Unleashing ROI And Innovation With Ignition

Speakers

Don Pearson

Chief Strategy Officer

Inductive Automation

Derrick Chambers

Business Development Manager

Flexware Innovation

David Lam

Business Development Director

Vertiv

Dan Stauft

Director, Operational Technology

SugarCreek

David McKenna

Smart Packaging Practice Leader

Grantek

When it’s time for your company to add or upgrade industrial software, something that you must consider is what the return on investment (ROI) will be. To correctly estimate ROI, you have to think beyond the software’s initial licensing fees — you must also think about factors like the cost of implementation, training, support, and operational resources.

No matter how you look at ROI, Ignition is the best choice for HMI, SCADA, and Digital Transformation software. In this webinar, you’ll find out why that’s true by hearing the experiences of industrial professionals who have worked with Ignition for years. As you look ahead at your organization’s technology needs for 2025 and beyond, be sure to join in and watch this valuable session.

• Learn how to get more value out of your control system
• Hear success stories from various industries
• See how unlimited licensing leads to long-term benefits
• Find out how Ignition solves SCADA pain points

Transcript:

00:00
Don Pearson: Good morning everyone and welcome to this morning's webinar. I appreciate everyone's attendance, "Unleashing ROI And Innovation With Ignition." My name is Don Pearson. I serve as Chief Strategy Officer with Inductive Automation, and I will be moderating the discussion today between our guest panelists. I have four great guests with me here today. They have a lot of knowledge and experience to add to our discussion. They are Derrick Chambers, Business Development Manager for Flexware Innovation. David L:am, Business Development Director for Vertiv. David McKenna, Smart Packaging Practice Leader for Grantek. And last but not least, Dan Stauft, Director of Operational Technology for SugarCreek. And we want to thank all four of you for being with us here. And I'm going to go down the line and ask each of you to please just take a minute and tell us a little more about your background, what you do, and maybe a minute about your company. So with that, let's start with Derrick.

01:00
Derrick Chambers: Sure. Hi there. As Don said, I'm Derrick, Business Development Manager for Flexware. I get the pleasure of serving folks in the metals industry, which not only includes steelmaking, aluminum, and specialty alloys, but also some stamping, wiring cable, and metal coatings. So I'm in a sales role now, but previously I was actually an Ignition developer at Flexware. So it gives me a little more ability to speak to technical customers about their legacy systems and how Ignition can benefit their plant. Lastly, some of you might recognize me as Inductus, the orange wizard from ICC. There's a lot of fun to do that. And thanks again to Inductive Automation for inviting me to be a part of the Build-A-Thon this year.

01:38
Don Pearson: Derrick, there's only one wizard. So thank you. Thanks for being a part of it. All right. David Lam.

01:47
David Lam: Good morning, everybody. Really pleased to be here. Thank you for the invite, Ignition. So David Lam, I'm the Business Development Manager Director for Vertiv. My background has always been in energy management, SCADA, building automation, and controls. Been doing that for over 10, 12 years now. Previously was at Schneider before moving over to Vertiv. So very familiar with the software sort of platforms that we use day in, day out. And currently predominantly serving the data center markets where we use Ignition a lot.

02:23
Don Pearson: Thanks so much, David. David McKenna.

02:27
David McKenna: Thank you, Don. Hi, everyone. I'm Dave McKenna from Grantek. Sorry for I guess I overdressed for this event, being the only one with a tie today. But I'm a practice leader for our smart packaging group. So we use Ignition primarily in food and beverage but also in other regulated industries to verify the correct product is in the correct package and integrate it with a variety of code daters and marking equipment from multiple vendors. 21 years in automation, and happy to be here. Thank you.

02:54
Don Pearson: Welcome, David. And Dan.

02:57
Dan Stauft: Dan Stauft, Director of Operational Technology for SugarCreek. I spent the first 21 years making cars. I was a manufacturing engineer for General Motors, Toyota, and Nissan. 11 years ago, I joined SugarCreek. It's a billion-dollar, privately held food manufacturer. And we've been using Ignition for the last nine years.

03:20
Don Pearson: Thanks, Dan. Thanks to all you guys for being here for sure. So just a quick look at the agenda. I'll give you just a brief introduction to Inductive Automation and our Ignition software. And our experts will each tell us about a recent project that they did with Ignition. Then I'll give a quick overview of some basic ROI concepts. And then as a group, we'll talk about some of the important factors in your ROI equation, which are what we'll be covering today: acquisition, implementation, maintenance, and faster ROI. We'll then finish up by sharing just a few resources and then answering some of your questions. So if you do have a question, you want myself or one of the panelists to answer at the end. Please type it into the questions area of GoTo Webinar control panel, and we'll answer as many as we can. But if we don't get your question today, please reach out. And one of our knowledgeable account representatives, they will get back to you and they will answer it for you. We'll show you their contact information at the end of the webinar.

