Speed Up Projects & Sales With Ignition Launchpad

Speakers

Chris McLaughlin

VP of Sales

Inductive Automation

Paul Scott

Senior Technical Marketing Engineer II

Inductive Automation

Does it seem like one of the hardest parts of developing a new software project is just getting started? What if you could blast through the time-consuming aspects of the development process and get a ready-to-use solution in front of customers much more quickly?

You can with Ignition Launchpad. Join Chris McLaughlin, VP of Sales at Inductive Automation, as he takes you inside Ignition Launchpad — a comprehensive new resource providing everything you need to rapidly build and sell Ignition projects. If you’re ready to send your sales into the stratosphere, you should definitely attend this webinar!

• Learn how to create a working Ignition project in minutes
• See demos of Launchpad KPI Dashboard and OEE projects
• Get best practices for growing your integration business with Ignition
• Discover how Inductive Automation helps integrators succeed

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

Transcript: 

00:00
Paul Scott: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, "Speed Up Projects and Sales with Ignition Launchpad." Thanks for joining us today. My name is Paul Scott. I'm a senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Inductive Automation, and I'm moderating the webinar today. Our main speaker is Chris McLaughlin, who is the Vice President of Sales at Inductive Automation. Chris, would you like to tell everyone a little bit about your background and your current role?

00:19
Chris McLaughlin: Absolutely. So my background was as an integrator for the last 20 years. I was a part of Trimac, an integrator in Southern California, for a decade, and then Vertech, an integrator that was nationwide, for another decade. And I held almost every single role that you could within an integrator, from technical to sales to marketing to project management and everything in between. And then within the last year, I had the opportunity and the honor of getting to join Inductive Automation directly. I've been using the software for 15 plus years and love it to death. And so this was just an opportunity of a lifetime to be able to come in as the VP of Sales and be with you guys here today.

01:03
Paul Scott: Awesome. Well, it's great to have you, Chris. So thanks for joining us, not just for the webinar but the company as well. All right, audience. So, hey, here's our agenda for the webinar today. We just introduced ourselves, and normally I'd give a quick little introduction to Inductive Automation and Ignition, but Chris is going to cover that in his presentation today. So in a minute I'll turn it over to him, and he'll show us an overview and a demo of the Ignition Launchpad program. And then after that, Chris is going to share some best practices for growing your integration business with Ignition. Once that's wrapped up, I'll come on back, I'll tell you about a few other resources, and then we'll wrap up the webinar by answering some of your questions. So if you'd like to submit a question today, please click on the Q&A button at the bottom of the Zoom window and type it in. We'll answer as many questions as we can at the end of the webinar. If we can't get to your question for some reason, just go ahead and reach out to one of our account executives. More information on how to reach out to them later, and they'll be happy to answer it. And then tomorrow we'll email the recording to you, and it'll be available on our website along with the slides. All right, well, hey, Chris, go ahead and take it away.

02:09
Chris McLaughlin: Let's go. So today we're going to be talking about Ignition Launchpad, which is near and dear to my heart. We spent quite a bit of time developing this, and now we just want to share it with the world. So we will go through this today. We are going to get to the point of doing a live demo, which is never recommended by people, but I'm crazy enough of let's do it on a webinar. Live demos are the way to go, but first let's explain what Ignition Launchpad even is. These are pre-built, fully functional, ready-to-go-on-a-production-floor types of projects. And there are two of them that we're going to be explaining today. Launchpad also comes with full instructions, manuals, and step-by-step tutorials, and they are video tutorials, making it very easy. There's also written documentation and tips; there are sales tools. It comes with literally everything that you need to make it a reality, and it even goes to the level of depth of having full PowerPoint presentations that you could download that are about the two Ignition Launchpad projects that are sales-ready; you could show them to a client, and all of this is free, completely free.

03:24
Chris McLaughlin: So these are the two that we will be going through. There is the KPI dashboard and an OEE performance-style screen. And behind all of this, hopefully everybody knows what Ignition is, but in case you don't, let's do a quick overview of this industrial automation platform. One of the biggest features about Ignition is its unlimited licensing model. We'll get into this a little bit more in some of the future slides, but it is the main differentiator of why I got into the platform originally and one of the main differentiators still to this day. Server-centric web development and deployment, meaning that yes, it could be deployed from any browser anywhere. Modular configurability so that you can just purchase whatever you need for that project. Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. And it's the Swiss Army knife connector that you can connect to any major PLC or database. It is the same designer whether it is Edge, Standard, or Cloud. No matter what application you're doing, you are working out of the same design space, and it's built on open standards as well as best-in-class IT and OT standards. So all of that leads to rapid development as well as rapid deployment. And that is what Launchpad is built on. It's just an Ignition project and application.

04:49
Chris McLaughlin: When we talk about "unlimited," and you're going to see me come back to this over and over again as a part of this presentation today, it really matters. It is the difference of it giving you unlimited tags, unlimited history, unlimited screens, unlimited users, unlimited connections, and also unlimited reports and unlimited mobile clients—all of it. It's just unlimited. And this changes the way that you use an application. It changes the way that your customer experiences the application, and it changes what you'll be able to add onto it in the future. And 16 years ago, this was revolutionary. It was the first in the industry for a company that was willing to do this and go all-in on one price, unlimited. And I thought in the last 16 years, some of the other major people would have caught up and started doing it, but they didn't, and I have no clue why. So shh. Still a major benefit, and we will take it as long as it can stay that way. The next thing to know about Ignition is that it's for multiple different application types.

