Business Operating System Solutions with Ignition
Last week, Inductive Automation posted an infographic on LinkedIn showing that 61% of all Fortune 100 Companies are using Ignition in some capacity. Since many of these companies likely have Non-Disclosure Agreements, we won’t get to see HOW they are using Ignition, but we’re pretty sure there are plenty of interesting use cases.
From our experiences with Ignition—now close to 16 years (it’s gonna be really scary to let it take the car out for the evening this summer)—we have found it far exceeds the original simple goal of simply being an improved alternative to other SCADA systems on the market. At least in our experience, it’s become what we now call a “Business Operating System Solution”.
Regular readers of this blog will notice the acronym ties right in with our BOSS Mode philosophy!
What is a Business Operating System Solution?
A Business Operating System Solution (BOSS) is the software for managing and running your business. Usually, it’s a number of smaller programs you’ve cobbled together over the years: a tool for project management, another for customer relationship management, and likely a bundle of even more tools for internal communications, file retention, email, and everything else necessary for day to day business life.
Different people on your team will use different portions of the BOSS daily, with varying overlap across the company. For example, engineers working on specific projects won’t necessarily look at the admin and invoicing section of the systems, although you’ll need to integrate the hours they are tracking on projects to correctly bill your customers.
As your company grows, you may be able to streamline or consolidate the tools you use so that there are fewer moving pieces. And you’ll likely begin to create a process and procedure structure to keep everyone on the same page—at that time, you’ll probably want to find the best tool for the job overall.
Why Ignition?
We recommend Ignition to companies across many industries for running their businesses. It can connect to any data source, includes front end design tools as well as powerful back end coding capabilities. It can easily display complex information in ways that teams quickly understand. It can also manage tightly integrated processes, and can be extended to manage just about any problem a business might have.
Since we recommend using Ignition, we figured it made sense to build our BOSS on top of Ignition too.
At Corso Systems, we’re focused on delivering powerful solutions to our customers, so we don’t have the time to focus on re-inventing every wheel on our vehicle. Where possible, we’ve integrated the information we need from various tools into our overall BOSS instead of re-writing our own versions of each tool.
For example, we use Asana for project management, manage banking with Quickbooks, track time with Toggl, and leverage Google Workspace for our email plus file retention and sharing. We like to use the best tool for the job for people using it day to day, then integrate with those tools and extract the information we need for the business as a whole.
Sometimes we even find optimizations to get data from these tools into Ignition instead of developing projects in Ignition, when we need to share functionality with a customer entirely outside of our servers—or when we need to integrate with a customer’s systems directly. For example with an intake form or survey, we might use Google Forms to quickly build out the front end to gather data and get access to it in a Google Sheet—which we can then import into a database with an Ignition script.
Other times we use Ignition to get data out to other systems. Our file upload Perspective Project integrates with our Google Drive Ignition Module to move files into our secure file storage system without outside users having to navigate the hassle of shared folder access.
Simplified Enterprise-Wide Communications
Nearly every Ignition installation we’ve completed has had the major benefit of simplifying communications across the customer’s enterprise. Improved communications is often accomplished through the following avenues:
Automated information sharing
Data distilled into KPIs and relevant information
Connecting systems across the entire organization gives users complete visibility
“Simplifying communications ensures that everyone has access to the information they need to do their job. It also accelerates their access to this same information.”
For example, by automatically updating production schedulers when a run on the floor is taking longer than expected, they can update the plan for the rest of the shift (or the day) without needing to manually check on the run’s progress then scrambling to adjust the schedule once they identify a problem.
This approach can standardize operations throughout your company, ultimately saving you time and money while getting things done. At Corso Systems, we have applied this concept to our project management systems as well by integrating tasks and status updates into Asana. Our internal dashboards show our team a project’s overall status in real-time. This information is also integrated with the administration side where milestone invoices are automatically generated. After verification, they’re sent out along with the relevant time tracking information from our Toggl system—all while saving the time and effort of compiling all of the right information manually.
Standardized Workflows
With all our systems integrated with our BOSS, we can standardize workflows across the company. Our standardized proposal templates include the most common tasks across any project so we can quickly deliver proposals. Once we get a purchase order, we press a button in Ignition which automatically generates an Asana project with milestones and tasks from the relevant proposal information. This same automation also adds the project to Toggl, sets up our file shares on Google Drive, and even spins up a customer specific gateway in our internal Ignition development environment.
This approach keeps our team and the customer up to date with a “pull” approach to information rather than a “push”. People can look up what they need—when they need it—rather than having to disrupt other team members for a status update.
While most development work can’t be fully standardized, we have fully documented templates, UDTs, and example projects to help people get up to speed with the entire Corso Systems Ignition Library. This accelerates project deployment, training for anyone coming into a new project, or who is new to Ignition in general.
Does Your Company Need a BOSS?
Corso Systems can create the ultimate customized Business Operating System Solution for your company’s needs. Schedule a short intro call with Cody Johnson today!
Wrapping Up
We could easily write an entire book about the Business Operating System Solution for Corso Systems built with Ignition—along with the myriad ways it can amplify our impact on the manufacturing world. Hopefully this post has explained how we use Ignition internally at Corso Systems and sparked some ideas for how you can use it at your company to run your manufacturing process as well as your entire company as a whole.
You don’t need to adjust how you do business to use Ignition. Ignition is fully capable of integrating with every tool you’re already using, and can help make your business even better by standardizing and simplifying communications.
Please reach out and share how you’ve used Ignition in your company. If you would like help integrating Ignition throughout your company to reach your full potential, we can help brainstorm what is possible and help make it happen! Schedule a short intro call with Cody Johnson in sales ASAP to get started.