04:22
Don Pearson: Also, the slides and the recording of this webinar will be available tomorrow on the same page where you registered so you can review the material at any time. Or if you find you want to share it with another employee, another colleague, you could certainly do that also. To introduce Inductive Automation to those of you who aren't familiar with us, here's a few facts. We make software for problem solvers, and we're focused on our software platform, Ignition. We have over about 340 employees now throughout the US and now in Australia. 61% of Fortune 100 and 44% of Fortune 500 use Ignition. We have a highly diversified customer base across dozens of industries. There are Ignition installations in 100-plus countries. I think it's up to about 140 now. We have over 4500 integrators worldwide. And our company, it's a profitable company, an independent company, no outside investors. And our focus continues to be just providing the best platform for you as our customers.

05:24
Don Pearson: And what is Ignition? Well, there's a couple things that are unique about it. We like to say that Ignition is an unlimited platform for SCADA and so much more. In fact, Ignition enables you to connect, design, deploy basically any industrial application you need, including SCADA, HMI, MES, and IIoT. It acts as a central hub for everything on the plant floor and beyond. It's web-based, web-managed, web-deployed, has an unlimited licensing model, and it's cross-platform. And it offers industrial strength, security, and stability for all of your deployments. Now with our panelists, to continue learning a little more about your companies and about what Ignition can do, I just want to hear from each of you about a recent project or initiative that you used Ignition for. Just take a couple of minutes each to give us a high-level overview of the problem, the solution, and the scope and time frame of your project. So Derrick, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell us about Ignition project at Flexware.

06:25
Derrick Chambers: Yes, absolutely. I'd say one of the biggest public successes I've seen with Ignition was actually when I was working as a developer. I had the privilege to work with American Water's team to not only help build out their enterprise portal but also build out their SCADA solution that's deployed across hundreds of sites. I think the real catalyst for all of this innovation was actually COVID when American Water realized that they couldn't be as remote as they thought. So they made a center of excellence team; it's formed of internal stakeholders but also included some partner integrators such as Flexware and Inflection Point, who's formerly ACC. From there, we went to work. Data is being pushed up from the edge using Cirrus Link's MQTT modules, and it goes up into a portal in American Water's business layer where data is being formatted based on its location type. And that's just kind of the beginning. Now that we have data at the fingertips of stakeholders, now they can start having ideas on what can be done with that data. QA would sometimes need to email sites for a CSV export, so we built out a tool for them to access that data directly. VPs of operations wanted to ensure that they stayed in regulation of their well permits, so we made a tool for that, cross-referencing permits with data that we are already collecting.

07:38
Derrick Chambers: So American Water thought they produced a billion gallons, or about a billion gallons finished water, per day nationally, and now all they have to do is look at the portal to not only see what that number is for today but what the trend is. It's really just showing what the power of Ignition is: to not only acquire the data but to add some context and make it useful for folks that need it most.

07:57
Don Pearson: Thanks, Derrick. Much appreciated. David Lam, tell us about Ignition project at Vertiv.

08:03
David Lam: So at Vertiv, we manufacture thermal cooling and power stream asset equipment. So big and medium voltage, low voltage switch gears, air handling units, cooling, UPS, and thermal. And predominantly, we manufacture those to serve the data center industry. And when I came on board a couple of years ago, we had no literature or marketing literature. So we actually use Ignition in a lot of our facilities because we have global manufacturing facilities all across the world made up through acquisitions of over the years. So there are several different types of brands and different types of layouts. There's no uniformity in our facilities, in our offices. So we decided to use Ignition because it was that open, and we knew very well that it could connect to any of the various types of manufacturing equipment that we had across the world. We then used it as a demo tool. So once we started to get Ignition Edge in all of the factories, we put it up into Perspective in the cloud. But then not only from an operational point of view to see what's going on in the factory, your typical sustainability, energy awareness, and obviously managing any outages to ensure continuity of manufacturing, but also as a sales visibility tool, not only for our customers but also for sales enablement tools for the wider Vertiv sales team that weren't traditionally familiar with our offer.

09:50
David Lam: It was a great way to demonstrate to our customers that we actually walk the talk. So we are selling this product and this solution, but we're also using it for ourselves. So now we've got it all over the world, and we map it out on a nice map. It's part of the Discovery Gallery as well this year, but actually we've taken it a step further now because there's a significant amount of factory witness testing that needs to be conducted before any equipment goes to any site irrespective of whether it's a data center or a hospital or a big commercial building. We've started to use the power of Ignition and Apple's Vision Pro to create augmented realities, allow engineers to actually do factory witness testing without actually coming to the factory. So it's just evolving over time, and it's a great tool for both Vertiv's salespeople internally, operationally, and our customers.

10:51
Don Pearson: That's great, David, thank you so much. That's great, great intro there. David McKenna, tell us about Ignition project at Grantek.

11:00
David McKenna: Yeah, so a new thing we've been doing is a lot more around code date inspection and expiration dates, which isn't new on its own, but there's some new machine learning-based cameras out there that can open up some new opportunities, and we've been extending our software to be able to handle the variations in code date and country formats, and my favorite, and this has really allowed us to solve new problems with customers, but it hasn't taken a great effort to extend our product, and my favorite thing about Ignition that really allows us to do this is it brings databases to the plant floor, to plant floor control systems. So many times, where control systems, because it was painful to access a database in the SCADA software, you just piled stuff in the PLC and stacked up arrays, and with Ignition, you're not doing that; you're doing it the right way.

