Breaking Through Limits: Igniting Transformation in Manufacturing

Speakers

Eileen Souliotis

Regional Senior Manager

Entegris Inc

Danny Haskell

President

NeoMatrix

Follow Entegris and NeoMatrix's joint journey to digital transformation. Beginning in 2008, the two organizations recognized the need to upgrade the SCADA platforms of multiple machines, and they chose Inductive Automation's solutions. From Ignition's precursor FactoryPMI and FactorySQL to today's Ignition 8.1 with Perspective, this session will take you on a tour of how these partners established Ignition as its standard OT platform for increasing scalability and cost savings as they continue to grow globally and expand to multiple manufacturing industries.

Transcript: 

00:00
Laya Kaddoura: Hello everyone. I'd like to introduce myself really quick today. First of all, thank you for joining us at ICC 2024. I'm Laya Kaddoura. I'm a front office assistant here at Inductive Automation, and today's session is "Breaking Through Limits: Igniting Transformation in Manufacturing." I will be your moderator for today. So, to start off, I would just like to introduce our speakers here today. We have Eileen Souliotis. She is the regional manager at Entegris Incorporated. And just a little brief introduction about her. Eileen Souliotis has more than 25 years in factory automation, having worked across four Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Entegris. She has spent most of her early career in the consumer industry. And although she has a significant amount of experience in the medical devices and the semiconductor sectors, it is during her tenure at Entegris that she became working with Ignition, a platform she now wishes that she had discovered earlier due to its capabilities and all of its benefits. So, please help me in welcoming Eileen.

01:23
Laya Kaddoura: And for our second speaker here, we have Danny Haskell. He is a president here at NeoMatrix Incorporated. And Danny has worked over 25 years in the industrial automation industry with expertise in life sciences, semiconductors, plastics, rolled goods, and wastewater. As an automation engineer and engineering manager, he delivers high-quality solutions with various PLC, HMI, and SCADA platforms. NeoMatrix has now been an Ignition premier integrator since 2016, helping many companies leverage Ignition in their manufacturing processes. So please help me once again, welcoming Eileen and Danny.

02:14
Eileen Souliotis: Well, thank you for joining us today. My biggest fear was that no one would show up, so thank you. So just a little bit on Entegris. Entegris is a leading supplier of advanced materials and process solutions for semiconductor, life sciences, and other high-tech industries. We were founded in 1966. Our headquarters are in Billerica, Massachusetts, which is just north of Boston. This has 8,000 employees, but with some of our mergers, we're really closing in on 10,000, $3.5 billion in sales, and over 4,400 patents. We have three big divisions. I'm in the MC division, which is Microcontamination. We filter air, we filter chemicals, and our... When we work with semiconductors, of course, our enemy is metals. And our other two divisions are material science... Are material solutions, which are the chemicals and gases and advanced material handling where we make chip trays and FOUPs for use in the semiconductor fabs.

03:31
Danny Haskell: I appreciate the opportunity to actually speak today about our journey helping one of our most important customers for the last 25 years. Actually, I've been supporting this company. NeoMatrix was founded on March 14th, 2003, which, coincidentally, is Pi Day. I did not intend that. We're a software services company specializing in automation and software integration for our customers. We have two main offices of one in Portsmouth and one in Andover, Mass. We cover pretty much the Northeast New York, that whole Northeast New England area. And essentially, in addition, we also help customers all over the world. And we already mentioned Ignition integrator since 2016, been using Ignition since 2010.