05:47
Chris McLaughlin: It's probably most famous for SCADA and HMI, but man, back since 2013, it's MES; it's enterprise. It's been getting into digital transformation over the last five to seven years. DataOps, IIoT, and tons of other applications, all built in the same exact software. And there are so many industries that it plays in. This is just a tiny, tiny fraction. Almost any industry that you can think of, Ignition is going to play there. Of course, there's the ubiquitous screen that shows off some major client names. For these are just a fraction of a fraction. There are thousands and thousands of names that you would recognize. There are over 88,000 installations, but you have to show off that screen at least a little bit. The next thing is that we should go through with the Ignition Launchpad projects. This is the KPI, one in specific, of what's in it. What does it actually do?

06:50
Chris McLaughlin: So the first thing to understand, and this will give you some context for what we go through in the demo, is that there are ad hoc dashboards that the user can completely configure, edit, and change all from the client session that is running. So the user can do that directly on screen. You don't even have to get into the Designer. There are multiple different types of KPI widgets that you are able to use, trending and alarming tools for the application. It's just an Ignition project, so you can customize anything about the Launchpad application as well as add to it anything your heart desires in that Ignition project. It has both real-time and historical data. Of course, it's mobile-responsive, meaning that it can run on any tablet, phone, TV, laptop, random HMI screen, or anything that you want to do. It's HTML5 mobile-responsive, so it's going to auto-size to the device, and you can make that data accessible to everyone. And it's built for multiple different use cases, which I'll try to explain when we're going through the demo. So those are the features. This is the look and feel. Again, I want to give you a little bit of context before we get into the demo, just so that it's familiar and it'll be easy to run through it. So there are overview screens for the starting dashboard. This one looks identical because it almost is, but this is the ad-hoc one that can be edited by anyone that has permissions to the application.

08:21
Chris McLaughlin: There are a bunch of these widgets that you are able to add onto the dashboards and screens. There are trending tools where you are able to see your tags live on that trend screen, as well as alarming notifications that you can set up within the system. Next, the other Launchpad project that we will show off is the OEE one, and this bottom row looks exactly the same because these are Ignition features. So all that's there. But from an application standpoint, its difference is that it is an OEE application that is made for monitoring performance, and it is plug-and-play. And we'll show you that there are only two tags necessary to get the entire application working. It's a combination of overview dashboards as well as line-view details. Gives you configurability within the settings to set up shifts and rates by a line level, not just plant level, and it goes into advanced production and performance analytics. And this one looks like an overview screen where you are viewing your lines or machines with line-level detail, a production summary that's showing off all of your tabular data of your production, and a settings screen to be able to set up everything you need for the application. And that's it.

09:39
Chris McLaughlin: So we're going to get into the demo now, but I strongly want to encourage you that this is all available for you literally right now, today. And so I'm going to show you the website where you can get that, but I encourage you to just try it out. Download it; check it out for yourself; make it real. And this is something that you could be using for your clients immediately. So you will see this link within the documentation that's coming back from the webinar, but on the website, you can see an overview video of what Launchpad is, which is what we just went through. You can download Ignition. You can download the KPI project or you can download the OEE project. And again, all of this is free. You can have the trial of Ignition for free. You can have either of these OEE or KPI projects for free. And these are not trials of the Launchpad applications. They are just something that you permanently have to be able to use for your own good. There are videos explaining what each of them do, which is again what we've pretty much gone through.

10:47
Chris McLaughlin: There's a full manual where you have both of the resources, videos of step-by-step instructions, and a written guide. We tried to make this as simple as possible. So literally, if you've never dealt with Ignition before, you will be able to do this today. It is that easy, that simple, and all the documentation and videos and how-tos are there. We even put it into multiple languages, so there is Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English for anybody that needs that. And lastly, there are decks that you can download for each of these if you are selling it to a client. But without further delay, let's actually demo the real system, the real deal.

11:30
Chris McLaughlin: So this is that KPI project, and this is your main screen. We tried to lay out something for you so that you didn't have to think about the UX/UI styling of this main screen. You don't have to understand anything about how the Ignition Designer works in order for this dashboard to look how it is. And on top of that, we also gave it a built-in simulator. So you're getting 30 days plus of simulated data that is coming with it immediately, and then it continues to build up as you have this live, and you are able to look backwards because there is that history. All of the screens work. You could go into longer historical timeframes. And all of the KPI screens, the charts, everything has data that is populated within it, which makes it really easy to show off to a client. We have a lot of people that are using these in their sales demos or on trade show event conference floors as demos in their booths where they're just running them in the background and are able to show off what Ignition is. But let me give you a little bit more depth of how one might use this screen.

12:40
Chris McLaughlin: So we'll imagine a few different industries and just talk about how you could use it right away. So the easiest one to imagine, since it's already using the wording, is what if this were on a food and bev plant and we were looking at the daily production of iced tea? So sure, I'm showing I want to do 1,900 cases, and this is where I'm at on my daily production. I'm able to see my hour-by-hour chart. I'm able to see a trend. These could be the lines. So right now there are seven. You could have 77 lines or five or 50 lines. It's whatever you want it to be. And as I flip through each of these, it changes to those sections of KPIs. So you can show off the metrics about any specific line and then balance-of-plant type stuff and some other statistics on power. Okay, so that's a manufacturing facility. What if this was solar? Well, these charts are just the same. Think of this in terms of power production, and you're seeing the megawatts that you've produced. And these are the hourly expected versus actuals with a trend. And then what if these were met stations that I was setting up and I was seeing all of my met data down here, and this was my balance-of-plant information and my active power?

