Our plant has been firmly entrenched in the FTView SE Network Distributed package for some time now. After a poor experience with Transaction Manager and reading several threads on this site, we decided to give Inductive Automation's Ignition a try for data logging, trending, etc. So far, we are impressed with what Ignition can do and how easy it is to set up.
Now the question has been raised about migrating our SCADA screens from SE over to Ignition. This is not a topic to take lightly as we're talking a couple dozen clients, hundreds of screens, thousands of alarms and about ten thousand tags scattered throughout 10-20 A-B PLCs of various vintage. The facility runs 24/7, so rolling out a change like this has to be well thought out. We do our best here to take ownership of our controls and handle modifications ourselves.
If there are any other plant folks out there who could share your experience with such an undertaking, I'd be appreciative. Integrators feel free to chime in, but I realize from 20+ years on that side of the process the perspectives aren't necessarily the same as those of the plant engineers.
Here are some questions we're pondering:
1. Assuming there's no software package to convert FTV SE screens to Ignition, how much pain is expected in the process to reconstruct the new screens in Ignition?
2. When adding new equipment to our plant, the OEM typically has no issue developing screens in FTV SE that we can import into our SCADA package. How challenging is it to find an integrator/OEM to develop such screens in Ignition?
3. I noticed posts in another thread that mentioned a dislike for Ignition's mobile app. Can anybody expound/update me on this? This feature is important to us, but even now were dead in the water as Viewpoint & SE haven't played nice with each other.
4. Any other caveats we need to consider?
Thanks in advance,
Now the question has been raised about migrating our SCADA screens from SE over to Ignition. This is not a topic to take lightly as we're talking a couple dozen clients, hundreds of screens, thousands of alarms and about ten thousand tags scattered throughout 10-20 A-B PLCs of various vintage. The facility runs 24/7, so rolling out a change like this has to be well thought out. We do our best here to take ownership of our controls and handle modifications ourselves.
If there are any other plant folks out there who could share your experience with such an undertaking, I'd be appreciative. Integrators feel free to chime in, but I realize from 20+ years on that side of the process the perspectives aren't necessarily the same as those of the plant engineers.
Here are some questions we're pondering:
1. Assuming there's no software package to convert FTV SE screens to Ignition, how much pain is expected in the process to reconstruct the new screens in Ignition?
2. When adding new equipment to our plant, the OEM typically has no issue developing screens in FTV SE that we can import into our SCADA package. How challenging is it to find an integrator/OEM to develop such screens in Ignition?
3. I noticed posts in another thread that mentioned a dislike for Ignition's mobile app. Can anybody expound/update me on this? This feature is important to us, but even now were dead in the water as Viewpoint & SE haven't played nice with each other.
4. Any other caveats we need to consider?
Thanks in advance,