11:45
Don Pearson: Thanks so much; much appreciated, David. And last but not least here, an Ignition project from you, Dan, at SugarCreek.

11:54
Dan Stauft: Okay, we started doing an MES solution corporate-wide about eight years ago. We implemented it, and that gave us pretty good control of, or a grasp of how our process was running. What we were missing was the product attributes to associate with the process data. We recently launched SAP, and we are currently plugging the SAP inspections and production results, dovetailing them with our production analytics and enable us to better understand where we're losing loss points. Yield is a huge issue in the food manufacturing industry. So we have a much better idea of where our yield losses are occurring and what's causing them. We've only been on this road for about three months, but the initial results are very promising.

12:48
Don Pearson: That's great. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. All right. Let's take a little bit of a change here and move to ROI and move our discussion forward and some things we want to cover today. ROI, of course you know, means return on investment. And the way you determine that ROI is by calculating the financial benefits you gained from using the software compared to the cost acquiring, implementing, and maintaining it. Because time is money, it's smart to calculate how quickly you'll be able to start seeing the return on investment also. When your ROI is in a good place, it can bring a whole lot of benefits to the organization, including increased productivity, cost savings, generating more revenue, just overall, better decision-making, higher customer satisfaction, a whole lot less waste, time savings, etcetera. So with that thought in mind, we're going to cover some of those aspects. And let's start with the subject of acquisition. And basically what I'm going to do is discuss these different things, starting with acquisition, and actually see how Ignition has helped with software acquisition costs, such as licensing. How does this compare to other software products? And Dan, let's go ahead and start with you now.

14:09
Dan Stauft: All right. Thanks, Don. Ignition's pricing structure is fully transparent, which is pretty unique in the SCADA space. There's really no hidden fees. You know exactly what it's going to cost. Even before you even talk to your sales rep, quite frankly, you can look up all the costs on their webpage. You can download a demo. You can do a proof of concept for free. And you can use that proof-of-concept to sell the stakeholders on the ROI potential based on your demo and the costs that you know you're going to incur. So it's unique in that way.

14:54
Don Pearson: Thanks, Dan. Derrick, how about your answer to the question?

15:00
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, I'm going to say some similar things here. I think Ignition's pricing strength lies in its simplicity. There's no complex pricing matrix that you can barely understand, right? Everything's there on the website. There's no barrier to just exploring. And once you see the price and the fact that it's perpetual with unlimited tags and clients, all the things we love about Ignition, it gives a lot of freedom to create rather than having to deal with the sales guy every time you wanna build something. So just as an example, I'll sometimes talk with customers about a project, and they come back with, outside of Ignition, another platform. And they'll say, "Well, I'll have to call so-and-so to get a thousand more tags added so we can do this." And you don't have to do that with Ignition. In some cases, I have customers saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, literally, per year on licensing alone. So it definitely perks ears when I'm having these conversations.

15:50
Don Pearson: Yeah, I'm a little bit biased on this point, but I got to tell you, Derrick, it always amazes me, the level of creativity that people can get into when you don't tell them they need to pay more money for another thousand tags. It allows the attention to get off of the money once the software is purchased and onto the innovation and creativity, and results of the project, so.

16:12
Derrick Chambers: 100%.

16:13
Don Pearson: Yeah, thanks. David Lam, your answer to the question.

16:18
David Lam: Yeah, so very similar, obviously. The pricing is completely transparent. But I think one of the key things for us in terms of acquisition costs is the platform can be used irrespective of the discipline, so whether it's mechanical or electrical. We use it in our factories for that. We use it for our lighting systems. And we've even started to consider to use it for our own CRM as well. So once you buy one unlimited license and you know you just don't have to worry about it, when the maintenance team are going to expand that factory or we're going to build, can it handle it? It's a no-brainer. It's just straight away it's yes. So it just takes that headache away from any discussion really. And then it's just easy as it scales up because we can just put an Edge or a Perspective into each one of our sites and just not have to worry about it. When you compare that to other softwares that are out there, the Honeywell's, the Schneider's, each one is a bit like Microsoft's Office, where you have an application for Word, an application for Excel, and an application for PowerPoint. Whereas Ignition is all in one. You really don't have to worry about it. And of course, from a licensing perspective, the price can be quite obscene in comparison to others as well.

17:47
David Lam: And they will charge you, just like the others said, for extra modules, extra licenses, extra points and devices, or even web clients or FIC clients that you may need as you scale out globally 'cause more people want to see that system.

18:02
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. David McKenna, your thoughts on the question?

18:06
David McKenna: Yeah, just to extend on the others and maybe not put as elegantly, but you only have to acquisition the software once. So once we've done it for a customer, we can put it across; we can install a station on a line, we can do the next line, we can do all the lines. Or if a customer has already purchased Ignition, they're getting the value of our solution on it with no additional licensing costs. So it really opens from an acquisition standpoint; it's that one time piece. And if you do need to extend, migrate because your system needs to be increased in size, you do get kind of credit for moving those around. So that's really the story that we've seen.

18:47
Don Pearson: Thanks. It's really interesting to Dan's point that one of the things that we find is incredibly important for folks entering into projects is take advantage of just creating the whole project without any acquisition costs. Go ahead and use it. You can use the designer. The designer never times out. You just, And it gives you the freedom to create those projects and see what it's going to be like while deciding on things that you're going to be acquiring costs and things like that. So thanks to all of you on that one.