14:00
Chris McLaughlin: The same thing could be true of pretending that this is a wastewater facility and this is effluent flow, and I'm seeing my hourly effluent. And these are just areas. Doesn't have to be named Line 1. All of this is configurable by you. You could name this digester, you could name this other anaerobic process, and you could have level and flow and pressure characteristics down below as well as some tank data down here. So sky's the limit. Set it up however you like, use it in multiple industries, and then allow your customer to be able to edit anything and add whatever they want. So like I said, this one is ad hoc. I'm going to do it right in front of you right now so that you can see that, yes, we can create a dashboard. We're going to go with a simple gauge and add a tag onto it from the simulator right here, right now. And we're gonna use air pressure and save that. And boom, we now have a live dashboard showing off the air pressure. What was that? 15 or 20 seconds of what it took to create a dashboard. And just think of this in terms of if you have a customer with an older SCADA system where they're not willing to do a rip and replace of the entire thing to get Ignition in there.

15:23
Chris McLaughlin: This is an opportunity to overlay some really neat dashboards on top of their existing PLCs. All you had to do was connect this air pressure tag to the database, and boom, I'm able to create a dashboard for them. They are able to also edit those dashboards just as easily as what we did. So if they wanted to change the tag on any one of them, they could do that. If they want to change the name, they can do that. Anything is available for them to be able to edit and then present live and present on mobile. The next thing that's true is you have access to any of the data that you have brought into it. I can just as easily bring those tags onto the screen and be able to show that off. So this is my same air pressure tag. I can X-trace it; I can see it in a chart with my min, max, and average, and this is very easy for them to be able to see the trends of any of their tags. And lastly, there's an alarming component to this where you can set thresholds of either high alarms, low alarms, or anything else that you want to measure, as well as the criticality of it and its state, so that you are able to see what is tripping within the system, be able to acknowledge it, and be able to clear those alarms as a part of the system. So this is yours. You own this. You can set this up today and use it as a part of a client project. And like you see, just because there's four screens right now, you could add 10 more to this if you wanted to, or you could modify how any of these work or any of the styling because, at the end of the day, Ignition is completely flexible in that way.

17:11
Chris McLaughlin: All right, next, this is the OEE project. Similar look and feel, different functionality. So this is made to be a performance tracking application. It is OEE, and so it's based on availability, performance, and quality. And sometimes you would refer to this as an MES project, but it doesn't have to be that daunting. This is just a simple way to attach something to a machine or a line and see how it's working, how it's running, and if everything is available to you. It automatically tracks hour, shift, and day performance. So you can just come back and see how it's been running on the day or how it's running on the hour. You can go into the history, and I want to see how this has been doing this month.

18:00
Chris McLaughlin: And okay, Line 1 has not been doing well this month. So I'm going to dive into that, and I get a line-level view with my top production over all the different days of the month. Like, when did I do best? I can see that of these scores, my availability is what is killing me. I'm experiencing too much downtime. And has that been a trend? Am I still in that kind of trend? Okay, well, yep, this week or last week, whatever I put in, I'm still experiencing the same type of effect. Is that consistent across multiple of my lines?

18:35
Chris McLaughlin: Let's go to like Line 5. No. Okay, Line 5 is doing good. And this is a capability; again, it doesn't have to be seven lines. This could be 80 lines; this could be two. It could be whatever you need it to be, and they could immediately go to any of those lines that are displayed there and see real data from that time period. We gave you the same style of simulator where there are at least 30 days' worth of data, and it continues to accrue. So they could do cool things like come into the production summary and immediately see how all of those lines are performing over any period of time. So I'm going to come back in a month and be able to see that these were my target production counts versus my actual production counts. And I can see my rejects, and I can see everything from downtime to my scores. And I started out by saying that this only requires two tags, and that is accurate. The only two tags that you need are the machine state. So the state is going to inform you whether it is running, down, or not in production. And then a count is the second thing that you require. So you need some kind of production counter off of the line or machine, and that's it. Literally, those two tags are driving everything that you are seeing in this application. You can add a third tag in, and that is the reject counter, but that's it. Literally three tags gets you everything that you're seeing.

20:10
Chris McLaughlin: Let's try something else that's cool: I go to my lines, and I go to all lines. This is so easy for a client to come in here and say, "What is my worst-performing line?" And I just sorted by OEE so that I can see the worst. And guess what? It's Line 1 over and over and over again. Okay, well, what are my best-performing lines? It's lines 7 and 6 and 5, respectively. Okay, there's a good smattering of those. And then I could do things like, what are some of my lowest amounts of downtime versus my highest amounts of downtime? And yep, that tracks. We already saw in the line view that it was the availability, meaning the downtime, of Line 1 that was bringing its score down the most. And you see it here in all of those different runs. But look at how easy that tool is for somebody to understand what is happening with their facility.

21:02
Chris McLaughlin: Quick tangent. This is based on something that we did in the past. This was a very common sales technique where we would go into craft breweries, and we made a control panel that had its own PLC and its own HMI screen and sensors and whatnot. And it was running Ignition on the screen. And we would hook this up to a bottling line, and within one day, it had live data that was flowing into it, and the client was able to see it on the plant floor. And we would leave it there for weeks, sometimes even a month, and come back and be able to show them, "Look, look at what was happening to your availability. Look at what would be able to be improved from a revenue standpoint if you're able to increase this many points of availability or this many points on OEE." And it's a very cool tactic of being able to sell a software system for continuous improvement. This just put the power in your hands; you literally have the entire thing that took hundreds of hours for me to build back in the day and took a long time for us to build for you to have. This is ready for you: in a matter of hours, you can walk onto a plant floor, connect two tags off of a line, and have live software that is able to track the performance of that facility and run a similar sales step.

