Unique Ignition Application Assists Family-Owned Paint Manufacturer With Increased Traceability

Project Overview

At Haymes Paint, an Australian paint manufacturer, a specification is a document that describes to their customers the entire scope of a painting project, considering several factors to determine the most appropriate combination of products to be used.

The original process of developing specifications was both time-consuming and heavily dependent on specialized knowledge. There were various ways to create a specification by using different templates and painting system combinations. Furthermore, the specifications lacked either clear traceability to the customer or internal specifier, or a formal approval process.

SPECPRO, the new, Ignition-based specification application, designed by Insight Engineering, resolved the original processes’ inefficiencies. The application can automate, track, standardize and validate specifications at Haymes Paint with its intuitive interface, reducing the time-cost of generating specifications and clearly indicating a project’s risk factors.

Challenges

Haymes Paint managed the previous process of creating a specification in a variety of ways, each unique to the particular individual’s own workflow, personal skill, and knowledge.

This process had resulted in increased risk and inefficiency due to:

• Lack of effective/enforced approval processes
• No standardized templates for specification structure and content
• Limited accessibility for managing specifications, resulting in workflow bottlenecks and delays
• Manual and undocumented processes, allowing for loss of information
• Failed attempts to create specification processes due to challenging user experiences and the large cost to train operators
• Poor traceability of specifications in a project’s lifecycle, resulting in unknown specification effectiveness 

The first challenges for Insight involved proving that Ignition would be a viable platform for developing this tool:

• Primarily known as a SCADA platform, Ignition would usually not be considered for a project of this type of scope. Competing suppliers/integrators suggested solutions built on Microsoft Power Apps. This, by nature, made the decision to develop with Ignition a risk consideration for the stakeholders.

• The Haymes Paint project manager attributed a great importance to good GUI/UX design principles, emphasizing the need for a “modern look and feel,” which projects developed in Ignition sometimes do not focus on, due to associated ASM fundamentals.

The tool needed to produce several unique PDF formats for a specification, generated from data stored in a database, making Ignition’s Reporting Module a necessary factor for the project’s success. The requirement for good design was therefore most prevalent here, and as developers, Insight needed to be resourceful and utilize the full capability of the Reporting Module.

Ignition was not initially considered by the project managers as a potential platform. Insight needed to be able to demonstrate that Ignition could tick all the major criteria: low-code, flexible, and great support options. 

The idea to utilize Ignition then became a standout against competitor products due to the added advantage of Haymes Paint’s existing investment into the platform: a recently developed MES solution digitizing their paint-making process, as well as its attractive perpetual licensing model.

Solution

To demonstrate Ignition’s adaptability to a non-industrial style guide, Insight created a demonstration project within a single day. This doubly served to present Ignition’s great capacity for rapid screen design, which would facilitate an efficient and thorough iterative design process – an approach highly valued by organizations like Haymes Paint that prefer agile development.

From a functional perspective, the most important aspect of this project was a system that could automatically provide a user with a preferred painting system (known internally as a PPS) based on simple dropdown filters for ease of use. The overall design of the database was entirely driven by this aspect of the functionality, and encompassed a major portion of the overall development timeline. The final query leverages multiple advanced MSSQL constructs to efficiently retrieve the correct dataset of PPSs with optimal performance.

Insight developed SPECPRO with a heavy emphasis on style classes and templates, maintaining the ability to quickly adjust the overall presentation. In this way, Insight was able to fully utilize Ignition’s tools to deliver immediate iterations in response to new requests from Haymes Paint. Insight and Haymes Paint took full advantage of this process throughout development, as the project went through several large alterations before reaching the final result. During each iteration, what would have otherwise been a sweeping overhaul to the frontend resulted in a simple and straightforward update, which propagated itself throughout the project.

