Digital transformation in sales for Engineering

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real world examples of digital transformation that was a great overview of the people processes and programs but you know there's nothing that paints a picture quite as well as a really good case study so now let's let's take a look at three digital transformation case studies and one of those focuses on edge computing and one focuses on the plant floor and one on the enterprise so can't can you talk about the first case study over to you yeah thanks don so uh the first uh example we want to talk about is about a project that dsi did which is one of our premier integrators specifically for dennis flint you know and this flint is a leading maker in pavement marking solutions and so ennis flint had developed a new continuous mixing process for a material that is produced in single batch kettle mixers and for this batch they use up to 20 different raw material feeders to continuously feed the mixer at the correct ratios so any fluctuations in this feed rate or any of the feed rates could result in a bad product and you know this presented a few challenges for them how do they assist their operators with running a process with so many variables how do they monitor those mixers to avoid fluctuations all that kind of stuff and and they realized that they needed to take advantage of some things like digital transformation to try to make this go smoothly and so they were able to leverage ignition as the program for that one of the programs and so what they did is they connected ignition to each of the feeders and started recording trends on all the outputs and they put these trends on hmi screens where many people could easily access the data you know it's like okay that's that's pretty basic right just throwing things up on a trend screen you know i'm putting in front of people turns out uh as they did so they found that feeder five was recording small momentary increases in weight when the feeder should have been losing weight and as a result the pid loop controlling the flow out of the feeder would over feed the materials causing a spike in agitator current and resulting in the bad product at the end of the day and so these small bumps in weight were determined to be the root cause the root cause of this was the motor current faults were resulting in a bad product and so um there was an issue with the shield grounding that was discovered and uh they made some changes within the plc modification uh to make up for this and and it made the system less susceptible to bad weight data and this was all you know easily identifiable because they put all this data into ignition and started visualizing it and uh you know that led them to the resolution of the issue and you know as as part of this you know you say okay well that's easy but it took them some steps to get there because these are all you know remote mixers um out in the field and so how do they get all this data up in front of people well they were able to leverage a hub and spoke architecture they used ignition edge running locally they had they had three of these sites and uh they had a plc at each and they were able to connect ignition sorry they had ignition on board from these on logic ipc's so they had ignition edge running locally and they were able to take that data and publish up to a central ignition gateway in the cloud and uh you know by doing this they're able to create a much more heavily automated system that lets the customer automate the flow of recipe information and material consumption in their erp because then they took that central gateway and they connected it to their erp system which was sap and now they're able to manage their whole process from a single interface rather than having a bunch of disparate systems so what did this project look like well they had about 4 000 tags that were logging about 2 million rows of historical data per day to two cloud databases that were microsoft sql server with always-on availability and they had about 10 to 20 users clients looking at this data daily you know after they've got all that infrastructure in place of how we uh have data collection at the sites we push that data up to a centralized system we integrated with other software as need to then it was about you know we've got these 10 to 20 people who want to look at it what are they looking at they leverage the perspective module because they really wanted this to be mobile responsive and dynamic and they wanted to allow people to pull this up on their phones any type of screen and you know perspective allowed them to do that they were able to build it in a completely dynamic fashion and then based on the equipment located on premise it allows you know rapid addition of new equipment with little or no changes to the perspective application um and the design allowed for cost-effective scalability as well as a cleaner and more consistent product this new infrastructure also allowed dennis flint to add uh new mixing systems into the perspective application and hours instead of days or weeks as it was taking them previously and so the perspective application was built using native theming you know leveraging reusable elements for styling the product if you go actually watch their case study they also talk about uh you know being able to switch between a light mode and dark mode helped people buy into this because you know people are particular about how they like to view things and uh just being able to switch to a dark mode uh made some of their users happy and actually allowed them to use the product you know but throughout all of this you know we get the data up to a centralized system how do people actually access it how do you secure that when it's going to a phone and perspective allows for that too so any authenticated employee was able to securely access this project from anywhere using any device and i won't go too much into their security paradigm here but um you know when you're going into the cloud you can create dmz's you can have reverse proxies behind load balancers you can have all these different things you know to secure that data and of course you know using role-based security and zone based security and all those other standard features of ignition to make sure that you're not letting bad actors you know access this data but once they had put all that in place employees could check the same details at home with their phone or tablet without losing any application functionality and they no longer needed to be in their office or on their laptop to respond and oversee things so it's about getting the right data to the right people at the right time so they can make intelligent decisions and to do that ignition help them collect the data securely publish the data to the cloud and then provide a secure interface for people to access that data wherever they are and then one other comment about this uh project dsi um wanted to make sure that you know the development of this program went really smoothly and you know traditionally uh people have you know had to be on site for development or they have a vpn tunnel in but maybe they're doing development against production systems with production data and if you do something wrong during that development it can you know cause downtime things like that and so dsi actually used docker to create several ignition images that can rapidly deploy and recreate the whole customer's environment so that developers can spin up an exact copy of the customer's