22:27
Chris McLaughlin: From a settings standpoint, you have the capability of going into any line. So I'm on Line 1 right now, and I can set up multiple shifts with different times. I can use two shifts or three shifts, and I could come into a different line and have a completely different setup if I just wanted to run one shift on that. I also could have different rates. Different lines and different machines are going to run at different speeds. So I set up a couple here. You could manage and set up as many rates as you prefer and have them individually on any of those lines. You also can have outfeed multipliers and reject multipliers. So if they're coming out in cases, but your production counter is just counting one case and you want to have the eight or six units that are in that case, you can have a multiplier of that. And lastly, there are thresholds that you can set for where you want it to say that it's in bad warning colors versus what is good. So all of that, all yours, all free. And if there are more questions about these, we would love to answer them. And in addition, remember, all of that documentation is within that website, and all of the explainer videos of how things work that I went through are going to be back in here too.

23:18
Chris McLaughlin: But now I want to change this up a bit. We're going to talk more about your business because this is another thing that is near and dear to my heart. Ignition is a fantastic platform for growing your integration business. And I say this from personal experience. When I was at Trimax from 2010 to about the 2014 timeframe, I grew from not using Ignition to one of the largest Ignition integrators in the world. And it was because that radically changed our business and brought us so much growth within the company. And then again at Vertech, it was starting all over, and at Ignition, we went from again, zero Ignition projects up to the number one Ignition integrator in the world within a handful of years. It is a fantastic growth platform.

24:45
Chris McLaughlin: So let's tell you how you do it. This is your business. This is something that you care very much about. I want to show you what's possible. So this isn't gonna be a deep product dive. We're going to concentrate more on your business at this point. I'm going to make just some basic statements in the beginning where we'll talk about the platform and things, and then we're going to come off of anything that feels marketing-esque, and we're going to get into very specific levers of how you actually utilize this and do it. Okay, first off, something that you need to know because this is very, very important to us. Our company was built by integrators. Inductive Automation was an integrator first when they built the Ignition software. And so they knew what the industry was all about. From that point forward, we said that the integrator is the most important portion of our go-to-market strategy. And so our company has grown with those integrators, and we have doubled down and are committed to the integrators forever. And so no matter where you are at in the program, whether you are registered or all the way up to Premier, we are here to help you grow your business along the way and help you with whatever you need from a technical or project or sales standpoint.

26:01
Chris McLaughlin: This software has also grown a lot over the last 23 years. So back in the day, you'd say Ignition and people would be like, "The what? Is that real? I don't know what that is." And now it's to the point where it's all over the place. 53% of the Forbes Global 1000 use Ignition. Literally the largest companies in the entire world. If you go down to the Fortune 100, it's 69% of them that use Ignition. There are over 88,000 installations in over 140 countries, and there are over 5,000 integrators. So there is a dominant perspective of people who know Ignition. It's not the "what is it?" anymore. And it is respected in so many industries and application types, which makes it easier for you to be able to use it, sell it, and find engineers that are familiar with it.

26:54
Chris McLaughlin: But before it gets all rosy, let's do a little bit of a reality check and talk about some of the struggles. And one of those is that skilled engineers are harder to find and retain than ever before. That just was the number one thing that I felt like I was always struggling with as a systems integrator. And because of that, that creates some challenges. The next thing is customers expect faster delivery because, thank you, AI, they can plug something into ChatGPT, and they're like, "It happens instantly." And so they expect the same of you: "I gave you the project last week. Why isn't it done already? And as a result of that, they are expecting it to go faster. But there's also more competition all over the place, which is just squeezing those margins. And lastly, we've noticed this shift: it's not just about making functional software anymore. There was a time and place where, yeah, you replaced the old software with a new SCADA system, and cool, it was done. Now they want to know, "Well, what's my return on investment?" And what is this going to do for my business?" And it is more business-driven than it is just functional-driven.

28:13
Chris McLaughlin: So why do integrators build their businesses on Ignition? Well, it's a lot of the things that we've talked about. First off, that unlimited continues to play. That is one of the major, major benefits of that. You just get everything. You don't have to worry about running out of users or running out of tags. You just build whatever is best for your client, and you build it in a way that you want to build it. The next is that it is powerful, scalable, flexible, and affordable. Those four words sum it up. That is the trifecta plus one. I don't even know what that word is, "quadfecta?" But any software that is able to do that is the one that you want to use as your platform. It does integrate with everything, so you're going to be able to connect to everything on the plant floor, enterprise software, as well as cloud applications. It has a strong ecosystem of both the modules that we have; the community, which is you, as well as everybody else that's involved in it; and the training that we offer. And lastly, it's going to fit the smallest HMI project all the way up to something that is hundreds of sites and millions of tags on the large enterprise rollout. Same software. And so if you're new to Ignition, what this means to you is just know that Ignition removes the artificial constraints. It's software. It doesn't have to be limited. Literally just say "unlimited," and it can be.

