Building Sustainable Industrial Systems And A Better Future

Speakers

Don Pearson

Chief Strategy Officer

Inductive Automation

Sam Russem

Vice President of Business Development

Kanoa

Chris Monchinski

Chief Technology Officer

InflexionPoint

Esteban De la Torre

Director of Sales Engineering

ASE Global

The demand for industrial solutions that support sustainability initiatives is growing rapidly across the globe. After all, these solutions are crucial in lessening manufacturing’s impact on the environment, so we can protect our planet and build a better future. And achieving greater sustainability is great for business too, offering powerful benefits like more efficient processes (with fewer errors), lower energy costs, and greater profits.

Join control system experts as they share real-world Ignition projects that are helping organizations in various industries make significant progress in their sustainability goals, from reducing paper usage, to effective energy monitoring, lowering carbon footprints, providing cleaner energy, and more.

• See real-world sustainability & smart manufacturing projects in industrial automation
• Discover the top business benefits to improved sustainability
• Learn cutting-edge ways to build control systems that foster sustainability
• Ask your sustainability-related questions and get live answers

Register now — even if you can’t attend, we’ll send you the recording!

Transcript:

00:00
Don Pearson: Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Inductive Automation webinar, "Building Sustainable Industrial Systems And A Better Future." Thanks so much for everyone joining us here this morning. My name is Don Pearson, and I'm Chief Strategy Officer here at Inductive Automation. I'm joined by three guest speakers, and they are Sam Russem, the Vice President of Business Development at Kanoa, Esteban De la Torre, the Director of Sales Engineering at ASE Global, and Chris Monchinski, the Chief Technology Officer at Inflection Point. So I'd like them to do a little better introduction than I just did. So with that, let's start with you, Sam. Could you just start telling us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about your company?

00:47
Sam Russem: Yeah, thanks, Don, and thanks, everybody, for having me. As Don said, my name is Sam Russem. I'm with Kanoa. I really joined Kanoa because I had a 14-year history in systems integration, where we were doing a lot of great smart manufacturing work, but it was just tough to find the right set of tools for our customers, and I was getting frustrated by the price points and lengthy delivery times it was taking to implement good smart manufacturing systems. So I joined some like-minded people at Kanoa, where we now make our MES software on the Ignition platform. So we are a set of Ignition modules that can plug into Ignition to expand it for things like OEE traceability and quality forms. So, happy to join the call today and show you a great use case of one of our customers that's used this for their plan.

01:35
Don Pearson: Sam, thanks so much for being here. All right, let's go to you, Esteban.

01:41
Esteban De la Torre: Thanks, Don. Well, I'm Esteban De la Torre, Director of Sales Engineering at ASE Global. ASE Global has faced the technological challenges of the industry since 2004. More than a traditional system integrator, we are a technology partner of our customers, understanding their strategy, culture, and processes, which is fundamental to deliver customized solutions such as industrial automation, MES, ITOT convergence, IIoT, telemetry, and data governance. Our headquarters are situated in Ecuador, but we have delivered projects in countries such as Chile and Argentina and Sweden, for example. We also have a strong engagement with education of future talent, and the continuous training of professionals. We are part of the inductive automation educational engagement, and we are authorized to provide Ignition training in Spanish.

02:47
Don Pearson: Thank you so much, Esteban, and thank you also for joining us today. All right, let's go to you, Chris.

02:52
Chris Monchinski: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Chris Monchinski. I'm the Chief Technology Officer here at Inflection Point. I've been with the company 31 years as of August. Inflection Point is a solution provider which can provide a complete vertical stack of integrated solutions all the way from automation, sensors, PLCs, DCS systems, up and through the SCADA and HMI layer, including using a powerful tool like Ignition in its various forms at the edge, multi-tiered gateways, enterprise-level solutions all the way up into what we call manufacturing intelligence and MES-type systems. Happy to talk about a topic like sustainability. I think it's a very important and topic that's timely. As Sam mentioned, along with smart manufacturing, I think these two topics go hand in glove. Hopefully, we can convince you all of that as well today.

03:43
Don Pearson: Thanks, Chris. Thanks again to all three of you guys for taking some time out to be with us and join us today. Here's our agenda. I've introduced all the speakers, and I'll next introduce inductive automation and Ignition. Then I'll talk about the importance of sustainability and manufacturing, and we'll look at three presentations from our guests. Sam will tell us how Kanoa is driving efficiency and visibility at a recycling company called rPlanet Earth. Esteban will tell us how ASC Global built edge-to-cloud architecture that acquires real-time data from remote oil and gas facilities. Chris will tell us about Inflection Point's smart manufacturing use cases and the smart manufacturing lifecycle. Then, as we always do, we'll wrap it up with some Q&A. If you have a question along the way, just submit it, type it into that questions area on the GoToWebinar control panel, and we'll answer as many as we can at the end. If we don't get time to get to your question, please do follow up. Reach out to one of our account reps, and they'll be happy to answer it. And yes, someone always asks the recording will be emailed to you tomorrow, and the slides will definitely be available on our website.