19:16
Don Pearson: Let's go to implementation. David McKenna, let's go ahead and start with you on this one. How does Ignition help with the costs or time of the implementation, such as installation, setup, and configuration? How does this compare to other software products you've worked with?

19:30
David McKenna: And I have a short answer to a product that has a short installation time. I mean, it's minutes, not hours or days, to set up and deploy. And the other is compared to some of the other software vendors that, like other colors and in their logos, you may not need as many servers. You can go multi-server if the loading requires it and you want to do it, but you don't necessarily need that directory server or some of those other sort of configuration servers that are highly, highly recommended to be put somewhere else. You can't just do it all in one if your application is the size, if that makes sense. So minutes, not days. And some of the new stuff that's coming out around the new version of Ignition with everything being text-based, I think that really is gonna make it a lot quicker and easier to manage version, to do provisioning, and ahead of competition. No question.

20:25
Don Pearson: Thanks David. Dan, your thoughts on the questions?

20:28
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so the implementation is, is very, very simple. The quick in install everybody knows about; one of our surprises is we thought we were gonna need a gateway for each of our six plants, and we ended up putting all six plants on one gateway, which super-simplifies everything because, you just have one set of templates on one gateway and just plug in whatever equipment you want from whatever plant, and you have a solution. The drag-and-drop capabilities, the Tag Browser, getting a project set up is very, very simple. We had a co-op design, a project for a refrigeration system on a 400,000-square-foot food manufacturing plant. He had no controls experience, no HMI experience, and in six weeks he completed the refrigeration system and the wastewater system. And he did it all by learning from Inductive Automation's Inductive University, which is free. So if you can take a student from nothing to two fully functional projects in six weeks, that pretty much tells you how simple it is.

21:46
Don Pearson: Thanks, Dan. Okay, Derrick, over to you.

21:50
Derrick Chambers: Yep. I think it's pretty well known with the community that Ignition downloads and installs in three minutes, and you're ready to go. But in terms of installation with other platforms, in a past life, I've spent hours per day setting up PCs, installing software, importing the templates just to begin the work. And that's per client. So when you're talking about five, 20, a hundred clients, that's literally days just to install and configure. So there's a huge benefit to having this single server-type installation versus multiple client PCs. So on top of that, I'd also say the Ignition gateway is super easy to use. Inductive Automation provides an incredible user manual to support you. If anybody's developed an Ignition, they know the user manuals to go to. I think another huge benefit to using Ignition is the community. The forum is very active. It's full of not only Inductive Automation folks but industry experts, and they love contributing their knowledge. So all that to say that if you do run into issues, it's usually easy to find an answer instead of spinning your wheels. And if for some reason you can't find an answer on your own, IA support team's just top-notch.

22:55
Don Pearson: Thanks so much, Derrick. I tell you, it always amazes me, the active community on the forum and stuff; you make a good point. It's like, you can probably find an answer to something you want from somebody in the community, and obviously we wanna make sure you get that answer to IA also. David Lam.

23:12
David Lam: Yeah, so very similar to what the others have mentioned as well. So very, very quick to install; download, and you're even able to use the free trial version. We had actually one specific customer, and we went into the exchange community where we needed a very, very large single line diagram to be displayed, and kindly someone had developed it on the exchange, and we were able to use it and they just instantly install it, set up, and configure to our own system. How does that compare to other software products? So for example, we've... There's a lot of power quality meters and analyzers out in the market now, especially for manufacturing and data centers, but a lot of them tie you into their software platform, a bit like Schneider and Honeywell. You have to use their power quality software if you want to extract all of that power quality data from those meters. But with Ignition, we've developed that in-house; we've managed to configure it. It's just so easy and obviously so beneficial for the customer, and it makes that whole implementation a lot more easier, easier and just improves overall ROI for them.

24:30
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. You mentioned the exchange in your answer there. Can you share with our attendees just whatever your thoughts are on the exchange and how that may help with implementation?

24:46
David Lam: So when it comes to a project and you are a little bit stuck and you put in that functional design spec and it gets approved, but often the customer likes to just change things, or can you do this? Can they do that? When a little bit out of scope sometimes, and we like to go above and beyond. So when we stumble across a problem that we've never come across before, we've never designed, it's not part of our library or of assets, we turn to the exchange, and that's where we found the Pan and Zoom. It's a British guy. He presented at the ICC, and it was just perfect. We went out there, after, the engineers asked, Has anybody come across this problem? And he said, yes. We've developed this actually, and that's the same initiative where we found two years ago when we went to the ICC and IA's head office. I was talking to one of the engineers, they said, oh, we actually use Ignition for our own CRM. So we spoke to them and now we're thinking about doing the same thing in our company to use Ignition as part of our CRM.