04:26
Danny Haskell: So the beginning of the journey, it all started back in 2008. So I had three different machines in the Bedford, Mass., plant, and I was asked to basically quote an upgrade. So I quoted it with RSView32, and then I quoted it with Wonderware InTouch, and the customer at the time, unfortunately, he's no longer there, very smart guy. He asked me, "Have you ever heard of this company called Inductive Automation?" And I'm like, "No, I'm sorry, I never heard of these guys." He said, "Would you do me a favor? Download the software; see if you think this can actually work for our process." And sure enough, I downloaded it, and I was like, "This is amazing." Well, one of the reasons why it was amazing, we could actually just have one license and essentially control all three machines. And as it turned out, they had the server in Billerica, where all of the servers are managed by IT, right? And then the clients were in Bedford, and you would not even know the difference. It was actually faster than the thicker clients at that time. So I was pretty much sold from that fact. And it was pre-Ignition, so it was the factory PMI and FactorySQL.

05:51
Danny Haskell: And as you can see, one of the things you can see is once you get Ignition in a manufacturing plant, it quickly spreads like fire because it went from that original three machines; it basically covered the rest of the manufacturing plant, and then it kind of snowballs with an Entegris having multiple manufacturing sites, and it just became really easy to kind of replicate our success at one plant. We would replicate it to another, and so on and so forth. So now, you got places in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and then, of course, all over the US. And I mentioned the scalability. In the Billerica plant alone, we have five servers. One of them has over... That's controlling over 100 machines on each server essentially. And so we've got a lot of tags, and each of these servers are actually performing at a pretty high level, which is astounding to me that you can have so many tags, so many clients, so many machines that you're controlling just from one platform. Yep.

07:16
Eileen Souliotis: Okay. So these are all the modules we're using today. We did go to Ignition 8.1 in 2020, and we did it so that we could actually use the Perspective Module and put tablets on the floor on machines that were sort of unnnected. And we kind of added just enough to connect them. We also have Sepasoft, which is a fantastic module. You'll see a little bit more on what we're doing with Sepasoft a little further. We're using Active Directory on some of our servers. Not all of them; it was a big change for us. SSL, we, in our last big rollout, was in Taiwan. And in Taiwan, we have front-end, back-end. So we're using like tag servers and just different servers for visualization. We are also using EAM modules, and we are doing server load sharing.

08:26
Eileen Souliotis: So this is really, in just the last few years, things have really taken off. And now we are working on another application in Colorado where we're gonna be implementing all of this. And even more, we are using REST APIs. Not really gonna be using MQTT in Colorado, but we have worked with all these as we've gone forward. And we're not going back on anything. We're going forward. I can't wait to do 8.3, so we'll be doing that as soon as we can get our hands on it. I will say that the upgrade from 7.9 to 8 was very difficult for us with the sheer number of machines we had. But of all those servers, we have one server that's on 7.9 now, and that will be done before the end of the year. And that's one of our Jangan, Korea sites. Okay.

09:30
Danny Haskell: Yeah. Thank you. So essentially, Entegris has chosen Ignition as its OT platform of choice for a number of reasons. One area is the connectivity. You can connect either as an Allen-Bradley PLC or any PLC for that matter, or we have we have these Watlow controllers, which is a lot of different type of controllers. We talk to those usually by Modbus TCP and then also just the database connectivity, being able to connect to any database. We've essentially been able to communicate to it. It's like an SPC package. At the time, it didn't have the REST API, so we communicated back and forth using SQL database transactions that way. So that kind of gave us the flexibility. And then, of course, the web services I mentioned and MQTT, not only does Ignition have the ability to do the SCADA piece, but it could do like critical monitoring or environmental monitoring, that's really important in a lot of industries.

10:42
Danny Haskell: With the alarm management aspect of it, it's important that the operators know if there's an issue recipes in batch, whether they'd be simple recipes or if you want to go full-fledged batch using the Sepasoft platform, or MES, you could do OEE track and trace things like that in the Ignition platform. Or if sometimes you have customers that have standardized on a different MES platform, just being able to integrate to the other MES system is critically important, so there's a seamless way of operating manufacturing operations. And then for critical maintenance systems, computerized maintenance systems rather we have customers that, again, when there's an issue, it'll automatically create a work order in that CMMS system. Using the REST API has been really helpful, and then just a lot of QC LIMS-type systems we've integrated with as well. So this is the big reasons why Ignition has been chosen as the OT platform for Entegris.