A major characteristic throughout this project was a commitment to deliver on good GUI/UX principles. To achieve the desired feel of a modern, web-based application, Insight used Ignition’s CSS stylesheet to great effect for transitions and animations, which overall added significant amounts of polish across the tool. 

Based on feedback during development, operators felt that accessible collaboration was the most important aspect to enable full utilization of this tool. This drove the inclusion of the Team Activity board, allowing visibility of other members of the team, simple and well-recorded communication, and email notifications for prompt actioning of tasks. Emailing was then further utilized across the rest of the project to great effect.

Overall, there were three unique report formats (project, builder, and color), each highly complex and diverse in their own right, and each generated via the Reporting Module. The core use case was to generate a PDF containing client details, details on each configured area, and other standard documents, all using the appropriate format for the intended end user. The project format was the standard template, and presented a single-page layout per area, containing all the defined area details, as well as dynamically retrieved application methods and features for each product, which were retrieved via API calls to Salsify, the PIM application. The application further generated detailed notes from several sources, configured by the QA team, as well as the user creating the specification.

The builder format featured a condensed version, primarily focusing on the products themselves. The application also displayed images retrieved via API to increase accessibility for end users who are non-fluent in English.

The color format displayed color swatches and uploaded images, demonstrating to an end-client an overview of the final result, rather than the process itself. Insight leveraged API communication with the existing ERP application Pronto to interrogate Haymes’ vast color catalogue for browsing, frontend selection, and data retrieval required to generate accurate swatches.

These were then further combined with a front page and details page, in addition to several external dynamic pages retrieved via API calls, and local storage, before being automatically collated to form the final specification. 

Insight effectively employed various innovative approaches for report configuration and query design to generate a highly polished and purposeful PDF, meeting SPECPRO’s high standards. The output presents data in a clear, efficient, and professional manner, each tailored to the varied operators.

Result

Haymes Paint found development on the Ignition platform to be an exciting prospect as it ultimately met all requirements for developing their custom tool, including low-code, support options within Australia, and the ability to enhance the solution iteratively over time.

Every specification created in SPECPRO is now formally approved, resulting in full traceability. The level of visibility that has been achieved in the spec creation process — from creation to approval, as well as in revision and re-approval — has resulted in a higher level of accountability for the specifications. 

Haymes Paint have seen several other major benefits from fully digitizing the specification process, such as:

• Significantly more backup protection
• Accessible collaboration and handover support
• Quantitative statistics to feed back to the business analysts

Due to the straightforwardness of integrating Ignition to external ERPs, Insight has integrated SPECPRO with Haymes Paint’s CRM and PIM systems. This has provided a level of interconnectedness not previously utilized for developing specifications, directly linking to the business sales opportunity and sales pipelines.

For Insight, as an Ignition Premier Integrator, developing this solution for Haymes has resulted in growth across the board with Ignition’s suite of tools, most abundantly in the four cornerstones of this project:

• Screen development from related GUI/UX design principles
• Database architecture and complex query construct development
• CSS stylesheet utilization
• Reporting design and development

The techniques Insight developed during the work on SPECPRO have continued into other projects, and multiple resources which have been diversely helpful have been uploaded to the Ignition Exchange.

Project Team

Kris G. – Joining Insight as an undergraduate in 2022, he developed the first implementation of Ignition for Haymes Paint in the form of the MES tool under guidance from Tim H. as a project lead. Expressing great interest in developing with a form-meets-function mindset, he was chosen to serve as primary developer and client liaison for SPECPRO.

Tim H. – Tim’s skills as Insight’s primary resource for all MES-based developments brought him to lead Haymes Paint’s MES project. During the development of SPECPRO, Tim played a critical role in the overall database design and implementation.

Sam B. – Prior to Kris’ interest and involvement with GUI/GUX design, Sam was Insight’s only resource with training in the field. As a result, he played a crucial role in supporting Kris through design guidance, development reviews, and regular consultation.

Start Date: July 2024

Deploy Date: January 2025