Automation Ladies
The podcast where girls talk industrial automation!
We interview people from all walks of life in the Industrial Automation industry. Through a personal narrative/conversational framework we talk about PLCs, SCADA, IIoT, Machine Vision, Industrial Robots, Pneumatics, Control Systems, Process Automation, Factory Automation, Systems Integration, Entrepreneurship, Career Stories, Personal Journeys, Company Culture, and any other interesting and timely topic we want to discuss.
Co-Hosted by Nikki Gonzales, Ali G & Courtney Fernandez - find them on LinkedIn!
Automation Ladies
Demo of Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure w/ Jen Sutter, Itoro Meshioye & Talita Clemente
How can breaking free from traditional limitations unlock a new era of innovation and resilience in automation?
Join us with Jennifer Sutter, Itoro Meshioye, and Talita Clemente, three amazing women from Schneider Electric, who are pioneering the “Universal Automation” movement, where design flexibility and hardware independence redefine possibilities.
Experience their inspiring narratives and an interactive demo of EcoStruxure, an IoT-enabled, plug-and-play, open, interoperable architecture and platform designed for use in homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries!
Thank you to Schneider Electric for demoing this cool product and sponsoring the episode!
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Co-Hosts are Alicia Gilpin Director of Engineering at Process and Controls Engineering LLC, Nikki Gonzales Director of Business Development at Weintek USA, and Courtney Fernandez Robot Master at FAST One Solutions.
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Get in touch with us at automationladies.io!
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Hey everybody, it's another Thursday afternoon. Welcome to an Automation Ladies Demo Day. We haven't done a Demo Day in a while, and we're super excited to have a platform from Schneider Electric that I hadn't heard of until well, maybe it was last year, but I remember when I saw it, I immediately started to watch some videos on their website and I thought that it was really cool, and I think I threw out a comment and tagged Schneider Electric and said who can show this to us or to me, or something of that effect. And here we are now, probably several months later, but I'm super stoked to have three incredible ladies on from Schneider Electric to talk to us about no, it's not open automation, it's universal.
Speaker 1:Okay, same concept, though, but it's a specific organization, a group, and so we're both going to talk about that, as well as the platform itself that Schneider has developed as part of this, being part of this group, being able to utilize this infrastructure so that not everything is completely vendor locked and hardware locked, which I think is really important to the resilience the future resilience of our industry. So I was really interested in learning more. Courtney, I don't know if you've ever come across this eco-structure, and I'll let the ladies explain what all of this terminology means, um but their iot platform and, and in specific, this automation expert stuff. Have you ever heard of that or worked with it before or seen a demo?
Speaker 2:uh I, I have heard the words uh, but didn't know what it was. Um, and admittedly, iot stuff is kind of like my weak point, so I'm actually very curious about products related to it.
Speaker 1:Then I think we're going to learn a lot today and unfortunately Courtney is going to have to jump off after kind of the conversation portion of this. Because, yeah, as we discussed, I think in our meeting yesterday, when I had kids barging and my kids were home from school, at least the pandemic, one good thing that came out of it is that we all kind of learned that, hey, we have these you know lives and families and things, and they sometimes come up. So Courtney's got to go pick up some kids from school and only if I get the text.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, yeah, Okay, we may make it on time, but if I get an uh-oh text I may have to drop off at 1 30.
Speaker 1:Okay, so at least we all know that that's gonna happen. Um, I also want to say live demos are something that not everybody's willing to do. They don't always go well. That you it's a little bit of a business like version of being vulnerable which is really what we're all about in automation ladies is kind of being true to yourself, being really what we're all about at Automation Ladies is kind of being true to yourself, being able to speak with passion, but also just honesty and integrity about what you do, and I love that you guys are willing to come.
Speaker 1:Guys we actually just had this conversation just now you ladies, but we use the term guys for everybody, so like, but, uh, we use the term guys for everybody, so like, whether it is a genderless term. If you get offended by that, I apologize. That's not my intention. I we're super excited to have you guys here today to both actually give us the the demo of this, but also just kind of like, uh, clarify what it is. What is schneider electric doing with it? How does it fit into the rest of all of the technologies and portfolios and things?