29:40
Chris McLaughlin: And if you've been doing this for a long time and are very familiar with Ignition, just know that Ignition rewards expansion, reuse, and standardization. The more that you put into Ignition, the more that it gives back to you. Okay, now let's get real. Let's get tactile with this. There are five specific levers that we're going to talk about that affect your business. Number one is Ignition can help you deliver faster and more predictably. And this phrase, standardization equals speed and margin. So the more that we can standardize, the more margin that you're going to be able to get out of this, which is helpful to your business. So how do we do that? One is reusable templates, themes, scripts, and UDTs. This is the premise that you can build it once and deploy it everywhere, which is eliminating repetitive work.

30:32
Chris McLaughlin: And yes, a lot of people will say that, and that sounds pretty good. Ignition has built itself specifically on how do you organize all of these things, and how do you actually move them to the next project, and how do you reuse them, and how do you share those libraries? There is total depth within that that allows you to actually make this a reality. The next thing you could do is develop common navigation frameworks and then use the same deployment methodology. So whether you have a water project or a food project, you can create similar nav structures and similar elements that you are going to have within the way that those projects are set up and then just easily deploy them to the next projects that you're working on, which again speeds you up and increases margin. Next thing, this is big. This is best-in-class. It is untouched by any other SCADA software or MES software or anything in that OT space. And this is something that I would have shouted from the rooftops prior to even coming to Inductive Automation. So I hope I'm not saying this as a biased person, but there literally is nobody doing source control and DevOps better. And this is something that if you can get your teams into, it is a huge benefit to standardization: that you can do repetitive builds, that you can use multiple environments of dev, test, and prod, and that you could use tools like Git and containerization. And this all helps you have multiple people working on a project, safer deployments, repeatable builds, and the ability to iterate faster across projects.

32:12
Chris McLaughlin: Package architectures were another secret: instead of having anything for anybody, you can get into the point where you are having a small, medium, or large type of architecture. And in that small one, we use this database, we use this size of server, and these modules have this kind of documentation. And offering that is just an easier way of putting something into a box and having it all standardized and ready to go. And lastly, this is not a marketing pitch. This is just a fact: if you do use Ignition as the default, it's way easier to train engineers. I recognized this while at Vertech: literally every single junior engineer or engineer that had been around for 20 years coming into the company was trained on Ignition. And because it was the same training platform, it was easy to repeat. There's Inductive University, and this provided redundancy of engineers on projects, which allowed them to be able to move between them because it's the same software no matter where you do it and the same designer, which provided more reusable items, which provided more projects with more references, which led to more sales of Ignition, which is rinse and repeat. Everything just happened again, and you'd be selling more of those jobs and doing all of these levers. Standardization.

33:28
Chris McLaughlin: The next thing to bring up, and this is where unlimited starts to come in, is that you can increase margins per project. So, say for instance, you sell a 120k SCADA project to begin with. You get in; it's unlimited. So they have the gateway, they have the software. For you to sell the next project, you don't have to resell the licensing at that point. It's already existing. You can add on services to that, screens to that, and users to that, and that could be new lines, new applications, and new portions of the facility. And so it's easier to justify future expansions. And I can't tell you how many times the initial project led to many, many more projects on top of that, which is increasing the amount of labor that you were getting because there's less friction within that sales cycle.

34:24
Chris McLaughlin: Number three is that you can actually sell bigger deals. So if you are using another software that is just SCADA-based, yeah, that has one capability of how far you can go. But Ignition allows you to get into MES and digital plant and UNS-style projects. There is so much more money and larger project sizes within those projects. So SCADA, where you could sell 100k or 300k type of job, and some of the digital plant and MES jobs, we're talking 500k, a million, or 2 million more plus rollouts that get huge. And so messaging to people that are new here is Ignition is going to grow with you, but it's also going to grow with your customer. There are plenty of larger project types that you can get into. And if you've been using this and you've only been using it for SCADA to this point, I'm here to tell you that you have the keys to the kingdom. You already have the capability of getting into larger jobs because you have a software platform that is capable of it.

35:32
Chris McLaughlin: Number four, building expansion revenue. So this is similar to number two, but it is slightly tweaked so that it is land, expand, and standardize across sites and business units and regions. And it is taking into effect that gateway being in place and the unlimited licensing. But once you have landed and gotten that initial site deployment, they have a foundation. They have their gateway and their licensing. That allows you to come back and expand with more lines and departments and additional sites. But then it also hopefully leads to the standardization across multiple sites or multiple business units. And that is just a lot of project labor that gets created through having an unlimited software platform that develops the same across multiple applications and multiple different geographies. And number five, the last one that we'll go through today in terms of levers, but we said it was competitive, and there are a lot of people out there. And if you want to differentiate yourself, Ignition is one of the ways to be able to do that. So why do customers choose Ignition integrators? Very similar reasons to why you would choose it: they're looking for modern UI/UX software. They want it to have open architecture with no lock-in. They want it to be enterprise-friendly, secure, and scalable, and they want it to be a single platform for multiple different application types. And if you are the one that is bringing them software with these things, they're going to choose you over the person that is bringing them software that doesn't have these things, which is an advantage to you.

37:06
Chris McLaughlin: The next thing that I'm saying is yes, there are a lot of Ignition integrators. So how do you stand out from the pack? Well, that's basically having more people certified in it, doing more projects, and having more expertise so that you are the one that is bringing Ignition to the customer. If you're the one that is bringing it up and the one that knows more about it, they're going to be more likely to use you. So where does this win deals? Well, if you're going against legacy platforms like System Platform, FactoryTalk, iFIX, or WinCC, anytime that you are the integrator with Ignition versus the integrator with one of these legacy platforms, it normally wins. Like, just being honest, you will see more success when you are the one that is coming in with more modern software with the feature set that they want. The same thing is true of legacy displacements. So when they are considering whether they should just upgrade within the legacy software platform to a newer version of it or if they should actually go with a modern, robust software, when you are the one that is pitching Ignition for that migration story, it is really compelling. And these are all ways to differentiate yourself within the market.