05:05
Don Pearson: Just a little bit, if you're not familiar with inductive automation, here's a few facts for you. Our software Ignition is used by 65% of Fortune 100, which means that it's being used actually every single day inside some of the world's biggest companies. We have over 4,000 integrators worldwide. I think they represent somewhere in the neighborhood of 75,000 or 80,000 engineers on those 4,000 companies, they're in our Ignition Integrator program. Customer base is highly diversified across many industries, thousands of Ignition installations in over 140 countries. We've been in the industry for over 22 years, have north of 350 employees in the US and in Australia. A bit about Ignition, as I mentioned, our software is called Ignition. It's a universal industrial application platform, SCADA, MES, IoT, and a whole lot more. It acts as a central hub for everything on the plant floor and beyond. You can build any kind of industrial application with it. It's web-based, web-managed web-deployable to desktops, industrial displays, and mobile devices as an unlimited licensing model across platform, and it offers industrial strength, security, and stability. Here's a couple of ways that companies can accomplish sustainability and work in this particular area. So if you think about sustainability and manufacturing, one of the most critical actions to safeguard, it is a really critical action in terms of safeguarding on our future. And so when you think about that, we're talking about conserving resources, helps of the environment, at least behind, frankly, a better world for generations.

06:54
Don Pearson: But sustainability also comes with it a tremendous number of challenges because changing existing processes can be expensive, it can be disruptive, and so we're gonna be able to hear today of some ways in which one is able to accomplish and get some of the benefits of that without having to deal so much with all of the problems that may be involved there. Ways to make processes more sustainable. Well, here are some of things that companies can accomplish with this. First, they can do more with their data. For example, they can get real-time data access or historical data analysis, or they can aggregate all their production and equipment data in one place. They can find ways to make their processes more efficient, such as eliminating unnecessary steps or making key performance indicators easily visible. They can reduce waste by reducing material variance, reducing downtime, maximizing materials that they have. They can also reduce their use of paper by automating processes and recording data digitally, and they can implement energy monitoring to use energy more efficiently and lower their emissions cost. Some of the key benefits to sustainable processes, you can tell by what I just did on the previous slide. When companies adopt these sustainable practices, they see some key benefits processes become more streamlined, fewer errors, lower energy costs, and they have less negative impact on the environment and their profits go up because they have less wasted material.

08:36
Don Pearson: So to really see how this plays out actually in the real world, pleased to have all our guests with us here. They'll help us explore how three innovative companies are using Ignition's unique features in their quest for sustainability. So with that, it's just a basic introduction, Sam, I'm gonna turn it over to you to get us started.

08:56
Sam Russem: All right, great. Thank you, Don. So yes, again, I'm Sam Russem. I'm here to talk about the work that we at Kanoa did with rPlanet Earth. So, we get to double dip a little bit into this sustainability webinar because we are introducing smart manufacturing technology that improves sustainability overall for a company that literally does sustainable recycling work too. So really great that we get to be here today and, and share this. So rPlanet Earth, very cool company. It was great to have the opportunity to work with them. They're out in Vernon, California, and they do the type of recycling that I think most people think happens all the time, that people think it's what recycling is, but it's not. Most recycling makes intermediate products, right? I take in giant plastic bales like you see at the top, and they might be making bags of plastic flake that they would then resell. rPlanet Earth is different. They are a fully integrated recycling plant. They get big bales of plastic recycling in like you see at the top here, and they output food-grade plastic packaging all within the same facility. So that gives them a lot of advantages in their green footprints, and this is a really just efficient way to be making recycled products. So, especially since they are a sustainability-focused company, the more they can drive efficiency in their own operations, the more sustainable they can be and the more product they can go out there and put into the world that is this good green product, right? But they did have some operational constraints that were holding them back from the full efficiency that they could be producing at specifically a lot of manual systems, paper logs, and Excel spreadsheets. And that really led to no visibility into real-time performance. It could be day definitely shifts, but sometimes days before an operational issue could be caught and tried to get run home and and fixed.

10:58
Sam Russem: So rPlanet Earth reached out to Kanoa. Kanoa, we are a MES platform within Ignition that our four solutions, Kanoa Core, Ops, Trace, and Quality, can help expand Ignition to take on these MES-type functions. For this particular product, we acted as both the solution provider in terms of the software, and this actually comes in from a part of Kanoa's history. We've been working with this customer for a while, where we really helped them with the implementation of this as well, though normally we are selling our software and working with customer teams or other integrators or things like that to help them implement a lot of Kanoa. 

11:37
Sam Russem: So, what we needed to do in our solution, we needed to seamlessly connect to their real-time equipment data. We needed to provide some new user interfaces for any time that manual input was still going to be necessary. We needed to automate a lot of the data processing that was done in those really complex Excel spreadsheets and eliminate redundant entry. It was not uncommon to find times that people might have to read a reading from a screen, write it down on a piece of paper, or type it into an Excel spreadsheet and enter that same number into their ERP. So, we're trying to really take that down to one manual entry at the most, hopefully zero, by collecting it from an automated piece of data. We did this with our solution, Kanoa Ops, for Phase 1. This is where a lot of our customers start with Kanoa. This is our platform for the organization control and analysis of all of your day-to-day manufacturing operations. So, the output is OEE, downtime analysis, and production counts, wrapped up into batch tickets and then sent up to ERP to reconcile inventory and close out orders.

