Fully Automated Distillery Uses Ignition To Integrate SCADA, MES, ERP & Cloud Analytics Into Single Platform

Project Overview

Whiskey House of Kentucky built a fully modern, greenfield distillery with Ignition at the core, integrating SCADA, MES, ERP, and cloud analytics into a single, flexible digital platform. The project enables real-time operations, full barrel traceability, and customer visibility, setting a new benchmark for innovation in custom whiskey manufacturing.

Challenges

Whiskey House of Kentucky set out to build a new kind of distillery: a fully modern, digitally integrated, and highly flexible facility designed specifically for custom whiskey production. With a 176-acre greenfield site and no legacy systems to constrain them, they had the opportunity (and challenge) to create everything from scratch.

The problem? A highly ambitious timeline. From July 2023 to July 2024, the team needed to go from initial SCADA software kickoff to producing world-class bourbon distillate.

This required not only the integration of complex distillation and facility systems, but also a vision that extended far beyond traditional SCADA. The distillery needed dynamic recipe control, full barrel serialization and tracking, seamless integration with ERP and MES platforms, and a modern data pipeline that could feed cloud analytics and customer-facing applications. 

The project’s scope and scale were daunting because three people — VP of Engineering & Technology Roger Henley, Director of Technology Patrick Mannion, and Software Engineer Micheal Palliparambil — had to orchestrate and manage the entire facility build from a controls and software perspective until startup in July 2024. After that, Director of Engineering James Oeswein, and Software Engineers Chris Summers & Reed Johnson joined the team to help improve and optimize many of the systems.

Beyond resourcing, the project required:

• Designing scalable architectures for SCADA, MES, and historian systems.
• Building a custom MES layer to handle complex barrel serialization and custom distillate production.
• Integrating with the Customer Barrel Warehouse Management System supporting warehouse operations.
• Integrating with ERP (NetSuite), Canary Historian, Flow Software, and cloud data lakes.
• Developing custom Android apps for barrel tracking.
• Building an MQTT-based Unified Namespace (UNS) for real-time data flow.
• Creating a cloud-synced customer portal and associated data pipelines with UNS integration.

All of this had to happen in parallel with the physical construction of the facility itself.

Solution

Ignition became the central nervous system of Whiskey House’s digital distillery. Working with Quantum Solutions Inc. (QSI), the team implemented SCADA tags and screens to integrate with process equipment and provide automated and manual control of facility equipment and processes.

Flexware Innovation also joined as a key external partner during the second phase of development. Their team contributed significantly to enhancements in scheduling, and the internal help desk system, which allowed internal users to submit feature requests and bugs, giving visibility and velocity to ongoing innovation. Flexware continues to support ongoing controls and SCADA upgrades across the facility.

Some key highlights include:

• Unified Namespace: Built using Cirrus Link MQTT modules (Transmission, Distributor, and Engine), the UNS feeds data into Canary and Flow for analytics and modeling.
• Dynamic Recipes: Custom recipe creation and modification tools allow operators to schedule and tweak distillation processes in real time.
• Custom MES Layer: Designed in-house to manage serialized barrel production, integration with scanner-based warehousing systems, and tracking inventory for multiple customers.
• ETL + Cloud Data Lake: Ignition publishes production and sensor data over MQTT then pushed via ETL to Microsoft Fabric, enabling high-scale cloud analytics.
• Customer Portal: A custom-built interface allows contract partners to view inventory, monitor barrel analytics, and gain insight into their distillate.
• Dev Experience: The entire system can be run locally using Docker Compose — including Ignition, custom services, RabbitMQ, and brokers — for full-featured development and rapid iteration.

Result

By July 2024, Whiskey House successfully started up their facility and began distilling. The Ignition-based platform allowed them to not only hit their launch goals, but also exceed expectations in terms of functionality, traceability, and innovation.

Some key benefits include:

• Seamless, real-time data flow from distillation to the cloud.
• Full traceability of serialized barrels for customers.
• Operator-friendly UI/UX for managing complex recipes.
• Cloud-first architecture that scales with business growth.
• Customer portal that turns industrial data into value-added services.
• Development agility through containerized environments.
• AI-ready data for integrating into LLM models, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and agentic workflows.
• Ongoing development in Machine Learning integration and model predictive control (MPC).

The UNS and MQTT architecture made onboarding new systems (like future ambient warehouse monitoring) a plug-and-play experience. 

The internal help desk process has evolved into a living product backlog that drives meaningful, user-driven improvements, feeding feature requests directly into the dev workflow to create a lightweight but powerful product management pipeline.

Few producers open up real-time operational data to contract customers via a customer portal — this transparency is a differentiator.

Whiskey House is already looking to the future, with several projects on their roadmap:

• Ambient warehouse monitoring (MQTT-connected sensors)
• Predictive analytics using cloud-native tools via Microsoft Fabric
• Further integration of AI/ML models into operations and QA
• Further Quality Management System and Computerized Maintenance Management System integration

From greenfield to glass, Whiskey House of Kentucky is not just distilling spirits — they're distilling data into action, and Ignition is at the heart of it all.

Project Team

This project was brought to life by a lean but highly capable team blending deep industry experience with cutting-edge technical know-how. From July 2023 to July 2024, Whiskey House of Kentucky’s digital buildout was led by Roger Henley (VP of Engineering & Technology, 20-year industrial automation veteran, and distillation expert) and Patrick Mannion (Director of Technology, backend systems enthusiast with a passion for moving data efficiently). Quantum Solutions Inc. (QSI) provided PLC and SCADA screen development with a rotating team of 7-12 engineers.

Post-launch (July 2024–present), the team expanded with James Oeswein (Director of Engineering, formerly Flexware Innovation), Chris Summers (Software Systems Engineer and SCADA lead), Micheal Palliparambil (UI/UX-focused Software Engineer), Reed Johnson (full-stack SCADA + software engineer), and Joe Sloan (Network Engineer and IT backbone). Flexware Innovation continues to support ongoing improvements in scheduling, help desk tools, and SCADA expansion with a 5-6 person team.

Start Date: July 2023

Deploy Date: July 2024 - April 2025