38:25
Chris McLaughlin: So now let's talk about some other tools for you because there's even more, which sounds so much like a sales pitch, "even more." But there is. Sales engineering is a part of my team, and there are plenty of people on that team that we want to help you. We are available to help you. Anytime that you have technical questions, our sales engineering team has answers. They are the ones that know Ignition inside and out, architectures, and different application types and can answer those questions. If you want them to join you on a sales call with an end customer, absolutely, yes, we will join you. So you just let us know when and where, and we will be there. We also help out with architectures. So if you have an RFP or you're meeting with a client and you want to know what the best way to set this up is, what modules should I use, what kind of configuration, and what kind of servers? We've got your back. We will either do that with you, or if you want to bring us directly into the call with the end customer, again, we will do that too. And lastly, there are times where we will build small proof-of-concepts if the opportunity is large enough and it really warrants showing it off. We have done that in the past. So please just let us know if there's something that you think would be qualified for that.

39:47
Chris McLaughlin: Next is this training program. Man, second to none. Again, I used this for so many years, again, training as many engineers that came in the door. It is an excellent online training program made up of short YouTube-style videos where you can learn how to use Ignition from start to finish. And it keeps track of all your progress. It keeps track of testing to make sure that you are learning the knowledge, and then you can come away with a credential at the end of it. So please check that out. There are also online and in-person training classes, and you can get your credential for free. There's also a core certification test, which is also free, and then there's a gold certification test. And these are all ways of proving your knowledge and competency within Ignition to be able to show off to your customers or even just within your company. And lastly, what we showed you today is Ignition Launchpad, which is just one more tool where we are always trying to help you out and give you the most to make you as successful as possible. And that's all I got.

40:56
Paul Scott: Well, that's quite a bit. Well, hey, thanks, Chris. Audience, we hope you've enjoyed learning about Ignition Launchpad and about how to grow your business with Ignition. We'll get to the Q&A in a little bit. Thank you for typing all your questions into the Q&A panel. This just gives you a little more time to think about any questions and get them in there right now too. Before we get there, though, we do want to let you know that you can download the latest major version of Ignition, Ignition 8.3, for free. Just go to the Inductive Automation website and click on Download Ignition. It takes about three minutes to install, and then you can use it in trial mode for as long as you want with no cost or obligation. And then Chris mentioned it, but it definitely is worth repeating. If you're ready to go a little bit deeper with Ignition or maybe even get started with Ignition, you should definitely check out Inductive University. It's where we host hundreds of free educational videos that help you learn Ignition at your own pace. No matter what your experience level is, there's always more to learn at IU. Also absolutely free.

41:47
Paul Scott: And then also, don't miss your chance to unleash your innovation at the 2024 Ignition Community Conference. It's happening on September 17th through the 19th in Sacramento, California. It's packed with over 60 sessions, hands-on workshops, the Build-a-thon, and a ton of great networking events. Just go to icc.inductiveautomation.com and register early to save on your ticket. If you're outside of North America, we have a network of international Ignition distributors who provide business development opportunities, sales, and technical support, all in your language and time zone. So if you wanted to learn about the distributor in your region, please visit their website as listed here on the screen. Alternatively, you can also contact our International Distribution Manager, Yegor Karnaukhov. And then if you'd like to speak to one of our account executives here in the US, please call 800-266-7798. To reach out to our office in Australia, please call the number at the bottom of the screen. And yeah, that's my stuff out of the way. So let's get to the fun part, right? Let's get to the Q&A. So let's see. We have a ton of questions coming in about Launchpad, which is really exciting. So to kind of kick things off here, can you differentiate... Oh, sorry. Can different users save different dashboards for their profiles? For what it's worth, this came up during the KPI demo.

43:00
Chris McLaughlin: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. Okay, so as Launchpad is built, every user is going to see whatever dashboards that you build. And that's just... For simplicity's sake, that's how that was built. But Ignition is completely capable of being able to differentiate dashboards that are built for a user. So it's a little bit more advanced feature to do, but still totally easy within Ignition, and you could customize the project to be able to do exactly what you said.

43:35
Paul Scott: Right on. We had a follow-up question from the same user; it looks like. It was basically the same for trending charts, so I'm assuming the answer would be more or less the same. It's kind of what you build that is available to everyone.

43:43
Chris McLaughlin: Yes. And so that is another way of saying the same thing, where it comes out of the box and where it's available to everybody. I used to do that all the time. If you wanted to save chart configurations, that is a very easy feature within Ignition that you could add on to that screen, and then you can just save it by a particular user and be able to load those back in.

44:08
Paul Scott: Right on. We have some questions coming up kind of about the back end of these projects. So first up, which simulator are you using? So when you're demoing it, where were you getting the data from?

44:19
Chris McLaughlin: Ah, so it's not a simulator like you might have experienced on some of our other just downloads of the Ignition software that come preloaded. This is a specific simulator that comes with Launchpad, and so it is particular line data, so machine state and production counts and reject counts for that OEE data. So it comes with it; you'll be able to load it, and it'll come up in your list of simulators that you want to be running. And the same thing is true on the KPI that it has a whole bunch of values for various PLC tags with, again, 30 days plus of history that looks realistic enough that you could show it off. And for both of those, the videos show you exactly how to set up that simulator. It's very simple that it comes already preloaded.