12:44
Sam Russem: Within Kanoa Ops to get that done, we're giving you tools to create all of your assets, define your materials, your shifts, your work orders, and schedule all of that work, and then track production throughout the day. As I mentioned, the Kanoa platform is a part that can extend the Ignition ecosystem that you have today. So, Ignition is providing all of that PLC and ERP connectivity that we need. We like to say at Kanoa that if you can get the data into Ignition, we can do anything that you need with it from there. So, whether you are talking to Siemens PLCs or talking over DH Plus or something to get all of your field equipment data into Ignition, then we're using something like the web development module to talk to your ERP to bring in order information and things like that, and we are using that flattened stack of Ignition to merge our automation data and our business data that leveraging Kanoa MES to make it all make sense together. So, for our pilot program, any good smart manufacturing initiative starts with a pilot. We started on their extrusion area. So, this is the first part of the manufacturing process at rPlanet. 

14:00
Sam Russem: They've already recycled the raw materials, they've turned that into flake. The first thing they're going to do is pump that through their extruders to make rolls of extruded plastic that then they will take through the rest of their manufacturing process to make end products. This area was selected because the lines had some machine connectivity, but not all, so we would get to test both automatic and manual collection, that the team was very engaged in their process and had a couple of specific points where they knew that Kanoa could bring improvements, and since this was the first part of that manufacturing process, any efficiencies gained here would help to improve the efficiency of everything downstream from it in manufacturing. So, the result was a Kanoa Ops system that would monitor automatically each line's state, work order, item, and performance. We would initiate and close all of their production runs and batch tickets. We would automatically log in for different materials that could be fed into the line at a time. We would manually log all of their produced rolls and scrap. We could track and validate all of their downtime. And again, at the end of the day, we would have a team go through, validate all of the data we connected, collected, hit a one-click transfer button, and we would package all that data up and close out the order in ERP.

15:23
Sam Russem: Here's a couple of screenshots for what came out of this. Here's a sample of one of their downtime reports, giving them information on downtime by category and reason, by shift, and by day. For example, we can see they had one big downtime here that affected them, where they usually have other smaller downtime that might accumulate to less. This is a sample of one of our run review screens. This is one of the big outputs that comes from a Kanoa Ops implementation. What you can see from this is all of the different runs that they've done, all the materials they were running at the time, in-feed, out-feed waste, and things like their OEE by component for each of those individual runs. Another thing we wanted to talk about was the smart scale project. So we did that first pilot, and then we did a small extension right after that to try to automate more of the manual process of weighing output from the lines. So they invested in getting a smart scale where they could weigh these rolls. And then we installed a tablet. We had a Zebra printer out there. So now we change the workflow from something where people are manually going to a scale, writing down a number, having to go into Kanoa and type it in.

16:35
Sam Russem: Now they simply weigh it, they click the line that it came from on their tablet, and we record everything and print out the proper labels. So this eliminated all of that manual data entry that they needed. It created a real-time pipeline to their ERP, where every time they would post an output here, we would immediately send it to the ERP, reducing errors and lag time and enabling better visibility. After that pilot's success, we did go ahead and extend Kanoa Ops to the remaining lines of the plant. Overall, they've seen an 18% increase in their inventory accuracy and gone through and standardized these processes across their facility. And we're continuing to work with them on the next evolutions of this project. For example, we are actively working on Kanoa Quality to capture a lot of the quality checks that they're doing today with both automatic and manual data. And were implementing Kanoa Trace with the goal of one day being able to take a specific piece of packaging that came off of that line and trace that all the way back to the specific recyclable bales that contributed to it. So that's a quick overview of our project, and I'm excited to get into the Q&A later in case you all have any questions about it. Thanks for listening.

17:53
Don Pearson: All right, Esteban, over to you.

17:58
Esteban De la Torre: Thanks, Sam. Thanks, Don. Well, I am going to tell you about a project that ASE Global built for one of our end customers called Smart Energy Applications. Smart Energy Applications was created to develop innovative and disruptive energy solutions for decarbonization, energy transition of the oil and gas industry here in Ecuador. Smart Energy makes solutions called Gas-to-Grid in a Box, or G2G-B, which produce energy using the gas associated with the crude oil extraction process. The G2G-B systems use gas without treatment to reduce carbon footprint. It comprises of a generation unit, a control and synchronizing unit, and a load sharing unit. That's what is a Gas to Grid in a Box. But Smart Energy Applications had a problem that they needed our help with. The generators are located in remote facilities that are difficult to reach and have no permanent staff. As a result, their systems did not have continuous monitoring, and an operator had to visit each facility once or twice a day to collect data manually. At the end of each shift, the operator manually recorded that data in an Excel report and submitted that via email. Then the staff at the headquarters would review and analyze the technical data provided by the operator the day before. Based on this, they manually created weekly and monthly Excel reports that include processes, indicators, and financial data.

19:49
Esteban De la Torre: These reports were shared with management and partners who need to justify the investment with energy savings, savings and carbon footprint, to ensure the implementation of more G2B systems. Obtaining KPIs and generating reports requires significant time, resources, and personnel because data could only be collected directly from the equipment displays. To solve this problem, we designed a hybrid architecture using Ignition Edge IIoT and Ignition Cloud Edition in Azure. To install Ignition Edge, the RTU box contains an Opto 22 group rear. We used the Model TCP driver of Ignition to connect Model TCP devices. And for Model RTU devices, we used Moxa and a Moxa adapter to use the RTU TCP driver. And each G2G-B system requires only one Ignition Edge installation for multiple devices. For historical storage, the system utilizes an Azure database for MySQL and Ignition Cloud Edition subscription using Microsoft Azure. Ignition Edge publishes the collected data using MQTT and subscribes using Xilinx distributor and engine models for Ignition, with a certain satellite internet for data transmission. We designed an application interfacing Figma and developed it using the Perspective module in Ignition Cloud Edition. The interface includes a dark theme and parameterized views to add more generators dynamically in the future.