25:55
Don Pearson: Those are perfect examples. And I know, yes, back to the beginning years, Travis Scott, who many of you know as... He created CRM with Ignition in the early days and still there today, 20 years later. So it's an interesting evolution to see the, we used to say, you eat your own dog food, but we... I was corrected on that one time, someone said, no, you drink your own champagne; don't you refer to Ignition as dog food. So I say, we drink our own champagne in Inductive Automation. And I love to see the community solving problems and sharing it, and then you can pick it up and use it and assist in the the speed of getting your own projects done. So thanks so much. Let's move on to maintenance. How does Ignition help with the costs or time of maintenance, such as software updates and subscription fees, operational costs, including staff and infrastructure to maintain the software and training and support costs? How does this compare to others? So with that on maintenance, let's, let's start with you David Lam, go ahead and answer that one first.

27:02
David Lam: So from a maintenance perspective, it's frankly superior than... Compared to any other software on the market. I would say one on the website; it's very, very clear. You've got the free options in terms of service and maintenance and upgrades. Secondly, it's extremely quick. It's really no different to an upgrade like you would do on an iOS phone or an Android phone. And then it's the cost. So it goes back to a couple of the questions where we were talking about the... When you think of other softwares out on the market, there's a software for every need. You can use Ignition for everything. And that obviously limits the need to have very expensive upgrade costs and no subscription costs either. In our world of data centers, very rarely do they get access to the internet. They're in a closed environment, completely air-gapped from the internet. So it could, in theory, last forever as long as you're able to maintain the hardware that it's sitting on and the infrastructure that it's supporting on. And it just goes on for very clear, very inexpensive, very valuable support costs.

28:13
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. David McKenna, your thoughts and answers to the questions.

28:18
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, I'll kind of focus on the training advantage that I see from Ignition, and it's really different than other companies because of the way Inductive is structured as a company. Inductive's a software company that makes their own... I didn't know you were into dog food as well. But you make your own software, and you're not acquiring when you need to do a major update or a new platform release, and everyone's doing that in kind of a... All the automation vendors in maybe a five to 10 or 15... Every 15 years, five to 15, let's say, when they release a new platform, most automation vendors, it's because they've acquired somebody. And that means you don't just have to learn the one new thing. Like when Ignition went to Perspective, you have to learn everything new because it's a completely different software, built a completely different way. And, and that's a lot more change for your engineers, for your maintenance, for your team to absorb. So that's one thing we're very pleased with Ignition that once our train is teamed up on it, as things inevitably change and they will, it's components of the application that are evolving, not the whole thing being a completely different piece of software.

29:23
Don Pearson: Great, thanks. Over to you, Dan.

29:27
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so I'll focus, I guess, on the cost component of it. As all the costs with Inductive's products are, it's very, very transparent. If you purchase like a Total Care contract with them, which is an annual fee based on your install base, which is again, transparent, it's right on the website, you'll get upgrades to whatever new stuff comes down the pike. So a lot of times with a software vendor, you'll get minor updates for free, but when a major comes out, you have to buy it again. With Inductive, that is not the case. When a major comes out, it is included in the pricing structure, and if you have the Total Care contract, it's free. And again, the upgrades install in three minutes, and they're very, very simple to manage. So in that case, it's unique.

30:25
Don Pearson: Thanks, Dan. There's a question from Roberto that, maybe, you just answered, but I'm gonna read the question and see if you wanna add anything to it. It says, "Does Ignition provide free version upgrades? Some PLC platforms will require you to repurchase your platform when there is a new version occurs, and there is a new one each year." So Roberto has a question in terms, I think you... A couple of you guys hit on that, but anything you wanna add to upgrades and moving forward as far as maintenance goes, Dan?

30:53
Dan Stauft: No. I mean, if you buy the Total Care or I think you have... I don't know how many levels, I think you got like three levels of service agreements, right? Yeah. I believe that free upgrades are included in all of them and the price for that Total Care package is very, very negligible when you look at the price of what a major install would be on a competitive platform.

31:25
Don Pearson: Yep. Yep. That's basically how it works. And people, you keep your Total Care contract there; you have upgrade protection with all of that. And that's how that's handled, Roberto. If you need more information on that, certainly we can follow up with that and get you more of an answer to that question. Alright, Derrick, maintenance your thoughts on these questions?

31:42
David McKenna: Yeah, I'll also start with training. There's just so many ways to learn Ignition, like the university; there's also an in-classroom training option. Flexware does provide this at our option or at our office. We have the folks from all over the world come over and not only learn but talk to other people in the class, and they're in different industries using it for different applications, and they take all that shared knowledge back to home base, right? Not just about maintenance or updates, but the larger picture of what Ignition can do. So that's pretty cool to see. But in terms of maintenance, I think features like the EAM, Enterprise Administration Module, really pulls a lot of weight here with the ability to do automated backups and push project updates out to multiple gateways at the same time. And that can be automated or at the push of a button. So, just makes it a lot less stressful for when problems do arise. Lastly, I think especially with Perspective, with it being web-based, it's so much easier to swap out a client if there's a hardware failure. I know customers can spend a lot of time swapping out panels, installing software; hopefully they have the most current backup. It's usually... It's just a lot less worry using Ignition when you... All you need is a web browser.

32:51
Don Pearson: Derrick, can you maybe make just a comparison of the comments you made about EAM, the Enterprise Administration Module, and pushing out changes and updates with the push of a button? Is there any comparison experience you've had with any other, other softwares when it comes to updating? A lot of different users?