45:11
Paul Scott: Awesome. All right, thank you. Next, can you go over the changes you would need to utilize MSSQL instead of SQLite and maybe go through how to change tags from what we have set up there to a tag provider with your live tags? Now, obviously we're not going to go through all those changes here. We don't have the time for it. So I'm going to be a jerk and hold you back on that part, Chris, but do you have a maybe like a concise explanation of what you would do?

45:33
Chris McLaughlin: Yeah, yeah, let's give a short answer, and then we'll go back to it being in the manual. Ignition has full documentation of how you change databases and how you would include different tags from a database or from a PLC. But I will say this much: whether you change between SQLite or you're going to a full SQL instance of it or you're going to Postgres or something else, all of that is done within the gateway, and you are just basically providing credentials to log into a database, pointing the application at it, and then setting up configuration where you're looking at particular tags. And so that's basic 101. And if you want to know how to do it, there are tons of videos in Inductive University about how to do that also.

46:23
Paul Scott: We're going to keep plugging Inductive University. It's a good resource if you haven't checked it out already. All right, well, thanks, Chris. Next question. Once metrics or data are collected and stored on the server or in the cloud, I'm assuming, presumably using the Launchpad projects here, are there any sorts of AI or analytics tools that can be used to sort of support decision-making or get predictive analysis or that sort of thing?

46:43
Chris McLaughlin: Absolutely, yes. Okay, so I'm going to answer this in a couple different ways depending on how advanced you want to get and how deep you want to take it. So we have an MCP module that is available. It's on the forum. You can hook it in directly. It is the beta version of that, so right now it's even free. You can pick that up today, and you can hook that up to any LLM of your choice, and you can have it accessing that data and then ask questions to your heart's content on whatever LLM you're going to use. If you want to go one step more, I would recommend utilizing a knowledge graph with it. And so I'm going to give a plug for our friends, one of our tech providers; they're called Thread Cloud, and I highly suggest that you check them out. They did a presentation last year at ICC. We've done presentations with them on webinars. We've also done presentations at Prove It with them. And it is an awesome tool. It automatically integrates with Ignition and creates a full knowledge base. You can even upload PLC programs and P&ID charts. It creates all those relationships automatically, which sounds so cool. And it is. I've seen this happen within minutes, and it gives the LLMs that extra level of context that they need to really be able to ask the right questions and be able to get back all the answers that you would want. Amazing, amazing tool.

48:16
Paul Scott: Awesome. All right, well, thanks, Chris. All right, which is the required Ignition version to run these projects? So assuming 8.3 at least, is there a minor version as well?

48:26
Chris McLaughlin: So yeah, you can run these on 8.1 and 8.3. Either one is fine.

48:31
Paul Scott: Either one. There you go. All right, the next question is a two-parter. First part, is there a step-by-step guide to importing both projects into the gateway and getting set up to run? You did plug the documentation for Launchpad a little bit earlier, but did you have more to add to that, Chris?

48:45
Chris McLaughlin: The video within the documentation will... It's like a 15-minute video that literally takes you step by step through what they're showing you as if there's nothing on your screen to the point where it is completely set up. And yes, it's a live video with no speed-ups and no cuts. So he did the entire thing within that 15-minute span, and you can pause and forward it and try it all out. It's very simple to be able to do. Take full confidence; you'll do it.

49:13
Paul Scott: Awesome. All right, and then part two is there a gateway backup that can be downloaded rather than importing the projects? Now it sounds like these are mostly project-based resources for the most part. Is that fair to say?

49:23
Chris McLaughlin: That's correct. That's correct.

49:25
Paul Scott: Gotcha. Okay. All right, let's see. Is there any sort of reporting system built in to this alongside the dashboarding?

49:33
Chris McLaughlin: So not directly, but again, it's Ignition. So right now it's going directly from on-screen dashboards and on-screen analytics. But any trial of Ignition is going to come with a reporting module that you could build a report against, and all of your data is there in structured database tables. So yes, you could build out reports just the same. And again, if you're doing this live at a customer's site and they had the reporting module, it's absolutely a good addition to the Launchpad project.

50:09
Paul Scott: Awesome. We had another user ask or attendee ask, Can I easily skin and brand this in custom colors?

50:16
Chris McLaughlin: Yes. Yes, you can. So we created a custom CSS profile that you saw. It's neither a light mode nor a dark mode, but you can drop in, and you can modify that with another skin or profile of your choice. It's really easy to trade out logos and names. Everything is open, so nothing is locked down. Nothing is so stuck that you can't edit it. Literally anything within that can be edited. We just wanted to give you a good starting point so that if you didn't want to have to figure out how to change colors and change all the stuff and make it from the first time, we wanted to give you a point that felt comfortable for being able to put it on a plant floor immediately.

51:04
Paul Scott: Awesome. All right, next question. Where can we get any technical support if we have any technical problems in the project?

51:12
Chris McLaughlin: Yes. Okay, I'm going to give a plug. We didn't do this yet. So it's also on that Launchpad webpage that it has a link to the forum. There's a specific forum for this, and we are monitoring it with both our support crew and our sales engineering crew. So if you have questions about Launchpad, you can ask it there immediately. If you are an integrator and already have support within the program, of course you can call into our support line also and be able to ask them questions. I would highly recommend checking out the forum because it's very likely that some of the questions that you're going to ask have already been asked by somebody else, and you might be able to get immediate answers to your questions.