21:40
Esteban De la Torre: The application is mobile responsive and has login and language selection options, along with sections for real-time monitoring, historical queries, events, KPIs, and reporting. The results were excellent. This solution has led to excellent results for managing applications. As I say, they have eliminated manual data collection and replaced it with an automated system. All data is now collected and processed without any human intervention, from the equipment to the end users. Personnel at the headquarters can monitor the equipment in real time and alert operators when there is an event that requires any attention. The Ignition software and Opto22 hardware met the requirements of Xilinx security and provide straightforward capabilities. Ignition Perspective was used to develop a dynamic application that facilitates future integration of new G2B systems. The application is mobile responsive, user-friendly, intuitive, and complies with dark theme features. To further improve decision-making and analysis of future investments, Smart Energy generates online KPIs and automatic reporting for managers and partners. Smart Energy was pleasantly surprised by the value they received from the Ignition Cloud Edition service. The price is much better than the price they had in mind. This makes it easier for them to maintain the solution with OpEx instead of CapEx.

23:19
Esteban De la Torre: Finally, Smart Energy Applications optimize significant time, resources, and personnel, and the solution helps to monitor the reduction of the carbon footprint CO2 emissions in real time, and it brings economic savings right now for them. So that's all what I have to say right now for my project. So I give the chance to Chris to present the project.

23:50
Don Pearson: Thank you, Esteban. Chris, over to you.

23:54
Chris Monchinski: Terrific. Thank you so much. So we've already talked a little bit about, and Sam and Esteban both talked about this concept of smart manufacturing as well. I had an opportunity to present this solution earlier in the year at the Sustainable Manufacturing Expo, which was held out in Anaheim back in February, I guess. And really the gist was that we have these convergences, which are very opportunistic for all of us in this industry, because we have all these tremendous technologies coming to the forefront that we have a cornucopia of technologies we can take advantage of. And at the same time, we have tremendous pressures in order to leverage these technologies in order to drive sustainability. Better use of resources, driving towards greater efficiencies in all aspects of manufacturing operations. These two are not disconnected. They are quite symbiotic, I would maintain. And we can think about our opportunities in work that we do in smart manufacturing as being a footprint for enabling or a foundation for enabling sustainability. Think of some of the use cases. You have advanced connectivity. I think it was Esteban who just mentioned the fact that he had a scenario in his project where people were going around to various sites and remote locations and transcribing data and then emailing that data.

25:12
Chris Monchinski: Well, what if you can use an Ignition architecture combined with a low-latency, low-bandwidth technology that can handle some of these difficult network connections like MQTT in order to collect a greater amount of data, more resolute data from these remote sites. I mean, that's what we've done essentially in the project I'm going to show you in a second. AI is, of course, something that's on the tip of everyone's tongue right now, all sorts of different types of AI. But applying AI and machine learning technologies can really help you understand historically how you've used resources and the interplay between the resources that you use, let's say the materials you use, the quality aspects of your product, the labor that goes into your product, all sorts of different vectors or life cycles that influence the operations in manufacturing and how they come together and converge and how you can optimize those using machine learning algorithms in order to optimize your sustainable footprint. This is the application of AI that I find most interesting in sustainability. And of course, cloud and edge computing, because now we can actually lease our compute power. We can expand our compute power and reduce our compute power and compute power, as we know, because again, part of the AI topic is all about data centers and how voracious some AI tools are in using resources.

26:33
Chris Monchinski: Well, again, coming on the heels of that, we're going to be a lot more agentic, which is the term that a lot of the AI guys want to use. But think also containerization, modularization, some of the things that Sam showed with the Kanoa type solution and Ignition as well, as they go to a more containerized and cloud-based platform, which Esteban also talked about. You're going to see a lot more distributed solutions that are much more efficient in how they are implemented and the energy that they use. Let me talk a little bit about the solution that Inflection Point implemented for one of our customers. I find this solution interesting because, of course, it's right in the wheelhouse of sustainability. The technology and the industry is called renewable natural gas. The idea is that you can generate natural gas from resources or what would be considered normally waste product. In this case, we are implementing mini manufacturing facilities at dairy farms across North America. So you can imagine a dairy farm, lots of cows, obviously, some infrastructure to handle the capture of milk from these cows and keeping the cows healthy, et cetera.

27:45
Chris Monchinski: And then the cows have a byproduct. They have waste, essentially, cow manure. And those slurries of cow manure have to be dealt with. Sometimes you can turn them into some fertilizer. There's certainly some use cases for using cow manure, but a lot of it is just waste product. Well, we have now a way to take that cow manure as an input product, raw material, if you will, into these mini manufacturing sites through a digestion process, a gas upgrading process, and turn that into green natural gas that can be put back into pipelines and then sold to customers and sold to either individuals that subscribe, you know, to receive this or actually into the general pipeline for you and I to use as heating and cooking natural gas. I think it's a smart manufacturing solution because it involves a couple of different things that are unique. We're building these mini manufacturing sites in these remote locations. So just like Esteban pointed out in his challenge, you have remote locations that aren't necessarily sustaining manufacturing facilities. They are not staffed, and yet they require a great deal of control and automation and safety, right? I mean, you're dealing with flammable materials, et cetera, explosion situations.