Speaker 1:We won't get too much into that, but a little bit of clarification about what this terminology is, which I think would be really helpful to us that have heard it but maybe don't know exactly what it is. We'll dive into why this matters and then we'll actually go through a bit of a sales demo. Let's see the thing, let's, you know, put some eyes on it. You're not going to get you know, all your in-depth question answered or dive into every little detail of the software or how it works, but we are going to see just a standard kind of demo. Talita is going to drive that for us. She's an application engineer that does these demos on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:So we asked for, like a person that normally does these, so that it's not necessarily prepped as a show, it's just prepped as you get, to be a fly on the wall for these demos and, more importantly, if you, you know, come here for the community.
Speaker 1:So don't be a fly on the wall. Engage in the comments, tell us why you're here, where you're from, if there's anything you're interested in finding out today, and then during the demo, feel free to ask questions and we'll try to. You know, throw them up on the screen. We've had a really fun time with our demo so far the audience engaging with some questions and stuff, and that also just helps the presenters to not feel like they're just talking at a wall. For you know, 30 minutes, 20 minutes it's a lot more fun for everyone involved if it's engaging and we're engaged. So with that, thank you so much for joining us and I would like to just pass it off to Jen to get started with a brief kind of like our standard automation ladies question. I'd love to hear just a little bit of an introduction about yourself and then how you got to be in this position, and we'll take all three of you and then we'll dive into kind of introducing the subject matter. Does that sound good?
Speaker 4:Yeah, sounds good. So, yes, so I'm Jen Sutter and I have been with Schneider Electric for 30 years now. How did I get into this? Well, my dad was a power engineer for a utility company, so there were no other women, other than a cousin of mine who went into petroleum engineering, that were engineers in the family. So I was good in math and science and decided to dive right in, got my degree in electrical engineering, put in power services, got my first job out of college at a utility company, and there I am, sitting in an office that really was a closet, with a computer doing load flow studies all day by myself, and I thought how can I do this the rest of my life?
Speaker 1:That's exactly what I thought engineering was and why I didn't get a degree in it. So I was like I don't want to be stuck in that closet.
Speaker 4:So I and I knew my dad had worked in the field. So I was like this isn't like what I want to do, and so. But I grew up also ironically or not ironically, but I grew up above a restaurant. My mom owned and ran and my grandmother before her we lived in the apartment above it. So growing up I had a lot of experience waitressing and stuff, and even at the young age of 12 to 11, 12, I'm onboarding and training the new waitresses that are 16 years old, being hired into the family to work for the family. So what I did is I did something fun, or what I did is I thought about it.
Speaker 4:Everybody remembers that one credit class you took in engineering. That was like all the different jobs an engineer can do, and I remember learning that, hey, a lot of engineers go into sales and marketing for companies that look for people in sales and marketing. So I started networking with different people. I had five uncles that my four of them were engineers. One was a purchasing agent. So of course I went to the one who was a purchasing agent and said, hey, can, can you help me figure out like what companies hire engineers, go into sales and might have sales development programs or something. And that's how I found Square D by Schneider Electric at the time Cause again my background was power Square D by Schneider Electric at the time because again my background was power Got into their sales development organization, their program, and spread my wings into the industrial automation and I'd like to tell people, in my 30 years at Schneider I did what I call the monkey bar approach.
Speaker 4:I took a lot of lateral moves in different business units to learn more about the company and to learn a lot of other areas of the business. And now that I'm a regional sales director in our industrial automation space, it has really served me well to have friends and all of our other business units, like our buildings business, our IT business, our sustainability business, our microgrid business and all of that. So a lot of fun stories over the years and it's a great company for women to work at. I really enjoy working at Schneider Electric.
Speaker 1:I love that experience and the fact, like you said, that career progression doesn't always have to be linear. And even within one company you would think you just okay, you kind of just climb the ladder up. But at a company as big as Schneider and I think some of the other big companies in our industry do well with this but you know giving people the opportunity to move around and learn different disciplines and areas, and then you kind of you know, with all of that and your institutional knowledge, you become, you know you can become a very valuable asset over time just from having all those different experiences across the organization. Right, absolutely, celita. How about yourself? Yeah?
Speaker 5:Hi everyone. My name is Celita Clemente. As you can see from my accent, I'm not American, I'm from Brazil. So I started at Schneider seven years ago right off college as an intern actually in Brazil. So I started as a college as an intern actually in Brazil. So I started as a. I was part of the engineering delivery team. So I started working on projects, developing projects, commissioning.