11:57
Danny Haskell: So some other features. Right off the bat, we were able to centralize the application. Why is that important? By leveraging the IT resources in your company, you can have things like backup and restoration. Again, that's all managed by IT, not your automation engineers, really important because if you lose the data, some industries, if you lose the data, you don't have product. So it's really important that having that professionally managed goes a long way. Then also, you can share data, obviously much more easily if it's on a centralized either database or a server, and then also allows you the ability to integrate to other enterprise-level systems much easier. And I already mentioned the scalability, but another way that scalability plays a factor is I have customers where they're buying vendor systems, and they come with, maybe they come in with a Wonderware InTouch or an iFIX or RS BACtrack View or some kind of other platform. And it's hard to turn that and put that on the server without changing the application appreciably. Whereas if it's Ignition, it's on that local client. It's very easy to port that onto a server, very easy. Within minutes, maybe an hour or two or something like that, you can have it deployed on the server. So for me, that is a huge selling point.

13:39
Danny Haskell: That's just an example of how you can take that local PC to the server environment. But as Eileen mentioned, they're utilizing tag servers. And you can also have Perspective servers as well that which would scale this architecture out even more. I mentioned alarm management. This seems to be a really important feature for many of our customers as well as Entegris. They run a lot of operations that are running 24/7. So if there's a problem, they need to know about it. So they'll get these either alarm and text message alerts and then also the ability to remote in and visualize what's happening, even if an engineer is at home. Ignition has been a very easy way of handling that. We do have some levels of security. Obviously, you can take advantage of the IT security to log in, but one of the other things you can do is you can lock somebody from actually controlling a machine remotely. So this is something that we've strived to do, is if an operator has to be at a local PC, we put in security to ensure that only that person at the local PC can actually do something on that machine. And whereas if it's a remote, even if it's within the company, if it's a client in the office space, you wanna make sure that that doesn't happen. There may be exceptions to that, but for the most part, we kinda lock that out.

15:19
Danny Haskell: I already mentioned the connectivity. And then in terms of cost, training, and support, in my opinion, the cost of the software solutions by Inductive is kind of unmatched. And then training is, for the most part, if you go to Inductive University, it's free. In fact, in our company, that's what we do as entry-level engineer. If you actually go through Inductive University, you get core certified, then you get gold certified. And so there's a roadmap for people to very quickly get up to speed on the platform.

15:58
Eileen Souliotis: And if I could just add to that, we do the same thing at Entegris for all of our co-ops or engineers. If they have not used Ignition, when they come on board, they start with the free training. Then just this last year, we had five different Entegris people get gold certified in a matter of about six weeks. It just happened that everybody finished at the same time, handed their tests in, and they all came back within six weeks. We went from zero to five. So we do recommend taking, not just doing the training to do the training; I actually think it's better to space it out. Do one level of training, use what you've learned, and then it makes the next ones. I think you get more out of the training, and you really understand it, versus you're not just taking the training to do the training; you're really learning the system.

16:54
Danny Haskell: Yeah, some goals and benefits connecting people, your assets, and your systems in real time, a big one that Eileen's gonna show later in this is really the increased visibility of what's happening in your operations. This is vital because you wanna be able to correct issues as they're happening in not days, weeks, months later. And then in terms of just being able to increase the utilization of your equipment, making sure that operators are actually using it when they're supposed to be, and then also ensuring the equipment is actually producing at the rates you're expecting, and then of course maintaining a high-level quality of your manufacturing operations. The increased visibility at all levels, there was a phrase, I think 25 years ago, "The shop floor or the top floor." I think that's really enabled Entegris; many people at different levels of the organization are viewing this data. And this is, as a result, has really helped them manage and produce better product.