28:53
Chris Monchinski: So safety is paramount. Security is paramount. Cybersecurity is paramount. You're implementing automation. You're connecting these sites together through leased line internet and or 5G and LTE technologies. You do require 24 by 7 operation teams to watch these sites remotely, to activate these sites and control these sites remotely. Another thing that's kind of interesting is because this is a new manufacturing arena, the companies that are implementing renewable natural gas get opportunities to do things that other companies might not, like choose their ERP for the first time, choose their CMMS for the first time, which allows us to have a conversation about things like Unified Namespace and how a tool like Ignition can help you structure your data so that it marries and integrates seamlessly with that CMMS. So if I want to track my assets, as I do, as any manufacturing facility, those assets are run in operation. The data I collect from Ignition, how long I ran a particular flare, how much I used a particular pump, is directly marriable to the CMMS system, and I can generate condition-based maintenance use cases now. So I'm really driving smart manufacturing through the blending of a data-centric paradigm.

30:03
Chris Monchinski: And then finally, think about the fact that, what is the financial viability for a solution like this? I'm putting many manufacturing facilities at dairy farms. This has got to be awfully expensive. I've got to be able to do this in a repeatable fashion. There are 50 sites that we've stood up through North America. I've got to be able to do this cost-effectively. It's got to be maintainable. And there has to be a way to make this gas essentially a sellable product. We do that through a concept of carb credits, which drive the sustainability use case. So what is a carb credit, essentially? You know, it's a state-run program essentially through California at this point, but different states and different regions, like here in the Northeast where I am, the United States, we have a regional consortium of different states that basically offer governments and or business can offer basically a carbon offset or a credit that comes through various forms of carbon taxes. These can be done through various mechanisms, like I said, ETSs, carbon credit mechanisms, internal carbon prices within organizations. So even within your own organization, you might use this to drive some sustainability use cases.

31:07
Chris Monchinski: In this case, we're taking advantage of government-run programs for this. How do you apply for a carbon credit? Well, you do this by demonstrating that you can turn this raw material, what we considered a waste product, like cow manure, into a sellable, renewable natural gas. But to do that, you have to run a digester. You have to run a gas upgrader. You have to expend energy in order to create something that will be used as energy. And so there has to be a very simple thermodynamics, energy balance equations, right? In order to demonstrate that we are generating something that's more valuable than the energy that we're putting in. And to do that, we need a tremendous amount of accurate data collection. We can't just sign off on something and say that we've created this amount of gas and this amount of gas took this much input manure, and this is terrific. We've done our product. Now give us our tax credit. To file for these types of credits, there's an ongoing labor of continuous accounting. And that accounting drives right down into the heart of the manufacturing operation, good data collection, metering across the entire process, and understanding those various energy balance equations and being able to support them with good data. So that data from remote locations, getting that to a central location, and then being able to process that and generate the proof that we deserve and have earned those carb credits is key to sustaining this manufacturing.

32:39
Chris Monchinski: Now, what does this look like from an Ignition perspective? In the Ignition webinar, we're standing up these mini manufacturing facilities. And so each of these sites has anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 tags. They're a collection of best-of-breed ODM equipment combined with balance of plant integration, and then an Ignition system that sits on top of that at every site that has redundancy, local data collection, provides visualization, alarming, all the things that Ignition does very well, including important data collection using the Ignition Historian for that accurate carb credit reporting. And then we bring that data together, and we use that with partners from Cirrus in order to implement MQTT, bolting into Ignition and using these modules directly in Ignition in order to generate robust data collection from each site, restore and forward capabilities. So if we lose connection through that 5G connection, we're going to keep that data locally. We're going to eventually restore that connection, push that up to what we call our multi-site location, which is an enterprise-level multi-tiered gateway SCADA system built on Ignition that allows us to see across multiple sites, drill in, build dashboards with the dashboarding tool in perspective to give ourselves a bird's-eye view of what's happening at each site, drill down, actually see the details, the alarms, all the information necessary to promote it and control that site. 

33:58
Chris Monchinski: In addition, we have many different stakeholders that use this type of tool at the enterprise level, such as our dispatch crews, which have to understand, okay, when we're making a new batch of natural gas, and that's ready to be hauled off with trucks or put into a pipeline, there is a transfer of custody. There is a distribution network that comes into play, and those people need to understand that data, dispatch trucks to the location, know where those trucks are en route, bring that gas into a drop-off point or an interconnect where it's then brought into the pipeline. And again, that chain of custody involves a lot of data collection, all at the Ignition level, because it is also part of what gas do we actually deliver to our end customer to ensure that we can apply for that carb credit. So I like to say, from a smart manufacturing perspective, when you think about sustainability and you think about smart manufacturing, I think it's a lot about life cycles that cross different life cycles that we know very well in operations and how they interact.

34:54
Chris Monchinski: We have a production life cycle, but we also have our management of our assets, which kind of falls into that maintenance realm. We have our product life cycle, the product that we're making, the quality to which we need to make that product. We have a supply chain life cycle where we need to understand what our raw material inputs are. That even affects, and again, crosses over with the asset life cycle to make sure we have spare parts on hand and those spare parts are available in the right quantities to remote locations in order to keep facilities up and running. We have our trained workforce and that workforce now has a lot of demands on it because it needs to be process experts. It needs to also understand how they can manage a system remotely and understand the system and the process health and the safety of that system and that process while they're remote from the site. So they have to have the right level of information which involves the integration of a lot of this data from Ignition also with camera technologies and other technologies and security technologies at the site that they integrate together through that Ignition portal.