Speaker 5:I got hired to that position and I was super excited. I loved PLCs and working with them was like my dream coming true. But then, just after I got hired, I joined an early graduate program at Schneider and I saw the role that Schneider had to offer me. So I started networking and talking to people still working on my delivery position. Then I moved to a position on the same team that I am today. That is where the competency center inside Schneider. So I started working with everything that Schneider has to offer in industrial automation with Brazil, ecuador and Colombia. And almost three years ago I got the opportunity to move to the US and work with EcoStruxure Automation Expert for North America, and I've been enjoying ever since the ride here Very cool.
Speaker 1:I think you may be the third Brazilian guest we've had on the show so far. Oh, really, that's exciting. Well, I'm missing someone, we. I think we haven't scheduled this episode yet, but yes, so very cool. Um, join the, join the ranks. My dad loves, uh, brazil. I've never been, but would love to to go at some point in the future and I should have been saying your name the american way, with the like my mother-in-law's name with theita, with the T. So Etoro you're next. I think I got that better Hold on.
Speaker 3:I'm listening to Jen and Toledo and I'm like, oh my God, I think I'm in the wrong place.
Speaker 4:But not for today's discussion. People will understand why later.
Speaker 3:The history that you ladies have with automation, I really don't know. So we don't have much time, but I'll just summarize real quick. So I started off in oil and gas, right, and at the time, traditionally, for like 160 years, you know, you extract the oil and then you flare the gas, which is pretty much those stacks we see, right, with, you know, fire burning. And so ExxonMobil decided, hey, let's not flare the gas anymore, right, let's. You know, let's innovate, right, let's build the pipelines and the assets and all that to process this gas and sell it. Yeah, right, and so they built this natural gas liquids plant, the first of its kind, and I was one of the first people to work there. So I did that. And you know, now, like 20 something years later in my career, I can look back and say you know, I'm always drawn to innovation. I'm always drawn to people pushing the needle and saying let's not do things the way we've been doing it right, let's do it differently.
Speaker 3:So it started off in ExxonMobil. And then, you know, bell South at the time was called Bell South. Now it's AT&T. They said let's not do dial-up anymore. If you can remember AOL, you've got mail. And if you had to choose between, you know, being on the phone or being online. Right, dial-up internet. And AT&T said let's not do that anymore, let's create high-speed internet so people can choose between hey, you don't have to always unhook your phone to get online, let's create, let's give people both. And while we're doing it, let's make the internet even faster, so fiber to the home. I was part of that right.
Speaker 3:And then I moved to Houston and OSIsoft a company called OSIsoft, the makers of the Pi system have always been using their technology for operational excellence for process industries. And they said let's not do that anymore, let's actually still do that, but use the software in data centers. And I was like I want to be a part of that and fast forward to here. Right, schneider electric said let's not do traditional control systems anymore, let's decouple the software from the hardware. And I'm here, I signed up. So now, looking back, I'm, you know, like moth drawn to the fire. I'm just constantly drawn to people pushing the envelope, saying let's not do things the way we do them traditionally. There's got to be a better way.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 1:So you're the perfect person to be here today, because some of the things that we and we don't even have a super clear like we started the show with X mission, like we started it for a bunch of different reasons and as we keep doing it, we keep doing it for different reasons, but one of them is there are so many people that could come into this industry in so many different ways and maybe they don't know about it.
Speaker 1:Right, you ended up being in a conversation with someone where it was an opportunity, right, but we just want to increase those opportunities for everyone to hear about what we're doing, how cool it is, how there is innovation happening and that you can be a part of it. Whether you're a trained engineer or you come from some other business discipline, it doesn't matter. We need all of them in this industry. So you can go do that in pharmaceutical or you can come do that here, and I think there's something cool and exciting about being here. Um, even things like, uh, you know, courtney and I actually uh, work a bit with, uh, landfill gas, uh, capture and flare systems oh, wow, look at that, yeah, and you would think like, oh, you know trash.
Speaker 2:that's not exciting, but there's exciting stuff about trash um I've been to one of the flare stations and, uh, it was intimidating, like the sound of the flame. Um, I didn't realize like. I thought like a train was passing and it wasn't a train passing under us, it was like the deep rumble of these things going it's intense.
Speaker 3:It's intense when you I mean conversation for another day but when you look at the environmental implications of that, yeah, yeah, then that helps you know of the communities who live around it, right, so? So of course, you know companies like exxon to get in mind. And also, when you're flaring gas, you're pretty much just burning money, yeah exactly I was going to say it takes something. That's what you're doing so yeah, you're doing the right thing. Part of it. And there's also how much money can be made when you report yeah, so another perfect.
