so we didn’t just want to go with just because everyone else goes that route, we want to go that route. We wanted to make sure that we’ve got backup. If there’s problems, we’ve got somebody to phone or we don’t have issues. So in the long term, in the long run, we decided that, listen, this is definitely the way to go in terms of situational awareness. We just looked at it and said that, listen, that’s obviously the way to go because too many colors, it’s not the way to go. So when it’s like the gray scale, when it’s gray, it’s right, and when something goes wrong, then it’s red. So that’s the way we wanted to go.

30:44
Speaker 1
And I would imagine the enablement or the human change management for your people and operators, that process was, they were included from the beginning in terms of what that looked like.

30:53
Speaker 4
The other thing as well is that we’ve got new operators as well. So they started in this new plant, so it’s fresh for them. It’s not something that they’ve been there for 20 years. And they used to how the old system works, so they quite new on it, and the feedback from them is 100% they love it.

31:14
Speaker 1
That’s great.

31:15
Speaker 4
Yeah.

31:15
Speaker 1
Thank you. So this is the architecture brom on the gateways, perhaps?

31:23
Speaker 5
Yeah, no, sure. So the architecture that went for is two back end gateways, one to be able to serve the old plant, one for the new plant, and then two front end gateways with a proxy gateway in between. All of them, you’ll see is redundant. And then we’ve got canary as well, and then the EAM master gateway. So that’s basically where we would do all the development and so forth, and then from there on distributed to all the gateways. So to make sure that the standard is up to date to all of them and so forth. And also from EAm, if you’re familiar with that has all your backups, it’s just your whole enterprise administrator module.

32:06
Speaker 5
So the reason why we did go with two gateways, we could have most probably gone with one gateway backend gateway to do all the tag collection and easterization and whatever scripting that needs to run. But what we found with the current plant is that because the PLC is not, there’s no real standard in the PLC, so there’s a lot of the alarming and functionality like that had to happen on your gateway. So the gateway actually need to process that. And so we wanted to make sure that there’s a gateway dedicated for that in the future, and we didn’t want to, only later on find out we actually need to purchase another gateway. I mean, the capex has been approved and that you rather spend the money now and make sure everything is in place. The gateway that we’re using for this particular project.

33:03
Speaker 5
Yes, it will grow the tag counts and all of that, but most of with the standard that we’ve implemented, all the alarming and those type of functionality sits in the PLC. So it’s not as resource intensive as the other one would be. That’s what’s the main reason for the two gateways. And then also for visualization. Same story, old plant, new plant. So it’s basically separating the systems, but also making sure that we still can communicate via the gateway network with all the systems and share data whenever it would be needed.

33:39
Speaker 1
Okay.

33:42
Speaker 5
Yeah. So as you can see, we’ve high performance. Yes, we’ve gone for a high performance graphics. That was something. You’ll see a little bit of a green day on the one valve. That’s always a debate. Should that be white? Should it be green? The nice thing with ignition is you just simply go and change the colors in theme and the customer is happy. So it’s a session that you can build everything, get all your colors, which you think is right, have a session with your client, go through it, make the changes, and they can immediately see the changes being applied. And they can. Yeah, that’s what we want. That’s exactly what we achieved there. So it’s a little bit of, almost want to call it a hybrid on that.

34:24
Speaker 5
But the main thing, if you quickly look at that screen, I can immediately see there’s a few devices in manual. That’s the blue. And I can see there’s one interlock there as well. So it immediately shows us just what’s happening on the system. And once the operators get familiarized with that, then obviously things that’s abnormal will stand out and then they can operate from that. So one of the things as well, when you build a scada like this, you need to also have your navigation in place. There’s a lot of concepts that you need to think about. You need to think about your alarming. You need to think about interlocking.

35:06
Speaker 1
Alarming.

35:08
Speaker 5
There’s your alarming, a little bit of alarming summary at the top and the bottom. The detailed alarm messages also use the right colors, look at your severity levels and those type of things. And at the end of the day, the system just need to be intuitive. It needs to be intuitive. Operators need to quickly get to where the problem is and then also even with the interlocks as well, if something is interlocked, they need to know what it is.

35:36
Speaker 1
Not just, I’m interlocked, Pedro, I’m sorry, Brahm. The application is desktop design. Hmi. There’s no mobile element, at least not at this point required.

35:47
Speaker 4
No, no mobile.

35:48
Speaker 1
Because I know your operations are pretty blocked down.

35:51
Speaker 3
Yeah.

35:52
Speaker 4
No mobile is allowed in operation.