environment locally and test changes and fixes thoroughly before introducing them into a staging environment and then migrate those to a production environment and so docker drastically reduced the overhead development time because it gave everyone on the team the same ease of access to the entire project and then you know when moving into staging no one had to worry about the naming convention schemes or connection paths that may be different between the simulated environment and the production one because they made them all exact matches and so this makes the system more reliable and ensures that when the changes are first on to production they're ready for prime time and they talked a lot about you know making this a digital twin that all the simulations all the things in the background were exact matches so this whole project by dsi really shows the importance of edge and digital transformation collecting the data where it's at making sure that you're bringing the right data up to a centralized system and then there you can make these decisions um and so yeah really excited about what dsi and nsplint were able to accomplish with that i'll turn it back to dawn to show how digital transformation can improve things on the planet floor thank you very much that was great really appreciate you going through that detail on that yeah the plant floor sugar creek sugar creek is a packaged foods manufacturer they've got like 50 years of growth and success to their name and their growth has been accelerated in the last several years and ignition supports and keeps up with that company's sort of rapid new growth demands for example sugar creek needs plant floor data to identify and solve problems across its six manufacturing sites and before ignition the information they had was usually a day old which can be really critical it was really hard to get real-time data but the initial allows them to have information in a usable context and format it actually gives them full visibility to everything going on at each manufacturing line and all of this in real time so this data access actually helps sugar creek and its managers to make data-driven decisions and save costs and improve their efficiency as was mentioned earlier really when you get to the people end of it it's people that end up doing these insights and people that end up making the decisions that can really improve efficiency working with programs and processes so it really gives them a lot of useful data that they can share with their customers additionally i would say that ignition has really helped sugar creek with a continuous approved improvement approach and their otit convergence in fact the company's i.t director said ignition gives us shared platform so it's easy to share information when they started out in the very beginning they actually showed ignition to the management team and the ot team really just downloaded ignition trial they modeled a production line in trial no cost and they showed them what the capabilities were before they even had to buy anything so sugar creek has constantly expanded the ignition role across its company it's now used in virtually all aspects of the operations and you know since adopting ignition sugar creek has reached record productivity it's seen 100 improvement in oe just over the seven months and in talking with dan staff from sugar creek he sees the continuous movement of that and continuous improvements in productivity as they continue to go on their digital transformation journey in addition that when you talk about people their culture has also evolved they've seen ideas and engagement and innovation coming from more people in the company than ever before people who really hadn't been involved in problem solving before now get involved in problem solving which really increases the capability of the company because they're taking advantage of all that expertise of the team that they have assembled there and that's what's real in my word if you want real successful digital transformation that's what it looks like it really digs into the people the processes and the programs in combination to accomplish that overall goal and i think you could take really get a good look at this also with our next case study so that's kind of sugar creek and the plant floor but uh kevin why don't you take it over and talk about the next one sure thing this is one that i'm excited about that i've uh worked with these guys for a number of years actually and their story is an interesting one so this is uh rj reynolds which is now part of british american tobacco and they're a great example of enterprise digital transformation so doing it on a really large scale a lot that's happening but they didn't always you know they didn't start large a company basically faced many serious challenges including a shrinking market intense regulatory scrutiny and negative perceptions about their industry this really put pressure on the manufacturing side of the company to deliver superior results they built a vision for digitally connected enterprise with a large infrastructure that connected controls mbs and erp with heavy automation between the layers eventually reynolds became aware of ignition and were impressed with it but they thought there had to be a catch and they weren't really sure exactly how to implement it and what to do with it they then got some new machines to manufacture new product but the machines had constant problems the machine the maintenance and engineering teams were working on them every day but the problems persisted the company's director of technology technical services was told to figure out how to get data from the machine so they could determine where the bottlenecks were he was given one week a pc and twelve thousand dollars to buy an ignition license within a week they collected data built rudimentary screens and helped them see where the bottlenecks were that's when they realized that ignition was not just an hmi or a historian and they could do a lot more with it since then reynolds has done a tremendous number of big ignition projects across the enterprise they've deployed ignition at more than 10 plants with more than one million tags and more than 200 clients ignition helps reynolds achieve its critical success factors such as compliance with technology standards security scalability and dealing with legacy control solutions i can't emphasize enough how important security is inside that list as well it's one of the things that is easy to overlook as an organization but for anyone who's doing things at an enterprise scale having a technology standard that is that has a strong focus on security uh is a really important piece and something that supports modern security standards and can play nicely with the policies that are already in place rather than having to carve out special security rules for unsecured networks specifically around a control system or a scada or an iaot system or an mes system despite the challenges that they faced reynolds has scored big wins such as cost savings reduction in waste and product rework they've established a platform for growth and innovation they have an agile they have the agility to work with new technologies that are coming to the forefront and they've had stellar financial results in fact at one point their stock had gone up about 600 percent in 10 years in short ignition has become a critical enterprise technology for reynolds it's helped them transform themselves into world-class operation even more so than they were already