33:13
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, most of it using things like USBs, and you either have to have remote connectivity or you got to be on site. So yeah, I would just say in my experience, it's just a lot of USBs.

33:27
Don Pearson: Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. All right, let's go ahead and move on to Faster ROI. How does Ignition help companies get a faster return on their investments? Go ahead and you're going... You're on a roll, Derrick; go ahead and answer this one first.

33:44
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, I think sometimes to get a faster ROI you need to actually slow down. Does a million-dollar MES solution make sense for your first deployment? It may and it may not. We see most success by getting quick wins, gaining buy-in from everyone, from operators to leadership and some you can do things like get appropriate training, like we've been talking about. Engage in the community, this fantastic community, find and select the right partner to not just sell you a solution but actually consult you. All these things are gonna contribute to unlocking Ignition's ROI. And we're talking about ROI, so I talked about one project. If I could just take a second to talk about another one that Flexware has done with one of my...

34:23
Don Pearson: Go ahead.

34:24
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, it's one of my customers. Belden wire & Cable. We have a a public case study that we did with them where we implemented Ignition. I got some bullet points just from the case study. It was a black box MES, it didn't have the functionality they needed. They were heavy on manual processes and travel knowledge, and their OE was sitting at 57%. So they partnered with Flexware and we deployed SparkMES; it's our configuration base launchpad built on top of Ignition. So it's not a module or anything; it's just a bunch of assets that we sell as a package. Operators had immediate insight into machine performance once that was deployed. They had a goal of 5% increase in OEE, and after deployed it was actually, it came out to be 18%, so got them up to 75% OEE, and we wanna hear about dollars, right? So that return was about a $500,000 annual performance increase. So yeah, we're talking real money, real ROI with Ignition.

35:22
Don Pearson: That's great, Derrick. Just in passing to the answer you gave to the previous one, I want to just give a shout-out to you guys at Flexware. Dwayne, and Scott and you, and the team there in terms of the training you're offering. I've had a chance to be out there and visit you guys and see what you've got set up there. And so really appreciate all the work you're doing with Ignition knowledge transfer in the middle... In the whole area that you're serving out there. So, thanks for the Indiana team there. All right, David Lam, your thoughts.

35:54
David Lam: So from a faster ROI, obviously we spoke at length around the pricing that is publicly available. So it's very clear and transparent, but where the ROI really comes into play, not only for us but also our customers, it's the consequential knock-on effect of other software platforms. So by that I mean Ignition works on any operating system, so it's just easy. You're not pigeonholed into one particular one, then, for a lot of it is, reporting is a big thing now. So quite a lot of other softwares on the market must use Microsoft SQL. Ignition is open to any SQL database, and we know how expensive that is. So there are greater returns on investments before you... Outside of just buying a SCADA, EMS, or BMS. So we all know that Microsoft SQL's database is extremely expensive.

36:55
David Lam: It's priced now per processor core. It's just so expensive, and when Ignition comes in, you can just use any, and there's a lot of free ones that are really good. And then the last one I touched on previously before is around PQ. We've actually had customers out there using because they have to use other vendors software just to get the PQ data, and then on top of it, they're using Ignition. So now we're able to do that, and they're able to knock out that other layer below, which just adds more complexity, more server resources, more licensing costs, and we're able to knock that out and push it over straight to Ignition.

37:38
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. David McKenna, your thoughts on faster ROI.

37:42
David McKenna: Yeah, I have one from an end user directly using Ignition. And they had an issue with raw materials, incorrect raw materials being used, and were able to build a proof-of-concept software to kind of cut these misformulation events down to zero with Ignition. And because of the previously kind of mentioned operating system flexibility, database flexibility, it was really the licensing cost and their own labor which they could manage to find, to build a proof-of-concept and to get that kind of idea off the ground. So, great, great example of low upfront cost to be creative. And because you... Such lower cost, you can get that faster ROI, you can start your project quicker. You don't have as many approvals; you don't have as much trouble getting funding because you just don't need as much to get started.

38:31
Derrick Chambers: Great. Thanks. Okay, Dan Stauft, so over to you on the ROI question here. Faster ROI.

38:38
Dan Stauft: So our initial scope of the Ignition project was a simple machine data collection project. And about a year into our implementation, we found we had a problem on a specific line making pre-cooked bacon. We were missing our target production, and this was a... We're a co-packer, so this is a bacon product that was made other places, and we were not making it as quickly as the competitors were. So we actually put Sepasoft MES over our machine data collection system for that specific line. And we did it using the free trial, of course. And we found very quickly that our bill of material targets were vastly below what the capabilities of the machines were. Our slicers had been upgraded, our microwaves had been upgraded. So when we first started computing OEE, we were at around 28% on that line.

39:45
Dan Stauft: We implemented Sepasoft MES, we put a continuous improvement team in place to train the employees on how to react to the data. Within six weeks, we were at around 63%, and we are currently right around 75 to 78%. The beauty of that project was we've got 11 other lines that are identical to that line. So we were able to just basically take the template we used on that line, apply it to the other 11 lines, and we rapidly went from working seven days a week, double-shifted, to trying to find work to work five days a week, double-shifted. So it was a huge improvement. We basically, our bacon productivity went up two and a half times.

