(upbeat music)
- Hey Guys, Walker here.
So, I'm with Mark French from Sepasoft.
Real quick, so for those of you
that don't know who Sepasoft is,
Sepasoft is, they essentially write the MES
modules for ignition by inductive automation.
They're in the second iteration of
the OEE downtime module which is 2.0.
It's been out in production
for two years or whatever, right?
And we're gonna be talking about
the business connector module.
But what I wanna do is give Mark French
a chance to give us his 30 second elevator pitch
about the company and then we'll dig
into the new module.
- Thanks, Walker.
Mark French, Director of Operations at Sepasoft.
So, as Walker mentioned, we're a strategic
partner with Inductive Automation.
Our MES modules run on the Ignition platform
and we're augmenting that with some
utility modules that address ERP
and Business System Connectivity.
So, we're coming from integrator roots,
trying to address the pain points,
just like Ignition, for integrators when it
comes to MES and in recent months and years,
we're focusing more on Enterprise Class Systems,
Multi-site Large Implementations and so we've
got a number of things coming out here
in the next couple months that directly address
that both business connector and a raft of
features that we call Enterprise,
MES Enterprise, that we're adding to our
products at no additional cost.
- So, the business connector module is something
that we happen to be incredibly excited about.
As most of you guys know, the core of our
business is the upper layer of the stack.
Layer three, layer four, layer five.
We do a lot of MES to ERP implementations.
For those of you who are already developed
with Sepasoft modules and Ignition,
you already know how difficult it is
without a Business Connector module
to connect to ERP systems like SAP,
which is the predominant force in the market.
So, I did have a chance to see
the webinar here about a month ago.
The Business Connect, we had one of our
clients as an SAP House.
Nine of their developers were on
that call with us.
We got a chance to see the
Business Connector in action.
I'll give you the high level overview
of the Business Connector module.
You essentially connect to the ERP.
You go ahead and download, if you're using SAP,
you can go ahead and download the BAPI
and then the module itself will pars
the BAPI for you, so you can browse all
the fields that exist up in SAP.
If they add a custom field, you'll be able
to see that field and then map it to your
data model inside of ignition,
which, I don't have to tell you,
if you're already doing enterprise class
MES implementations with Sepasoft,
is a huge game changer.
The value proposition for me is cutting
that integration time down from six months
in the first engagement down to maybe two months
to get all that work done, which is helping
clients do more with less.
But, do you want to go a little bit more in depth
into, A, what gave you guys the idea?
Who did you work with?
And what are the core functionalities
of the Business Connector?
- So, this was really customer driven.
You know, we used to say, Hey,
we're on Ignition talks and everything,
so use a database query, use some Python,
use web services and then, what winds up
happening, is people write four thousand
line scripts to do that and that's
just a bare to maintain and, you know,
things are spread out and so we said,
you know what?
The market really wants this product.
And so, that's where we said, Okay,
we need to map this out and we worked
with 4IR to give us some of that SAP
expertise that we lacked.
So, yeah, that's been a great relationship,
and again, we know MES, we're not SAP experts
and so, you know, Hey, we need to bring
in those expertise, but that's been really great.
And it's not just SAP.
That's why we called it Business Connector
and not ERP Connector or something like that.
And so you can build data flows
that involve SAP, that involve other systems,
web services, database queries, enclosing charts,
all kinds of great stuff, we're not gonna
go in to all those details.
But, it's very flexible and then it has
an intuitive visual mapper.
So, like Walker said, you can get from
one data schemer to another and that's,
again, just a bare to do manually,
and we want to make that seamless, automatic,
bring the skill level required to implement
this down from someone who's an expert
in both systems and all intermediate technologies.
To someone who can follow the tutorial
and just, kind of, point click.
- How long did it take to develop the module?
So, you guys are in private beta right now,
expect to see the module for sale
in the next two months or so, right?
From start to finish, how much development
time did y'all have to put in to this?
- Oh, this is at least a year involved.
I mean, there's a lot under the hood here.
- Business logic, do you want to touch
a little bit on the functionality
in developing business logic within
the Business Connector itself?
Do you wanna talk a little bit about that?
- The para dime is that of charts,
and so, let's say you need to iterate
through what SAP spits back, associate that
with information from another system,
those can be built in to the charts.
Standardized and then called from within
Ignition on, pretty much, any event.
So, on a timer basis or scheduled basis
or event basis.
So, does that answer your question, Walker?
- It looked to me in the Webinar that it was
similar to sequential function charts.
You could basically build business logic
using an SFC methodology, right?
- Exactly.
- The other thing I noticed was that
we can essentially talk to any ERP, right?
So, if there's a restful interface
or a soap interface from the ERP,
we can use your web services module
to connect to that.
- That ties in natively.
- And then the Business Connector
can handle all the parsing for you, right?
Is there anything else, any other products
you guys have coming down the pipe
that you want to touch on?
MES enterprise, perhaps, or anything else
that I'm not already aware of?
- You know, last year at the Ignition
Community Conference we mentioned
the OEE light module, so you'll
see that later this summer.
That's really your edge of network,
running on your Ignition edge, or on big boy
Ignition, regular Ignition.
And that's a really lightweight, no scheduling
in-memory database version of OEE.
So, there are some applications that call for
that and they don't need the full OEE
feature set, so that's coming,
and like I mentioned, there's the MES
Enterprise Feautre Set that we're
adding to the product.
Some of the nice things there and we'll
be putting up some media on that
is build-in monitoring component.
To monitor each MES server and see
MES specific utilization of resources,
analysis, response times, how many milliseconds,
mid, max, mean, standard deviation,
so you can really drill down into
your system and see how it's performing.
And I think that's pretty critical when
you're administrating a large scale
multi-site implementation.
We also surface all of that data in TAG,
so you can build your own dashboards,
use the alarming functions, all that kinda stuff.
- Excellent.
- It also affords an internal structure
where you can add your own monitoring,
you know, timers and values and things
like that to further build that out.
Full audit log, you know, change log
now for all your MES objects.
So, especially customers in a farmer space
and increasingly in other regulated spaces,
you know, that kind of stuff is critical.
So, who changed that configuration?
At what time?
What did they change it to?
That's all recorded.
- So, that makes me want to bring up a point.
So, the biggest advantage OEE 2.0,
in my opinion, is the shift from looking
at the production model as a single resource,
to looking at the production model
as a group of resources, where you could
add each line, every layer of the ISA 95
data model is treated as a different object,
as a different resource in the production
model, which is one of the biggest,
on the nuts on bolts side, is one of
the biggest advantages of OEE 2.0.
So, Mark, thanks for your time.
So, if you guys wanna take a look
at Sepasoft's modules, go to Sepasoft.com
or I recommend that you go to Ignition's
website, go to the strategic partnership
module showcase and you'll get a chance
to download and play with the modules all you want.
(upbeat music)