18:12
Eileen Souliotis: So I think the next few slides show some examples of how we're using it. We are running a mix still of Vision and Perspective. If we do a new application, we do it in Perspective, but it's a little hard to justify the ROI of redoing a project. And we're... Sometimes, we source constraints, sometimes not. So hopefully going forward, we'll be moving more towards Perspective. This is one example in our pre and post treat room. This is one of our oldest applications, but we just, the temperature and the humidity is very important to our product, and we trend it, and we keep it in SQL, and it was kind of just fun. This was done before I got there, but I thought it was just really funny to have the gauges. And then the trends, and you can see that there's trends. You turn them on, you turn them off, you only need to show the ones you need. And we usually, on most of these charts, if you look up in the, there's an export to Excel where you can get your data on this CSV file if you need it. This is not one, I'll be honest, that people usually look at, unless there's a problem with the product, and then they...

19:24
Eileen Souliotis: Check the temperature and humidity. This is one of our older projects, and it is a Vision project. This was a web-membrane project that we did. Again, it's also in Vision, and it just we like to point out all the different things we did. The web path, we can jump around to different screens. There's recipe screens. We do a lot of what we call recipe linking, where if you scan in your catalog number, it automatically loads the recipe that you have. That's a huge savings, and it saves from fat fingering. We all love that, right? The recipe was run wrong. We also do a lot of lot tracking and alarming.

20:11
Eileen Souliotis: You can see a lot of things are blacked out 'cause I can't show you everything. I can't show you all my secrets. But this is one of our, this is in our Bedford application.

20:22
Danny Haskell: Entegris has a lot of complicated processes, and this is one of them. So there's a lot of pipes on the screen. So what this machine does, it basically, it takes solvent and removes oils from their product. And then on the left is, you basically have a distillation system that removes the oil so you get clean solvent to remove the oils again. So it's kind of a circular process there. This is a machine I actually programmed the PLC on. Kind of proud of what I did there, but anyways, the screens did my best to try to highlight visually what's happening from a process standpoint. So having the piping animation Ignition was very helpful.

21:11
Eileen Souliotis: Again, this was done in Vision, but we are preparing for our new site in Colorado, and we're trying to do a very, very similar machine, and we're doing it in Perspective. And NeoMatrix is doing that for us.

21:24
Danny Haskell: Yeah, the only thing that's changed here, I think, is using the new model of the HMI standard where you're using less color to make it easier to see what's happening. But yeah, having the valve status, and so we, if you click on a valve, knowing exactly what's happening with valves and pumps has been important for operators to know what's happening on the system.

21:50
Eileen Souliotis: And with all the detail we've added, we've split this into several screens so you can click and travel, much like the old factory talk you used to go to the next page and flick around. We're doing that now in Perspective. So the next couple screens... I'm a huge fan of Sepasoft. I promise they didn't pay me to say that. But I'm gonna show you, this is my favorite screen in all of our Ignition projects. We have a bunch of membrane machines, and this is was done in Vision using Sepasoft, and rolls of material run for a period of time. They get treated. Sometimes those rolls run for eight or nine hours at a time. They run a very long time. And we have some very special tools we use to calibrate and set them up in between runs. And we're changing; every time it goes blue like that, it's pretty much a planned roll change.

22:58
Eileen Souliotis: And we didn't think we needed more of these tools. This is our bottleneck production, and when we started to lay out the data like this and look at the screens, you could see that they had more than one machine down at a time because they only have one of these calibration tools. And so this was like the evidence they needed. Just having a number of 80% run time doesn't show you that it's happening at the same time. So these time charts, I gotta tell you, everybody loves these time charts and using this part of Sepasoft just to see the trends.

23:35
Eileen Souliotis: So again, this is more Sepasoft analysis. This is kind of what we call our flush room. And all of these machines, now I gotta tell you, everybody who knows all the standards, they probably say, "Well, when a machine's down, it's supposed to be red." These machines are down more than they're up because it takes so long to load them. And it's a very short process, and our VP said he couldn't have all that red on the screen. So red on this screen actually means it's in maintenance mode. Gray is that it's down, and green, it's running. This was a second shift operation, so there's a lot of gray. That machine in the corner was considered our bottleneck in the flush room. And they were looking to build another machine. And because of how long the process is versus how long it takes to load and unload it, a 40% runtime was considered pretty good.