35:50
Chris Monchinski: And of course, we have order to cash, which in this case is cow to cash. Lots of technologies come into play. Like I said, the accuracy of emission monitoring. I'm flaring off a gas because I'm not able to use that gas or I'm not able to upgrade that gas. That's a loss, and I need to deduct that from what I'm ultimately going to present as a carb credit and what I've produced. Real-time skater visibility, accurate historical data, and material energy balances. As I mentioned, MQTT being an important technology here to dealing with the kinds of network connections we have and the visual recognition of AI and accuracy. We track our trucks using visual AI, knowing what trucks pulled up to a particular loading station, what gas was offloaded onto them when they came to an internet and connect and load that gas back into a pipeline or an interconnect site. We also track that truck there as well. And then finally, I'll leave you with just a couple of quick thoughts about smart manufacturing and sustainability. As I said, I'm a big fan of the idea that there's a convergence between these two technology things that are happening in real time. We're all part of it.

36:55
Chris Monchinski: You really can't, sometimes in the world of sustainability, it gets a bad rap. ESG was a big acronym for a while on how organizations were going to report on projects and how they were going to make their organizations more sustainable and responsible to shareholders, essentially. I think at the end of the day, if you want to think about sustainability projects, it's no different than selling a production efficiency project. Sam mentioned OEE before. OEE is ubiquitous within manufacturing, and it drives production capability. If you're thinking about OEE, you can't really use OEE unless you drive ROI. What is this OEE number telling me and how can I improve it and how does it affect the bottom line? It's no different with sustainability projects. So when you think about sustainability, consider what the manufacturing goals are. You want to be more resilient. Do you want to implement digital technologies, and how can they help with sustainability? The labor issue here. Our workforce upskilling, our workforce, labor shortages in manufacturing, et cetera. How can they improve with sustainability and smart manufacturing? And think about the use cases here. Of course, we talked about waste reduction and wages efficiency, looking at our utilization of utilities as resources, essentially driving to best quality, driving to predictive maintenance or condition-based maintenance. These are all use cases that are both smart manufacturing use cases and sustainability use cases. So with that, let me hand the comm back to Don for some closing thoughts.

38:29
Don Pearson: Chris, thanks so much. That was really, really good. And I know I see a couple of questions coming through, which we will definitely get to in a minute. I'll make some closing thoughts, and then I'm going to ask each of you for some closing thoughts. So first off, let me just say that those projects, the insights you're sharing with us, much, much, much appreciated. But to wrap it up, here's a couple of key takeaways. From what's been discussed today, we can see sustainability does, even this particular, this last slide, it improves efficiency, reduces waste, which is great for both an ethical and a business point of view. Real-time data and automation, they drive improvements, they enable continuous organizational sustainable gains in productivity, and a marked decrease in material and energy waste. Smart manufacturing is crucial for those sustainability goals because it makes operations more adaptive, more resilient, and resource efficient. Collaboration leads to successful outcomes. By people working together, stakeholders can overcome complex challenges, accelerate innovation, and drive systemic change towards a more sustainable industrial future. So we saw three examples of that here, but I'd like to ask each of our guest speakers maybe to have any additional comments about these takeaways as you listen to each other or add any takeaways to this particular list. So with that, let me start with you, Esteban. 

40:00
Esteban De la Torre: Yeah, thanks, Don. Yeah, I would say that nowadays companies have strong sustainability strategies, many initiatives that need to be implemented, but the path is not easy. But in our experience, using the right technology could accelerate that implementation. In our case, for example, Ignition has features that make that a perfect match for that daily, daily requirements that our customers have. And using Ignition with that power to make this IoT convergence, adding, for example, machine learning systems or AI systems, is really amazing. And the results are really amazing for our customers. And yeah, I think that Ignition give us now the features that we need to make that implementations regarding the sustainability strategies of our customers.

41:03
Don Pearson: Thanks, Esteban. Sam, how about you for some final thoughts or additional takeaways?

41:09
Sam Russem: Yeah, I would talk a little bit, kind of going off of what Chris was talking about. So again, I got to double dip here a little bit and do a sustainability project for a sustainability company. But a lot of the work that we do with our Kanoa MES and our smart manufacturing systems does have a direct impact on sustainability and the bottom line by trying to eliminate and reduce waste and lost time and things like that. So I do think that every manufacturer can kind of get credits and be able to pat themselves on the back for doing the right thing in sustainability as they are doing their efficiency projects. The manufacturing is a labor-intensive process, resource-intensive process. The more effectively that we can do it, the more sustainably we are doing it.

41:55
Don Pearson: Thanks so much. And to you, Chris, for final thoughts or additional takeaways.

