Water Utility Seamlessly Transitions Operating Systems and Speeds Development

Project Summary:

Design and develop a new treatment plant HMI to replace WinCC and condense third-party applications into one platform. 

Problem:

The City of Orlando used Siemens WinCC for many years, but had several problems with it. The City had to wait until the development team in Germany could find a solution to its issues. After many days of trial and error, the City of Orlando finally got a solution. Updating WinCC was a very daunting task. It usually had to completely rebuild its servers, from installing the operating system to upgrading each client out in the field, and it took about two weeks to complete a system upgrade.

Solution:

When the City of Orlando has a problem with Ignition, it can easily contact one of the developers or a very knowledgeable technician who will help it as best they can to find a solution to the problem or find a path for its own solution. Myron, The City of Orlando’s Inductive Automation account representative, is also very quick to help set up meetings with the developers and find a solution to specific issues. The City of Orlando can contact Ignition support in a matter of minutes and resolve an issue in a matter of a day or two. Upgrading the same version of Ignition takes minutes and is fairly easy to do. The same is true for installing Ignition and restoring a project.

Results: 

One of Ignition's main benefits is it saves development. Ignition takes less time to maintain than the previous platform. There are some built-in modules in Ignition that eliminate the need for third-party software. Consequently, the City of Orlando no longer needed the paging software Win911, and Kepserver for some of its communications as Ignition has a built-in paging system.

Ignition also has a built-in auditing feature, and there was no need for auditing in the previous platform unless it was scripted or third-party software.

The system can also bring information from other applications into Ignition via SQL communications, scripting, and querying. There is an interface to CMMS asset management software, and its end users find that very helpful. It can feed more information into Ignition than what it could before.

Deploy Date: September 2021