35:55
Speaker 5
Only your underpants. You’re only allowed with underpants.

35:59
Speaker 1
That is one of my favorite site visits to that one.

36:04
Speaker 5
Yes. So this is just the power chart. Also with canary. Like Rudy said, it’s so easy. Got the canary module, and we can easily switch between the canary module and even ignition historian if we need to with our standard. But in the front it’s exactly the same thing. We’re just bringing through the data. You can use the standard ignition tools to pull trends up and so forth. It is just extremely fixable. Just makes it so much easier. You can see there a little bit of bottom, we’ve got a legend of the different colors. So, yes, there is different colors in a situational awareness environment.

36:44
Speaker 1
Sorry, Brom, that legend. Can you maybe explain the function of that, the visibility and the function of the legend? Is that visible at all times? No, a separate component.

36:55
Speaker 5
It is a drop down from the top or slide in from the bottom. That new operators, new concept. It’s like, oh, shocks, what does this thing mean? Because first of all, when it’s gray like that and you can see the plants running, they’re going to get used to either the green or the gray. That’s going to be easy. But then suddenly there’s some funny color that pops up and they can quickly, because that’s going to stand out.

37:20
Speaker 1
Right.

37:20
Speaker 5
And they’re going to quickly have a look and see what it is. So just make it available to them and not like, okay, go and read this document. Before you can operate this plant, you need to study this document. No, it’s there. Just open it up. That explains it.

37:35
Speaker 1
Well, so it’s in front of them.

37:36
Speaker 5
It’s in front of them. It’s all there.

37:39
Speaker 1
Very nice.

37:42
Speaker 5
Yeah. So just again, another thing on the navigation. We’ve built this whole application around it is a content type driven application. So you’ll build your visualization and so forth, and then depend on it can also be put onto multiple screens. And in the same session you can actually say, I would like to look at my overview, my alarms, my trends and so forth. And they’ve got a four screen layout that they can work with. And one thing that we’ve added as well, because nowadays you’ll have an operator in all days that would certainly will only operate that part of the plant and knows it well. But what we’ve seen more and more operators are, he’s responsible for utilities, but he’s also maybe going to be responsible for some of the batching systems and so forth.

38:36
Speaker 5
So he actually needs to operate within two sections of the plant of two.

38:42
Speaker 1
Areas, awareness of two.

38:44
Speaker 5
So our navigation actually caters for that. Where you can say, well, on that screen, I want, if you look at the tree view there at the bottom, we can say sync the view, so don’t sync it. This view, I want that asset.

38:55
Speaker 1
That’s a very nice function, the ability to sync the views between.

38:57
Speaker 5
And you can change and chop and you can say, I want to show the overview of that. And it’s fully flexible. You can link it to the user that’s logged in. Next time he logs in, that’s his default view. So we’ve built all of those things into the background of the framework to be able to just make it easier for the operator so he can think about what he needs to do and not struggle with a system.

39:19
Speaker 1
And also keeping the number of clicks in mind. Yes.

39:23
Speaker 5
Search functionality on a tree view as well. There’s actually quite a lot of features that’s been built into the system. That’s a typical pop up. I see. Rudy, you guys had your tab at the top. Just got it. Same thing, just different look. But yeah, I think that’s typically how we would do it. That’s our home page. It’s analog input.

39:48
Speaker 1
It’s two great examples. I mean, different, but both visually functional.

39:52
Speaker 5
Yeah, it just points out the need. So then you got your configuration section. You’ve got some detailed statuses that you also maybe want from your control module. Yes, we’ve got there. You can switch on alarming and you can switch it off. You can change the severity on alarms as well, which sometimes you want to do it manually most of the time. And I think that is the right way of doing it. It needs to be done in the PLC because the PLC knows best when it runs certain processes. Then you can change the severity of an alarm, because the severity of alarm is effectively telling the operator at what time does he have to react to that particular alarm. So all of those type of things can easily be changed either from the front end or even in the PLC.

40:45
Speaker 5
So this one is just a pid controller. So there we’ve got the full algorithm and it shows you exactly what your PNI and D components is from a commissioning perspective. This is very quickly to see, okay, which component actually contributed the most to the output. And so from commissioning perspective. This just works so well.

41:06
Speaker 1
Okay, fantastic. So in terms of functionality provided both technically and as well as operationally, Pedro. So the situational awareness, your opinion so far, that’s well accepted by the operators?

41:22
Speaker 4
Well accepted by the. There’s one operator at the moment, and she’s quite happy with what she can see. And even from far, you can see if something is wrong compared to our current skater system, where everything is in colors.

