I've been looking into Ignition and Sepasoft. What is your opinion on the platform? Does it scale well? Are customers happy with it?
Thanks for your replies.
I'm a huge proponent of the Ignition platform. Sepasoft is doing some great things and I think the product is starting to really mature. The OEE 2.0 release has been a great change for end users, but it's also had some struggles. Sepasoft modules have a steep learning curve, and much of it is powered by scripting which there are many many many functions to learn.
There are some things you simply do in Ignition, like database queries that are considered bad practice in Sepasoft. Sepasoft whats you to get any and all data through the script engine and analysis tools as it's more efficient to go through their query engine then direct. This can lead to bad habits for those who just try and dive into Sepasoft and leverage methods they use with base Ignition.
Sepaoft's alignment with ISA-95 is a great thing, but again more to learn.
Right now with the release of Ignition 8, Sepasoft is playing catch up to be compatible. I believe they have a release candidate for Ignition 8 but I don't think it will be Perspective ready until the end of the year. The next major release of Sepasoft modules will also change some back end stuff which will be interesting, but long-term is probably the right change to make.
Everything is extremely scalable customers are happy with it ONLY if it's done right. I've had to fix a number of Ignition/Sepasoft projects done by other integrators and end users because of various issues and such. We are also ripping and replacing a number of Ignition/Sepasoft projects done by others because they failed to achieve the customer's requirements.
Any MES project, regardless of the platform, people need to know how to use it and implement it to get the results. The bulk of problems I have seen with Ignition/Sepasoft have more to do with the application build rather than the platform. BUT, we have found issues with Sepasoft and they are pretty responsive about releasing service packs to fix them.
I am certified in both Ignition and Sepasoft, PM me if you would be interested having a more formal conversation.