24:26
Eileen Souliotis: And the managers insisted that there was nothing they could do to get more out of this machine. And we started showing them trend charts, and that's what they found. All the bays were down. All the bays were down for lunch. So it was obvious there was more we could do. We started staffing it through lunch. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal, but again, when you have a 40% runtime, you don't really know why you're down. When you see hours blocked down, another one of these machines was gonna cost us $400,000. And again, it's the difference between looking at a percentage and then seeing the time charts spread out like that, and you can see what's really going on.

25:18
Danny Haskell: Yeah, this is a feature that's been invaluable to Entegris, is the language localization. So Ignition, you have essentially the ability to have other languages automatically, by a click of a button, change. And so for folks in Taiwan, this has been very useful to the operators operating the machines, being able to just click a button and then basically be able to know what they're doing. So luckily we have somebody on our staff that can do the translations for us.

26:01
Eileen Souliotis: So this was just a little bit of an example we had on why Ignition is cheaper for us. We took the example of one of our servers at one point. We had 63 machines on it. We had, I guess, it was two servers, two Perspective licenses. Ten years we paid the maintenance contracts. We usually get the priority contract. 17-inch Hope displays is what we use on our floor for modules. PCs are provided by Entegris, but we did look it up and see what they would cost. And so for ten years it would be $189,000 to keep this equipment up and running.

26:43
Eileen Souliotis: And if you look at, did the same thing in Billerica with Panelviews, I got a quote from our vendor for almost $8,000. And so if you just multiply that out, it's $50,000. So we know right there that if we can do it, if we can build it in the beginning, and we do struggle with some of our vendors who aren't familiar with Ignition. So if I ask them to build the machine and they're gonna give me a Panelview, then I know when it comes in, my team's got to convert it, or we've got to somehow get them on board from the beginning to doing it in Ignition, or we have to work with them. And a lot of the vendors are not...

27:21
Eileen Souliotis: We have two that have gotten very familiar with it. They still don't do it our way, but we're working on that. But even if we get something that mostly works, once it's in, it's easy to convert versus changing hardware. I think we all know what it takes to change out an HMI to fit a PC in. Maybe it was 24 volts before; now it's 120. It takes a lot. One of the things we found as well on the HMI and SCADA package using Ignition is that we control the image of the PCs that are running the clients. And so that means Entegris really has a good grip on the cybersecurity. It's our fault if we're not running the latest images with the latest cybersecurity software.

28:09
Eileen Souliotis: And then unlimited clients for monitoring. As Danny said, we have managers at all levels looking at that time chart screen for the role. That is our bottleneck process in the building right now. So they're looking at that. People are looking at it at home. When the machines shut down, you can look at it at home and find out what's going on. You can VPN in. All very secure. Are you watching me? And we've had some really awesome experience. Our uptime right now is phenomenal. But we have the option to log in. So that was kind of what we had. But we'll open it up for questions. Yes?

28:56
Audience Member 1: Well, I'm assuming both of you went to the 8.3 announcement. Hey, okay. Hi. So I assume both of you went to the 8.3 announcement. We heard some really cool stuff coming out about 8.3. And I was just wondering personally for the both of you, what are you most excited for when it comes to moving to 8.3?

29:20
Eileen Souliotis: I've really liked the, I'm hoping that the potential of getting rid of the store and forward and the SQL connection, I'm a little worried about the upgrade and how we're gonna get there. But I think just taking every extra connection out and every option of moving data would be the big one for me. I'm gonna go to the next session on 8.3 as well.

0:29:45.3
Danny Haskell: Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go. So I don't have any comments on that just yet.