42:00
Chris Monchinski: Yeah, again, just reiterating what a lot of folks have already said here. Obviously, I think, and I think we've all made the case that there is a tremendous value in implementing smart manufacturing technologies and some of the tools and the flexibility that comes with a tool like Ignition in order to drive sustainable projects. And again, sustainability, if you if you want to implement sustainability and you want to operationalize that, come back to the basics. It's return on investment. It's "How do I improve my bottom line?" They are not diametrically opposed. Sustainability affects the bottom line in a positive way. And everything we do from a sustainability perspective should positively affect that bottom line. There's no contest here. We should be able to do this with manufacturing. And I think we've proven this year with some of the use cases you've seen here. One last thing I want to leave you with. I often like to, when I do sustainability projects, I always think about this particular phrase. I used to credit this to the Navajo Nation, but I guess officially there's no it's Native American, but not necessarily accredited to the Navajo Nation. But I always love this phrase. I keep it in the forefront of my head that we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children. And I always think about that when I think about sustainable projects.

43:15
Don Pearson: I like that. I'm sorry, I'm taking a minute to write it down. I'm going to steal that, too, whether it's from you or from the Navajo or from...

43:24
Chris Monchinski: It's not from me, smarter people than my myself, for sure.

43:29
Don Pearson: Some Native American tribes and probably many that actually had some pretty good insights into where we're going into the future. So thanks. I want to make a couple of comments, and then we're going to go into our into our Q&A because we have some questions in the queue here. So we'll stay on our task here. But a couple of things I want to say first for new people. If you've never tried Ignition and just invite you to download it, basically takes about three minutes to download. If you start downloading right now, before I finish a couple of comments here, you'll be done and ready to look at it after the webinar is over. Then you can use it in trial mode for as long as you want. Designer never times out. Plus, the latest version, Ignition 8.3, is in beta, and the final release will be available on September 16th. Additionally, on the subject of understanding Ignition and its utilization, you should check out Inductive University. It's our free online training website. Hundreds of educational videos. You can learn Ignition step by step at your own pace. There's also a comprehensive online user manual. You can refer to it any time.

44:41
Don Pearson: So it really doesn't matter what your experience level is. You can always learn more, and there is no cost whatsoever in transferring knowledge to yourself. I mentioned September 16th, and that's because I want to tell you about our Ignition Community Conference in Sacramento, September 16th to the 18th. That's just two and a half weeks from now. If you liked what you saw on the webinar today, you get much more of that at ICC. There's really tons of networking activities. There's a big exhibit hall. We have live technology showcases, build-a-thon competition, and a whole bunch more. So you can buy in-person tickets and live stream passes now at icc.inductiveautomation.com. So come and, as we say, level up with us. Over a thousand other industrial professionals at ICC 2025. If you're out of the country, basically outside North America, we have a network of international Ignition distributors, provide business development opportunities, sales, technical support in your language and your time zone. So if you want to learn about the distributor in your region, just visit the websites listed above or contact our international distribution manager, Igor Karnikov. So with that, also, you certainly have an opportunity to speak with any one of our account representatives at our headquarters.

46:10
Don Pearson: You can see they all look very friendly. Just kidding. Anyway, reach out to Australia if you want to. The number on the screen is there for us locally in the US. The number at the bottom of the screen is actually for Australia. And so with that, let's go into a little bit of Q&A. I have one. I think this may be to you. Well, to anybody here. We have a question here that says, "What do you think about the circular economy when we talk about sustainability and manufacturing? Do we also think about the circular economy?" Comments from anybody on that?

46:51
Chris Monchinski: I mean, I think that I was going to say, I kind of paused for a second because I think, Sam, of course, your use case very much talks about the circular economy. The ability to consume PET plastics and actually turn them into food-grade plastics, which several different manufacturers have tried. That really speaks to improving our use of plastics and making sure they don't end up in landfills, et cetera. I think the use case and the projects that we've worked on here in renewable natural gas are another example of that. Maybe the circle is a little wider there. But absolutely, if you think about it, it's a little bit more formalized with WE and other statutory requirements in the EU in the electronics arena, where if you look at electronics manufacturers or machine manufacturers, they're being tasked with now auditing what the product they make and coming up with a roadmap for the lifecycle of that product, including how it will be disposed of. But this is even true in North America, where there are some regulations, for example, if you're making a product, an electronic product, for example, that uses lithium-ion batteries.

48:00
Chris Monchinski: And this is true with EVs. You have to have a way to dispose of those lithium ion batteries and move them into recycling. There have to be places that will recycle them. So there's lots of examples of that. I think it's a little bit disjoint right now still. Manufacturers, through both regulatory prodding, which may not be the best way to do it, but also hopefully the good stewardship of how they want to implement their products, can take a greater role in understanding the products they make, whatever that product is, even if it's an intermediate, how it comes into the supply-chain and how it will ultimately be consumed, and how it will ultimately be disposed of and possibly reused. And I think that's a great place to think about sustainability and expand possibly a set of services and offerings that a particular manufacturer might offer for their product. There may be new ways to sell services around that product after that product is sold in order to help dispose of it in an inequitable way.

48:56
Sam Russem: No, that's great. Thanks a lot for that, Chris, because I was struggling to find the mute button on myself. But no, that was a great answer. And then, yeah, I do, for the rPlanet perspective, just one thing I thought I would mention. I don't want to spend too much time on the question, but I did see this really cool post that rPlanet did on their LinkedIn recently, where a customer spotted one of their plastic bottles in one of the manufacturing bales that Our Planet had. So they were proud of their recycled plastic bottles and then saw one of their bottles being recycled again. So really kind of just showing how we can be reusing this stuff more than once. And yeah, I personally learned a lot in this project kind of about recycling. I was kind of naive as I started. I pictured blue bins full of recyclables going into a factory and then, like, nice clean water bottles coming out. I learned that rPlanet Earth is really, I believe, the only company in the US that does that. I think that they still are the only fully vertically integrated recycler in the US. So there's definitely opportunities to be doing this. And I appreciate being able to support their business model because the more we could do all of this in a single facility, the more sustainable it will be. So yeah, I want to see them win.