40:35
Don Pearson: That's actually amazing. Thanks for sharing that. I think sometimes it's hard to imagine when you think about moving an OEE number by a couple percentage points can make a very happy C-suite inside an organization. And you're talking about significant movement. I've also heard a couple of things on a case study you did a few years ago from your C-suite and the founder that, you're pretty happy about those numbers. So that's great. Thanks for your comments on that. So just a couple of things overall, we'll get to a couple of questions here before we end off. I just wanna do a little bit of housekeeping here in terms of Ignition. But first, thanks to all you panelists for taking the time to just share your experiences today and to all of our viewers. Thanks so much for the listeners being here today.

41:23
Don Pearson: Thinking about your software needs in 2025 and beyond, definitely want to invite you to at least consider Ignition. You can actually try Ignition today by downloading a free trial. As even Dan said, you can put a whole project together in the free trial, just three-minute download. You can use the trial for as long as you want in your and with the designer. It was also mentioned in passing, but I wanna emphasize the free university. We have free training website called Inductive University; hundreds of training videos in IU. You can learn Ignition step by step at your own pace. And I know a lot of our integrators use... They just go to the videos they want. They can search; they can find, when they're on projects, they can quickly get a little update or a little bit of information on some aspect of Ignition that they need for that project.

42:14
Don Pearson: Brand new now or recently new. If you're looking for a gift for an Ignition fan in your life, there's a few fans around. Check out the new IA gear store, great selection of official IA clothes, mugs, water bottles, and a whole bunch more. So shop and get your Ignition merchandise delivered to over 190 countries. And speaking of 190 countries, I think we're in about 140 countries now. For those of you outside of North America, there's a network of International Ignition distributors. All provide business development opportunities, sales, and technical support in your language and time zone. So if you wanna learn more about the distributor in your region, please visit their website listed on the screen here. Or you can contact our international distribution manager, Yegor Karnaukhov, and he'd be more than willing to help you out with that. I also mentioned I'd give you contact information inside our organization.

43:08
Don Pearson: If you wanna speak with one of our account representatives at our headquarters in California, you can call 800-266-7798. To reach out our office in Australia, please call the number on the screen. We got just a few minutes left, we're gonna maybe take five minutes here and get to some Q&A and give a chance for any of our speakers to make any final comments there. So with that I did have one question. I don't have an answer to this, but somebody on the group here may or may not. This is from Roberto, and he says, "I work in science research where I'm responsible for multiple telescopes in our observatory. Do you know if there is an observatory that uses Ignition?" So that stumps me. I do not know the answer to that, but I'm making a comment there.

43:58
Don Pearson: So maybe David Dudley, you can take down a couple of notes, and we can see if we can find out if we can give Roberto some more information on that area. Now a question from another David, David Nichols. He's asking, and I'd maybe like to ask each of the four of you to respond to this if you have an answer for it. David's question is, "What is the most common concerns you find from C-suite leaders about adopt adopting Ignition?" So, anybody? I'm not putting you on the spot, but go ahead.

44:32
Dan Stauft: So I this is kind of funny. The biggest reaction and pushback we got when we pulled the trigger on Ignition is they, the leadership of my company could not believe the claims that the platform could do what you say it could do for the price. They thought that there had to be... They're skimping on something. So that was... It was hard to convince our CIO to go the route for Ignition, which is why we had to do all the trials to show him the proof of concepts because they thought it was too good to be true.

45:13
Derrick Chambers: Maybe if I can...

45:14
David Lam: That's reassuring, actually, because I have actually the same experience our customers, and say, "We just don't believe it." I say, "Well, it's there on the website, you can see it all." And that's why we went down similar proof of concept and developed our news Ignition for in house so we can show it any place in time and they can walk through the factory and see it. So it's exactly the same. They don't believe it.

45:37
David McKenna: And just to add, there's only, there's two main objections or challenges or sort of stumbling blocks I've seen. One is brand presence and recognition, which is a far different story today. Ignition is a much better-recognized brand, better in more places in more big companies, in more traditional, more conservative companies than ever before. That was more of an issue. They knew the other vendors; they're comfortable with the other vendors maybe five or 10 years ago. Actually, two more come to mind. One is some of these companies rely on traditional automation vendors to manage all their servers. And so they're a little hesitant to disrupt the relationship because they have all their infrastructure and their data centers maintained by one of these vendors. So they're hesitant to stop using their software, and what are the consequences of that? And we don't...

46:29
David McKenna: So, they're kind of at the prey of the vendor because their business is sort of all maintained by that vendor. That's one that I've seen. The second, the third, I guess, is network connectivity. So Ignition is... I know I'm on an Inductive conference or a podcast, a webinar. You need a good network if you have unreliable networks in your facilities or poor networking or cobbled-together old networking, and maybe it's reliable at the machine level, but when you're connecting everything up to servers, it comes and goes, then yeah, you should probably be sticking with some sort of local panel-based system that's right in your plant or if you just don't have the IT staff to maintain networks or anything like that. So that one's valid. The other two are more kind of commercial or, reputation, but I, we're not really seeing the reputation thing anymore.

47:22
Don Pearson: Cool. I think I got everything's voice now, but Derrick, any any comments you wanted to make on any of that?