29:51
Eileen Souliotis: I can see the drawing package being the other really. I think everybody in the room was extremely excited to do drawing. We do some of our machine overlays. We put them onto and show P&IDs. We use CAD drawings that we get other places, and we use them. So it will give us some nice options for drawing things the way they should be and hopefully cleaner. Sometimes you get some of these CAD drawings, and they have so much on it and you're taking all the layers out, and the end result just doesn't... It just looks like a drawing, a machine drawing. It's not really representative of what you need. So those are two. Yes?

30:32
Audience Member 2: I know you've invested in getting five of your people gold certified. Are they gonna become design developers? What's their role, and do you think this will help you transition?

30:44
Eileen Souliotis: Both. Both. So the people on my team already do Ignition projects, Perspective, and Vision edits. And like I say, when we train new people, we start them with making edits to an existing project. I think that's always good. Our co-ops, we try and put them on projects that they're not gonna get shot if a machine comes down. But we have enough work to keep NeoMatrix busy. They are a huge player in our Colorado site startup, which is... It's an entire facility. We're gonna have multiple divisions in that building, and so we intend to keep doing both.

31:33
Danny Haskell: On our side, we also do maintenance support for Entegris. It might be less or so than our projects, but we do do both when needed.

31:45
Audience Member 2: How far do you go with them?

31:49
Eileen Souliotis: We usually try to not touch their machines until we get through SAT, and then we go all in. A lot of them will do Ignition, but what they really do is a factory talk application of Ignition. It looks just like it. It acts just like it. We have to teach them how to do this recipe linking and the trending that we do. We have two big... Two vendors that are really starting to get up to speed, and I'll just say we still have to do a lot of work with them.

32:23
Eileen Souliotis: We have other machine vendors that either we will have NeoMatrix partner with, and from the beginning, they'll do the PLC and the Ignition code. We have a machine we're looking to build pretty soon that we're going to do... They're gonna build it, and we're gonna do the code ourselves, the Ignition HMI. I'll be honest, we have a vendor in Japan that is also working with us right now, and they use KEYENCE PLCs. It's not our favorite, but we're gonna use Kepware, and we're gonna be using an Ignition screen, but it's gonna come in with a KEYENCE PLC, KEYENCE HMI, and then we're just making the builder build in a screen for us to add an Ignition client afterwards.

33:11
Eileen Souliotis: The KEYENCE HMIs are literally this big, and they can't do a trend. There's a lot of things they can't do. So we could do a headless Ignition app, which we've done, or I'd rather build in one where our process engineers, our operators, they can see the trends and the temperatures as the machine's running and see the things that really matter, the process data.

33:33
Danny Haskell: So for some vendors, if it's a one-off and they don't have the experience with Ignition, they often will be supplying a Panelview and then will be asked to do the Ignition front-end. So they'll qualify their machine based on what they're delivering, but then we're responsible for connecting to their machine and having it operate like it should, and then we'll do the other stuff that's on top of it like recipe management. And as she mentioned, the recipes dependent upon actual product numbers or catalog numbers that are associated with those recipes. We'll handle all of that stuff.

34:16
Eileen Souliotis: Yes?

34:20
Audience Member 3: So you had mentioned you have multiple sites across the world. How much interconnectivity do you have between different locations and plants? I know you talked about some places had MQTT and some did not. How much, I guess, interaction is there?

34:34
Eileen Souliotis: So not as much as we'd like. We've done some with the EAM servers for a little bit of, I would say, like license tracking and things like that, but not as much. And in our IT world, we have really kept the servers separate. We are starting to work... We have a plan to work with Google Cloud, and one of the reasons I think we're doing that is to aggregate data between sites. There's been a big push of keeping servers separate but including SQL servers.