Speaker 1:We do this because it's a win, win, win, win, win Like whoever people are on the screen is how many wins we like to get. We also like to have fun doing this. We like to learn. Our audience likes to learn. We get to know each other.
Speaker 1:You know, it's really great when you can kind of check a lot of boxes all at once, and I think you know we really one of the things we wanted to not do the same way and I think you know we really one of the things we wanted to not do the same way but do differently with this demo day was not keep all of the information about our industry so under wraps and even things like sales information and sales demos. You know, and I completely understand, you don't just want to demo your stuff to everyone in the world and if it's not relevant and to give that one-on-one time from a sales rep to a person, it's a waste of time for everyone involved if you're not a potential customer or you have no use for it. But awareness and knowledge is also really cool. Even if you're not in the buying cycle or you're not a customer, if you're in the industry, it's nice to be able to know what's available, what's out there, what it looks like, without wasting people's time and expectations of having to go for a sales demo that isn't worth anybody's time. So we really, you know, just appreciate your willingness to come show this to whoever's watching, no matter how likely they are to buy this or not, with the mind of just sharing it with everyone, and opportunities do tend to come from that.
Speaker 1:Thank you all ladies. Those was were great intros. I learned a lot about each of you. It's just I I continue to be amazed by the caliber of people that we get into this industry after they've been doing other stuff, uh, so we're very, very happy to have you, um, yeah, so I guess unless, courtney, you want to talk a little bit like me, get any of your dying, burning questions out before we hand it off to Jen to start telling us a little bit more about this EcoStruxure stuff and universal automation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, actually I like your words better than my words, nikki, you're just more eloquent than I am on things. I get excited about seeing tech and I'm like yeah take it out, take it out, take it out.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, take it out, take it out, take it out. Oh yeah, there's people too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I really uh, like to your point. Getting to meet you guys and talk to you is always like the best part of this Cause. Like I'll, I'll remember whatever you guys show off today, but I'll remember you more than I will whatever you're about to demo and you know what nikki was saying. I think it's just cool that people can come on and see the different paths, um, you know, into automation and also, just to you know, look at people and be like hey, I look like that, my story sounds like that. I could do that. So thank you guys for being willing and vulnerable to share your stories in front of everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm also going to throw up a few thank yous to some of the people that joined us in the comments. Jose, thank you so much for a few comments, including this passion on it. Yeah, this is. This is important, um, important stuff. I appreciate that, carl.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I don't know, I've struggled with the y'all so a little bit, but I moved here to houston in middle school from iceland via a brief stop in england and I had a really heavy british accent. When I first moved here and people would try to, they would be like, can you say y'all? And they would have me say different words and then make fun of me. So I immediately was like I'm never saying that word, I am not from here, I am not saying that. And then now, you know, many, many years later and with kids and I live here again and I appreciate it, I've started to say it a little bit, but I still default to guys most of the time. So again, that applies to guys in this case. All good, you know, all good intentions for that. Um, uh, yeah, totally Y'all. Hey, from Frisco, okay, so you're pretty local.
Speaker 1:Um, we had a couple of people that I brought up earlier on the screen. Thanks for joining us, leo. Thanks for joining us from Toronto. Let's see. Oh, we have Rafi here from Pakistan. Great to see you, rafi.
Speaker 1:I'm wondering if you're familiar with this platform. I know he works a lot with Ignition, scada and companies that use various different hardware platforms for their operations. He works with a lot of US-based systems integrators and things like that, and he actually flew here to Houston for our OT SkateCon earlier this year. I would love to come. Yeah, absolutely, I'll get you guys in touch, michael. Great to see you. Michael's also an automation engineer with a great systems integrator, growing systems integrator called Mast Owl Technologies, and actually the podcast episode that came out today is recorded with the owner of Mast Owl, alex Poole, and that was an incredible conversation that Ali and I both really enjoyed and we want to collaborate with them more.
Speaker 1:So thank you guys for coming on. Slam dunk, courtney. Yeah, it's absolutely right, and you know, same thing goes for being in the comments and being active. A lot of people they kind of passively consume content, which I don't want to push anybody out of their comfort zone. I just want to encourage you to push yourself out of your comfort zone and I find that you know, our crowd is pretty friendly. If you're into automation, we already really have something in common, like we nerd out about things, so our differences are. I think. To me, the commonalities are much more so. With that said, acknowledging everybody in the comments for joining us, we really appreciate it. Let's dive into what the heck are we talking about today, technology-wise, and Jen, dispel the lingo confusion for us.