47:27
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, I think most of it was pretty much said. I would definitely echo what David McKenna said, especially being in the metals industry. When I came in from an Ignition developer into a sales role, I was pretty much told good luck even saying the word Ignition. And there's a couple of platforms that have there's strongholds in the metals industry and, but I think once you going back to the how do you get the most ROI or quickest ROI, it's get those quick wins so that the C-suite can see where the values coming from.

48:01
Don Pearson: Cool. Thanks. There's a question. I'm gonna have to ask a follow-up on this to get it to you 'cause it's a Sepasoft question from Hampton, but he asked "Did Sepasoft modules receive the required regulations to be used in pharmaceutical industry?" I know that a Ignition can create compliance. We don't say compliance, but you can use it for 21 CFR Part 11 compliance. I do not have the answer to the exact certifications that Sepasoft has for their modules in pharmaceuticals. And I know the applications that Dan's using are not pharmaceutical area. So we'll follow up and get that answer to you. Here's maybe a... I'm gonna take one more question here and then give everyone one minute. If they have anything final they want to say to the audience today, I'll go round the horn. But Kashael is asking, "In the starting phase, showing the financial benefit to the organization is quite tough. Do you have any advice about this?" Anybody got any advice on, I know it was covered a little bit in implementation, but any other thoughts on how do you in the startup phase show the financial benefit? Dan, do you have any thoughts on that? I think you've covered a little bit in some of your answers.

49:15
Dan Stauft: Yeah. For us, the ability to throw a project together for free and basically show people how bad they're actually running. That raised some eyebrows, and it immediately got people asking, "Well, why that can't be right?" et  cetera. And it basically sells itself. For an MES solution, for a company that is having specific struggles, I think you can justify it very, very simply using the trial.

49:49
Don Pearson: Cool. I'm not saying everyone has to have an answer to that. Does anybody else wanna make a comment on that? Okay, that's cool. I'm gonna answer this one question. It's a general question, and I think I have an answer, but someone else can chime in. General question is, when did Ignition become so popular, or how did Ignition get so popular? Well, it's an overnight success. 20 years in the making. I'll say, Roberto, is basically the answers you're hearing to the questions from the folks in our community that are on this call. The four guests we have here are basically the reason I think it's become popular because our founder, Steve Heckman, was an integrator for 25 years. When he started out, he just made a list of, at the time it was about 20 of the main pain points that he found working with other people's software.

50:40
Don Pearson: And so he set out to say, "I'm gonna handle all these pain points." If I make a product that's easy to use, that's available, that's scalable, and that people can feel they're in the driver's seat on it. If I'm transparent with pricing and things, he says, "I think I'm gonna do the things I wanted as an integrator. If I do those things, other integrators and end-user engineering departments are gonna like it too." And I guess I would say from a little bit of a bias viewpoint, he was right because that was 2003 when I first started working with Steve, and we were getting the ball rolling on the company, and it's become popular because people can do the things that our guests today are saying they can do. It all comes down to can you serve a customer, and can you be user-friendly for the integrator and the end user on their project challenges. So with that, I'm gonna ask anybody else to have maybe final thoughts. Just gonna go quickly, and if you can take a minute if you have anything you wanna say finally to the audience before we end off. Derrick, let's go first with you.

51:42
Derrick Chambers: Yeah, absolutely. We have Flexware; we love Ignition. We believe in it. We're at least I, last I looked, we're number one in the top integrator list, so it's a big part of our business, and we love solving real problems with a great product like Ignition. So if you're looking just to talk or figure out what a quick win is for you and your company, give me a call. If you're in the metals industry, we work in all verticals. So yeah.

52:09
Don Pearson: Good. Thanks, Derrick. David Lamb, final thoughts?

52:14
David Lam: Oh, no, it's a good discussion. Really nice to hear everybody's thoughts as well about it from different industries, but for me, we are just in a more connected world, and unlike others out there that restrict you, Ignition's completely open, and all we're trying to do is connect everybody and everything together.

52:36
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. David McKenna.

52:39
David McKenna: Thanks, thanks for having me on. Just one other thought that came up. If you are at the C-suite thinking there's resistance and I would encourage attend ICC attend Ignition's conference. I went for the first time, I'm using the software for a long time. It went for the conference for the first time, and it really shows you that this is a real software company that focuses on their craft and produces an amazing product and is more in line with big professional software companies. And I'll say some of the stuff that we see in the automation world and software at times.

53:14
Don Pearson: Thanks, David. And then finish this off, Dan Stauft.

53:18
Dan Stauft: Yeah, so my recommendation, if you've got a specific pain point or a specific project that you're considering possibly using Ignition for, definitely get ahold of one of these reps on the slide there because they will probably be able to connect you up with somebody that's already done what you're trying to do. And they will let you talk to real people that use the same platform, and you will get real results, not charts and graphs that are theoretical.

53:50
Don Pearson: Thanks so much. I really appreciate all of you and questions and answers for today, and hopefully it was useful to our attendees. As a closing statement, the next Inductive Automation webinar will be January 30th. So hope everyone has a great holiday season as the year comes to a close. Until then, you can stay connected with us on social media and by subscribing to our weekly newsfeed email. So thanks again to everyone for joining us, and once again, happy holidays.