41:39
Speaker 1
And I know we haven’t spoken about the number of sessions or client sessions, though, but typically it’s unlimited clients. On the prospective side.

41:48
Speaker 5
Yes.

41:51
Speaker 1
Where do we expect to land on number of clients eventually? I know it’s not expensive.

41:58
Speaker 5
No, it’s not. We pretty much based it on what they had on the previous plant, and were like, okay, you know what? On the current plant. And then with the new plant, we expect it to be more or less the same at the end of the day. But I can’t remember the number now. I don’t know, maybe 25. Yeah, 25. That’s nothing. So, yeah, it’s unlimited. I think that’s one of the things when you. Unlimited tax, unlimited clients, unlimited historian.

42:31
Speaker 1
How many engineering stations did you have to buy or client licenses did you have to buy?

42:35
Speaker 5
We didn’t have to buy any engineering client licenses.

42:41
Speaker 1
No cheating. All right.

42:44
Speaker 5
That’s not needed.

42:46
Speaker 1
So essentially what you have is a single SCADA standard that you can expand to.

42:50
Speaker 5
It’s just your EAM controller, which effectively that’s your Eam gateway. And on that you’ll just submit whatever you need.

43:01
Speaker 1
Fantastic. Maybe not an easy question, but for both of you. Jar compedra, any future plans outside of the immediate scope? Once the application is now live, it’s landed, it’s in use. Do you see any other potential use cases outside of this?

43:22
Speaker 4
Yeah, from our side, I think we want to implement it to our current plant. So that is the future. So once we know that axiom and ignition is working, we’re going to roll it out to the current plant. So that will be massive as well. So that is the future. Maybe in the next ten years.

43:41
Speaker 1
And the heavy engineering lift has already been done, correct? Yeah. So it’s easy to repurpose those.

43:47
Speaker 4
I think we looked at it, there was a breakpoint of three years. After three years.

43:52
Speaker 5
Yeah, I think it was three or four years. It was quite interesting when I showed them the graphs. It’s because obviously now you have to take out money to buy new licenses and so forth. So your first year, the cost is more than the other software which had a name change. And then basically from there on, it’s just your support. And I think the break even was about four. It was actually 2025. You guys bought it last year. That’s the number I remember, 2025. That was the break even. That’s when it’s like from there on every year, it’s a cost saving for them.

44:34
Speaker 1
So that’s obviously the total cost of ownership calculation that was done over a ten year period.

44:39
Speaker 5
One thing also that we know with the other software we’ve done that implementation, so we know exactly how that standard work. What is the pitfalls that we need to be careful of. And so there’s a lot of learning from that previous project, and we can literally take all of that out of that system and then build it into ignition, and we can actually automate a lot of that as well. So yes, there’s going to obviously have to commission and those type of things, but a lot of this stuff can be automated, which also take away the.

45:12
Speaker 1
Risk from them, the good learnings.

45:16
Speaker 5
Absolutely.

45:19
Speaker 1
Any questions for Brahm and Pedro?

45:26
Speaker 5
I see that you guys have a.

45:28
Speaker 1
Long window on top.

45:30
Speaker 5
No. So what we did is you can’t really see it, but if you look at the top left now, this is only the cooling water. So as the plant would expand, there’s more sections of this utility application that’s going to grow across. But if you do click on that would bring you another section underneath that. So the number at the top changes based on that. So we had to build an alarm summary UDT, which has got the ability to basically keep on asking in the gateway, okay, where’s the new alarms? And we’ve got this push mechanism that pushed that into that so that we can quickly show, hang on, there’s your alarms. And we really do believe that if you manage your alarms correctly, then you should have very little alarm indications at the top.

46:20
Speaker 5
Or if you do have alarmed indications at the top, it should be of a much lower severity. So if they see red, that’s like, okay, we need to go and sort that out. Their current system works exactly the same way. So they also have an alarm banner at the top. I mean, that’s just. Yes, that’s going to be alarm, but where are you operating? Where’s your focus? We do have on the bottom, though, also the slide in where the legend is. That’s actually a tab which shows the legend, but the initial tab is actually alarm summary of that particular area which they navigate in.

47:00
Speaker 1
Well spotted, Grant.

47:01
Speaker 5
Yeah.

47:04
Speaker 1
So there you may repurpose awesome. Thanks. Any other questions? Anyone? Cool. Thank you. Pedro Brahm. Thank you very much.

47:19
Speaker 5
Thanks, Pedro.