Inductive Automation
Canvas Category Software : Operational Technology : Manufacturing Execution System
Inductive Automation creates industrial software that empowers organizations to swiftly turn great ideas into reality by removing all technological and economic obstacles. By cross-pollinating IT with SCADA technologies, Inductive Automation created Ignition software, the first and only universal industrial application platform. With Ignition, industrial organizations are able to create virtually any kind of industrial application – SCADA, IIoT, MES, and beyond – all on one platform. 61% of Fortune 100 companies depend on Ignition, with its outstanding software platform and top-notch support. Visit our website to try it for free.
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Bridging The Data Divide: How Egglife Foods Unified The Plant Floor With SafetyChain And Ignition
Egglife Foods, Inc. is a great example of bridging the gap between quality and machine-level data. By partnering with SafetyChain and Inductive Automation, they’ve unified plant floor data and eliminated latency between data capture, actionable insights, and results. Egglife can connect the dots between thousands of data points across the floor, so quality checks are understood alongside machine performance.
With the introduction of advanced data processing technologies, there is a lot of interest in the “last mile” analytics — the gap in analytic output and actual changes in behavior on the plant floor. A more painful challenge for most manufacturers is the first mile and the “middle miles.” These miles involve getting the data out of the plant floor’s many closed systems and machines, and connecting it with other manufacturing subsystems (human input, machine performance, quality/compliance, etc.) to generate the appropriate context for better decision-making. Anything that doesn’t allow data in or out is a closed system to avoid; this should be table stakes.
An early constraint in the journey to a connected plant floor is leveraging as many of your existing systems as possible. When it comes to solving the “first mile” problem, Inductive Automation’s web-based supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, Ignition, is unbeatable. Ignition supports multiple frameworks and industry protocols, connects with your existing shop-floor stack, and elevates machine data for utilization in downstream systems and processes. There is no need to look further than Ignition to open up traditionally closed systems (and without breaking the bank).
For Egglife Foods, quality assurance bore the brunt of first- and middle-mile inefficiencies, with processes still heavily dependent on a mix of paper and spreadsheets. Leveraging SafetyChain and Ignition as its food and beverage manufacturing software, they turned what was once a complex and inefficient process into an automated, agile operation capable of delivering consistent, high-quality results in real-time. VP of Operations and Supply Chain Manesh Paudel emphasizes the importance of consistency: “We’re in a business where you’re rewarded for… doing the same thing day in, day out. That is exactly why SafetyChain and Ignition are so important.”
Energy Monitoring for Manufacturers Gets Easier
In a session on the benefits of energy monitoring at Inductive Automation’s Ignition Community Conference 2024, Becca Gillespie, managing director of Energy Systems Network’s Energy Insights, noted how the savings from energy monitoring can provide critical justification for needed automation investments. For example, one manufacturer Gillespie worked with was able to save 20% on their energy bill by learning how much the installation of VFDs (variable frequency drives) would save them. She explained that this manufacturer installed VFDs on all the fans in their facility to optimize the speed at which they ran instead of always running at full speed.
Improve your industrial operations with cloud-based SCADA systems
There are several advantages of cloud-based SCADA systems, such as reducing the need for installing and maintaining expensive server hardware and software on premises and making your industrial data available wherever and whenever you need it. Cloud-based SCADA systems are increasingly important in IIoT and Industry 4.0 because they provide the automation, data collection, analysis, analytics, machine learning, and connectivity necessary to improve processes and operations. With cloud-based SCADA systems, customers have easier access to the data and can use cloud services to manage and analyze the data at scale.
Ignition is an integrated Software Platform for SCADA systems by Inductive Automation. The Inductive Automation partner solution deploys Ignition, a solution by AWS Partner Inductive Automation, to the AWS Cloud. The partner solution enhances availability, performance, observability, and resilience of SCADA applications. It provides both standalone and cluster deployment options of Ignition on Amazon EC2 Linux instances. Both options are designed to be secure and highly available, configured with best practices for security, network gateway connections, and database connectivity.
Get a Competitive Edge With RFID Applications in Ignition
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology can provide a significant competitive edge in the manufacturing industry by providing a more efficient method of tracking and confirming products, equipment, and assets. The technology utilizes radio waves to identify and track objects which have a small RFID tag attached to them, sometimes with a printed label that otherwise works and looks identical to the existing labels placed on items. Manufacturing companies have realized the benefits of RFID in improving their production processes, reducing costs, and increasing productivity. From inventory management to quality control and supply-chain management, RFID has a wide range of applications in manufacturing.
However, manufacturing presents challenges to using RFID and unlocking its benefits that aren’t present in retail and supply chain (two other major applications of RFID). In supply chain and retail, the RFID software/middleware is typically the primary system of record and runs independently or is layered on top of the existing inventory management systems. They tend to be centrally managed or cloud-hosted (i.e. readers from the antennas go to a central process point). This disqualifies RFID from use in most manufacturing operations, as they have a significant investment and dependence on their MES system, which directly controls edge sensors and scanners and includes requirements for rapid response and availability/uptime.
Sandalwood set a goal of having direct edge responsiveness and control with central IoT device management capability, based on our decades of Digital Transformation experience. In order to achieve these goals, we worked closely with our partners Inductive Automation, Cirrus Link, SLS RFID, and Zebra Technologies to develop a truly in-line RFID architecture suitable for the most demanding manufacturing RFID environments.
All About Ignition Cloud Edition by Inductive Automation
Inductive Automation has taken Ignition to new heights with their recently launched Ignition Cloud Edition. This cutting-edge platform seamlessly combines the power of the cloud with the robust features of Ignition. In this post, we’ll explore what makes Ignition Cloud Edition unique and how it differs from the standard Ignition platform. Plus, we’ll talk about the scenarios where Cloud Edition really soars.
Ignition Cloud Edition gives you the power to extend your automation architecture to the cloud - HMIs, SCADA, MES, and more. While standard Ignition can still be used in the cloud, Cloud Edition facilitates an easier, quicker, and more flexible way to create a hybrid architecture.
A hybrid automation architecture incorporates both on-premise and cloud-based systems. Your local gateways (Ignition Edge) and central gateways (standard Ignition) send information to a Cloud Edition gateway for comprehensive enterprise-wide data aggregation and monitoring. This hybrid approach allows for an optimal combination of local processing and cloud computing power.