35:14
Eileen Souliotis: So what Danny was saying is early on, we had a server at one site and a machine in the other. We are not allowed to do that anymore. So the world changes with... Cybersecurity is a really... Everyone has a big push on that right now, and that's one of the ways I think they're trying to get around it. We have an architecture team that is working on that, and they're pushing us to do that in our Colorado site, which will be... I mean, it will be interesting. I think we're gonna be pushed to do more of that between the Taiwan and the Billerica site. They're kind of sister plants right now. Japan, Taiwan, and Billerica run the same products. So how do you compare data? How do you make sure you're running the same process? How do you share recipes? So not much more to come.

36:05
Audience Member 3: Look forward to it in five years.

36:12
Eileen Souliotis: Anybody else? Yes.

36:15
Audience Member 4: Hi, Eileen. Thanks for the sharing. It was very, very interesting. I had a question where you had written about the savings of $400,000 and all that on the downtime. How does this work in a large enterprise? Does the CFO office influence to know if the investment of whatever you saw was a difference, 182... The numbers you had given in terms of investments made to decide on Ignition, and the savings was this much, there was an ROI. So how does that whole loop of budgeting when you wanna take decisions to shift with Ignition's, how does that work? And do you see possibilities that this pressure, which the other gentleman asked the question, that OEMs are... You know, machine builders are very proprietary or separate; you can't influence do you see somewhere ahead the trend that the ROIs and the returns will justify for larger companies such as yours to push... I don't wanna use it wrong, but it's kind of a nexus in a way that makes it... Empowers the customers to do what's best for them?

37:30
Eileen Souliotis: So I think, unfortunately, I would say that it's on the customers to push. And the reason is a vendor builds it and pushes it out. When they do their development, they do the Ignition development on a PC that they just connect up temporarily, and then we move it to a server. They never buy licenses. So for them, I think the hard part has been getting people trained to use Ignition and, again, learning the ways that Entegris has learned from NeoMatrix because a lot of these ideas have been... I've been at Entegris six years, but Danny's been working with them for 25 years.

38:12
Eileen Souliotis: So to get them to do it our way and to build in things from the beginning, every time we learn, we try to put a standard. We have a standard template for colors, and we're trying to start with that and pushing that and developing that every step. Every time we work with a vendor, we try to build it a little bit more. But I think from an OEM side, there's no cost savings for them. So I think it's really reliant on us to push them. Having said that, I know that at least one of our vendors is now using Ignition with another company, so another one of their customers. So I think it is... So we're on the East Coast.

38:55
Eileen Souliotis: I think it's starting to gain a little bit more out there. We're seeing more and more servers and more and more people with... On their resumes, to say that they've used Ignition when we are hiring. So I think that was one of your questions. I can't remember what the other one was.

39:13
Danny Haskell: The first one was regarding, I guess, the financial.

39:16
Eileen Souliotis: Financial. Yeah, with us building these new sites, we have to justify the new machine. And we were going down the path on that one $400,000 machine of building another machine. And when we start to pull together ROI numbers, that's the kind of things they look for is data. We try to be a data-driven company, and it just didn't justify spending it. And I've got to tell you, that's not our bottleneck machine for us anymore. They stagger the lunch shifts, and it's just sometimes people don't believe what's happening. And even that, honest truth, when we first showed the supervisor of that area, he says, "That's not true, they run at lunch."

40:04
Eileen Souliotis: And he went in there at lunch and found they weren't. He didn't believe the data. And I'm like, we just set it to a one when it's running and a zero when it's not. I mean, it's data, but he didn't believe us. So we've really gained a lot of credibility from this was a continuous improvement manager. He did not believe the data. So...

40:25
Audience Member 4: You talked about going to Google. Google Cloud. Did you look at just standing up your own data center or getting your own servers in the data center?

40:39
Eileen Souliotis: Yes, we have, but they really don't wanna have different sites connected to the same servers. So they wanna do something in the cloud.

40:50
Audience Member 4: I'm just worried about did you do an analysis?

40:55
Eileen Souliotis: Oh, So I was saying...

40:55
Audience Member 4: I'm not trying to get into your business.

41:00
Eileen Souliotis: No.