50:13
Don Pearson: Thanks, Sam. Another question here, just something that any of you may comment on. What practical approaches can small to mid-sized manufacturing operations take to start measuring our carbon footprint accurately? So any comments from any of the three of you on that particular question?

50:34
Esteban De la Torre: Yeah, I can go on that. For example, Smart Energy Applications, the customer of the project that I showed today, is a mid-sized company. And yeah, they maybe all the budget for servers and licenses, for example. And they found in this model of IoT and, I don't know, a cloud subscription using Ignition Edge and Ignition Cloud Edition, they found like an affordable solution, a for the old solution to implement and start measuring what they are doing. And yeah, I think there are options for small or mid-sized companies like this. And yeah, not every company had the budget to implement data centers or servers, a lot of licenses. And maybe implementing sustainable sustainability projects are maybe not that expensive that maybe everybody could think. So we can make it like affordable, and yeah, using these kind of technologies.

51:55
Don Pearson: Cool, thank you so much, Esteban. Sam, any comments you want to add to that? And then I've got a final question for Chris.

52:02
Sam Russem: Yeah, sure. So, I feel like I answer this question a slightly different way a lot of the time with people that are just wanting to start to measure their OEE or something like that. So I do think that one of the reasons that we love building in Ignition is that it is such an open platform to communicate with so much other stuff out there. So from an OEE perspective, I'm excited because I know that Ignition can connect to all these different machines and line controllers and things like that that are out there. It should also be able to connect to any of the other meters or devices that you have measuring for your sustainability goals as well. So I do think that Ignition's a great tool. I do think that you kind of start by not by starting simple and expanding as your needs get more complicated. Get a couple of meters that you think are going to work. Make sure they connect to Ignition. Put a couple of trends together. It's better than what you had yesterday.

52:56
Don Pearson: Thanks so much. Now, we only got a couple of minutes, but I'm going to throw this final question, I think, to you based on some of those comments you made, Chris, in one of your final slides. The question comes from Thomas, and he says, "Can you speak more to benefit/sustainability of utilizing a UNS or implementing MQTT over standard Ignition connection methods such as OPC, OPC UA?" Over to you, Chris.

53:19
Chris Monchinski: Okay, but yeah, I would say, think about, and we talked about, it kind of leads in from the previous question as well. So it's not just small companies that would struggle with how do you implement some of these technologies and where does your capital spend go? Larger companies that are trying to implement more ambitious projects like renewable natural gas, the project we were just talking about here, where you have many farms, many manufacturing sites, you have all the requirements you have with any manufacturing sites, safety, quality, operational uptime, et cetera. How do I do this in the most cost-effective manner? No one is immune from looking at cost. And so you look at a tool like Ignition that can be built out into a small form factor edge on a varying amount of hardware. We don't use this typically, but you can put Ignition on a Raspberry Pi. I mean, you can do it very inexpensively, I should say. And as a result, you can come up with a solution that can be very distributed and very cost effective. How do you then stitch that all together reliably? You want to use communication technologies that are robust.

54:24
Chris Monchinski: MQTT, as an example, and I mentioned it, is the technology that we used in this particular project. Light bandwidth, lots of volume of data, secure, it can be secured. And it also, the modules will work, like I said, in a store-and-forward scenario where if you lose a connection, you don't lose that data, it buffers, it will then eventually make it to the parent system or the broker that you're transmitting it to in the right time order. It will be able to be pulled back apart, contextualize again. Now the one other part of the question was UNS. Again, we want to build out systems today in a smart manufacturing realm. We want to apply tools like AI. We talked about that briefly. We talked about dashboarding. We saw a lot of screens with dashboards, et cetera. We want to do that effectively and maintain those. Again, no one wants to spend a tremendous amount of time building these things and having to go back and revise them and revise them again and again and again. It starts by contextualizing your data as close to the source as possible. So when we think about UNS, we're thinking about, it's not just a data point like a temperature.

55:31
Chris Monchinski: It's what machine would that temperature come from? What process was running at the time? Can I look at the maintenance and the calibration of that temperature sensor over time from the maintenance system? Bringing all that data together typically is a very difficult task, very brittle, requires a lot of ongoing operational maintenance. What if the data was contextualized from the get-go? And what if the data just blended together through a harmonious data fabric, the concepts that we're talking about today? That's the promise of UNS. And again, what's that going to do? It's going to save us time. It's going to save us money. It's going to save us energy. Again, it's sustainability at the end of the day.

56:07
Don Pearson: Sure. Chris, that's a great answer. I really appreciate, well, you and Esteban and Sam for taking time to be with us today. I just want to wrap up with the end of our time here. I just want to say, as always, we'll be back in late September with another webinar. But then please just connect up with us on social media, subscribe to our weekly news feed email. You can also stay up-to-date through our blog, case studies, and a whole lot more. Tons of helpful content for you to explore on our website. So please go and check it out. And of course, join us for ICC next month. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. Have a great day.

56:45
Sam Russem: Thank you, everyone. See you at ICC.

56:47
Esteban De la Torre: Thank you. See you at ICC, bye-bye.