51:56
Paul Scott: I can second that for the forum. If you haven't checked out our forum before, there's a fantastic amount of information in there from our community. So all right, well, thanks, Chris. We had user... We do have a few more minutes; just kind of let everyone know we're getting close to the end of the webinar, but we do have more time, so we'll keep hitting these questions. Are there any existing templates that adhere to ISA 101? So was there any sort of compliance requirement when we were building these?

52:16
Chris McLaughlin: ISA 101? So is that the high-performance graphics? I always get my ISA numbers mixed up, but if they are, these are not necessarily high-performance graphics. These were designed in such a way... I used to say this as I was talking to clients and selling the best benefits of it. I feel like it takes the best out of the ISA standard and then still makes it look pretty. I always struggled with things being too boring for a user that has to look at it day in and day out over and over again. And so no, it won't comply explicitly with the high-performance graphics standard, but it is mirroring a lot of the best features of it where you saw that there were specific good colors, specific warning colors, limited use of... It wasn't just flagrant colors everywhere. And there was an organization to the data that supported being able to mimic high-performance standards.

53:17
Paul Scott: All right, well, thank you. Anonymous asks, "Are you able to see regarding the OEE project causes downtime for any timeframe on any line or machine?" So are there specific down codes, stuff like that?

53:29
Chris McLaughlin: Aha. Okay, so I knew these questions should come out, and this is going to be another plug for some of our tech providers; this application is not as robust as Sepasoft or Kanoa or any of the other OEE applications out there that are state-of-the-art MES modules made only for that. So there were some things that we had to exclude from this Launchpad project to make it quick and easy and to be able to be configured within an afternoon or a day. And one of those was the downtime reason code. There are just too many that you could get into when you start getting into downtime reason codes. The other one is that we didn't have named products or production runs. So when you dive into this, just be aware of those that are keeping track on a time basis. It is keeping track like you saw of hours, shifts, and days. And funny enough, that was 90% of our customers' what they really wanted. You would try to give them this incredible depth, and they'd be like, "I just want to know how it's performing on the hour and the shift." So if they are to that level, this works. If they want to go further into downtime reason codes and further into production runs, there are other tech providers that have built pre-built stuff for that. Sepasoft, Kanoa, and others. Or if you want to continue adding on to the Launchpad project, absolutely. Add in downtime reason code functionality and add in basically production run info. You can mod it to that. We just didn't do that from our base application.

55:16
Paul Scott: All right, well said. And just some folks are asking, "Hey, do you need Sepasoft's modules?" Chris just kind of answered it. It sounds like no. But if you do want to dig deeper into the world of OEE and get a little more specific, that sounds like that would be the use case of when you want to start using those. Is that fair to say, Chris?

55:31
Chris McLaughlin: That's 100% correct, yep. And they have awesome teams that would be able to talk with you about their modules and what use cases are going to benefit the most from them and how you would get started. And so I highly recommend a conversation with them if you feel like it's on the fence.

55:46
Paul Scott: All right, next question. Are there versions of Launchpad for Perspective and Vision? Now this is Perspective only, I believe. Is that correct?

55:54
Chris McLaughlin: Yes, Perspective only.

55:55
Paul Scott: Gotcha. All right, there you go. There you have it. All right, and then next question. Where is Launchpad? How do I find it? Where can I access these resources? Can we circle back to that real quick?

56:06
Chris McLaughlin: Let's circle back to that. Okay, so we're going to send this out in marketing communication. You will be able to get it. But if you literally just want to write this down right now, it's those pages. inductiveautomation.com/ignition-launchpad. A mouthful to be able to read out, but it will come in your marketing communication back to you. This page has everything. It's a one-stop shop for downloading Ignition, downloading the projects, the forum, and any of the details that you need on it; it's all referenced and linked here.

56:42
Paul Scott: All right, thanks, Chris. Got time for just a couple more questions. First up, is it complicated to import one of the two projects into my existing gateway template? So if I have a gateway up and running, how easy is it to get this in there? These projects?

56:54
Chris McLaughlin: It's easy to get in there. The only thing that I would caution against is if there are any global settings that you have done on the other projects from the gateway standpoint that maybe would have an effect on the styling of Launchpad. So that would be trying it out and making sure that everything looks good and has the styling that you want from a Launchpad standpoint. This Launchpad project is not going to affect your other projects. It would just be like if you had set something at that global level for your other ones; that might affect Launchpad.

57:33
Paul Scott: There we go. All right, and then the last one here. Ignition newbie here. What are the sensors and devices that can be used, and is there a resource for that? So we've been talking about Inductive University quite a few times here. We have a bunch of documentation. You probably want to check that out. But if we're using sensors and devices, it probably would be through OPC of some sort. Did you want to add anything to that, Chris?

57:52
Chris McLaughlin: Yeah. Okay, so the list is longer than we could talk about in this whole hour. There are so many PLC types and sensor types. I recommend what Paul did for our documentation as well as the forum. The website has a bunch more information or, shoot, a little AI search because our documentation is so public and so prevalent. That's a great question to be able to ask, like, "Is this device supported?" and you should be able to find a pretty quick answer.

58:25
Paul Scott: Awesome. All right, well, with that, we are at time, so we'll probably have to wrap it up right about now. So thank you, audience, for joining us today. Thank you, Chris, for sharing Launchpad with us and talking a little bit more about that. Everyone, we'll be back next month with a webinar about deployment modes in Ignition 8.3, but until then, you can follow us on social media and subscribe to our weekly news feed email or visit our website. So thank you again for joining us, and y'all have yourselves a great day.

58:44
Chris McLaughlin: See you, everyone.