41:00
Audience Member 4: There's a cost to put data in and pull data out, especially in an industrial environment.

41:07
Eileen Souliotis: I agree. I'm a little worried about it, too. I will say that it was made at a higher level than mine. We have an enterprise architecture group that makes those decisions.

41:25
Audience Member 5: Thank you, Eileen. I just want to understand the use of NeoMetrics when you are rolling out across the globe. Did you use them as a system integrator, or did you use the local system integrators because support is critical sometimes from the manufacturing perspective?

41:41
Eileen Souliotis: So Danny's team has supported our Jangan, Korea site; our Yonezawa, Japan site; and our Taiwan KSP site. So yes, we lean on them for everything.

41:56
Danny Haskell: We may have to stagger our hours a little bit.

42:00
Eileen Souliotis: They just work 24 hours now when they're working on those projects. Yes.

42:11
Audience Member 6: Thanks for the presentation. Since you guys use Sepasoft a lot, it looks like your numbers are more low mix, high volume. Do you see Sepasoft in other scenarios, like high mix, low volume for the recipe management, as a good fit, too? Like a pretty dynamic changes on the recipes.

42:36
Eileen Souliotis: So I'm gonna say, Danny, are you guys using that? Is Chris using that? He's using Sepasoft, right?

42:44
Danny Haskell: Mm-hmm.

42:46
Eileen Souliotis: So I can only say Entegris is actually a very high-mix, low-volume. Could we, could I see? I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be a good fit for low volume, high mix.

43:02
Audience Member 6: Do you normally get other ERP integrations, too, like SAP?

43:10
Eileen Souliotis: We use a little bit of SAP today integrations. We're gonna be using more in Colorado, a little bit more. It's really hard. Everybody knows Greenfield is much easier than Brownfield. So Billerica is really Brownfield. It's just been around a long time, and a lot of old architecture, and taking equipment down when it's running 24/7 is just so hard, right? But in Colorado, the sky's the limit.

43:44
Audience Member 6: Okay. Thank you.

43:46
Eileen Souliotis: We are hiring. There's a posting.

43:52
Audience Member 7: I got one quick question. You said your favorite screen in all Ignition is your downtime analysis for Sepasoft. Do you see the payoff after identifying those initial, let's say, those downtimes of lunch or your calibration tool? Do you still keep up with looking at that?

44:11
Eileen Souliotis: That's a great question. We have the one with the rolls on it that I couldn't tell you a lot about, but they run like 8, 12 hours at a time. Those are analyzed daily. We actually have a report I didn't show that comes out of this Sepasoft data that tells you how many feet, how much downtime by tool aggregated. We have two different types of tools. It's separated, and that is looked at every day, every day, and reported on in every production numbers, daily, weekly, monthly. It's the only one, to be honest, that is reported that way.

44:55
Eileen Souliotis: So there's a weekly email that goes out, and they snap just those numbers right off of our reports and stick them in there. Yes, it's looked at constantly. But I know where you're going. Sometimes you use a tool until you get to a place, and then you kind of step back. And you wonder then, is it really worth it? Is it worth the support? Well, this year we upped our support with Sepasoft to the next level because we've been adding more and more tools to our trends and charts like that. In fact, I have someone from NeoMatrix adding one right now back home.

45:40
Eileen Souliotis: So our Taiwan and our Colorado sites have Qual servers and production servers, so we call them Qual servers. In Billerica, where I sit, we do have a dev server, and we have actually purchased extra licenses and Perspective licenses to do some work on it, but we're really still building up a Qual server application and including SQL tables that we wanna have, so we're working with our IT team to build that up. It is a little nerve-wracking to be changing things on the production server, and we usually wait until people are through the free training before we give them access.

46:29
Laya Kaddoura: All right, so that's all the time we have for today. I just wanna thank Eileen and Danny today for today's session. If you could give them a round of applause.

46:44
Laya Kaddoura: And again, thank you for everyone's time, and have a great rest of your day.