Speaker 4:Yes, yes, I will simplify the Schneider Electric meaning of EcoStruxure. So, really, ecostruxure is Schneider Electric's IoT-enabled architecture and platform. It integrates across various solutions, different business units like energy management, automation, sustainability and a more cohesive system. Ecostruxure is what we say helps businesses optimize our operations, improve efficiency, enhance sustainability by leveraging real-time data and analytics. So EcoStruxure is our broad term that we use across the company, so you'll have EcoStruxure in all of our business units. So, specifically, we're all a part of our industrial automation business unit.
Speaker 4:And today we're specifically going to talk about universal automation and universal automation for us. We call it EcoStruxure Automation Expert and that is what Etoro will refer it to. And universal automation is really based off of an IEC standard I think it was set about 15 years ago the 61499 IEC standard that is driven by end users. Exxonmobil, for instance, is actually putting in. So Etoro you talked about ExxonMobil, for instance, is actually putting in. So Toro, you talked about ExxonMobil being a leader in industry and changing. They are this month, and one of their Baton Rouge facilities, ripping out PLCs and putting in a universal automation solution, not just leveraging Schneider Electric EcoStruxure automation expert but leveraging other um companies, products um, that are part of universal automation. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Toro to kind of talk a little bit more details about Schneider Electric's play with EcoStruxure automation expert within the universal automation organization and a little bit about universal universal automation organization.
Speaker 1:Thanks Very cool and I know you can we'll include this, and it was included in some of the event descriptions, but there's a list of all the companies that are members of this on the website, so it's really easy to find. There's definitely like other companies that we've all heard of and worked with, so it seems to be a very good collaboration. Yes, so, just seems to be a very good collaboration. Yes, so just jumping right in.
Speaker 3:So what is Universal Automation? The board? So it's really a not-for-profit organization and it's made up of members from the end-user community, from vendors like Schneider Electric and from nonprofits as well as universities. And what do we agree on? We agree that we came up with a common runtime, so it's a common software for doing your automation right.
Speaker 3:And we're saying that when you use this automation system, it's totally decoupled from the hardware automation system. It's totally decoupled from the hardware, which means traditionally when you get a PLC system, you get, you know, you buy from a certain vendor and you're pretty much locked to that vendor. And so this organization is saying, no, let's decouple the software from the hardware so that end users have that choice to decide what vendor they want to use it for. So think about it. And you know my mom always wonders what I do and I like to explain to her. You know I talk about like Android for control systems. That's pretty much what we do. So if you can think about your iPhone, you're pretty much locked into the iPhone ecosystem, right. And you know we're lining up trying to get upgrades, but still locked to that system, right. And so we are pushing the needle and we're saying let's not do that anymore. Let's give our customers because we've listened to the customers customers let's give them the choice to decide what hardware vendor they want to go with. Right, so it's. It's. It's totally separating, decoupling the software from the hardware so you can take the software and run on multiple hardware infrastructure, as long as they're members of universal Automationorg. So that's pretty much what Universal Automationorg is. It was founded in 2021. It was about 10 members, but now it's over 100 members because the more we're taking the message out we're talking to system integrators, distributors, customers.
Speaker 3:People are saying absolutely, this makes sense. Like we've never gone to anyone who says absolutely doesn't make sense, right? They're saying it makes sense and it's high time we move from the way things were done in the 50s, because now it's 2024. We should have options, and I'm going to steal the word that ExxonMobil uses. They say we need options. Okay, yeah. So we're saying we've heard you, customers, and we're giving you options. So that's pretty much what it is. So EcoStruxure Automation Experts it's an implementation of that standard. It's Schneider Electric's implementation of that standard. It's Schneider Electric's implementation of that standard. Like Jen mentioned, it's based on IEC 61499, which is pretty much function blocks Not gonna steal the thunder, but Toledo is gonna demo that and show how it works Very cool.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty excited about that. My role in kind of the supply chain stuff over the last few years definitely makes me think that a lot of people realize that this in fact does make a lot of sense when you can't finish building something because you can't get the PLC or whatever that is, or you can't get a spare fair right. This at least gives you a lot more resilience in your operations not to be completely locked in to one particular vendor or one particular piece of hardware, absolutely absolutely, because I also worked for a system integrator and you know we're used to, you know, running into issues with projects being delayed because of supply chain issues.
Speaker 3:Anyone remember COVID right, when you had to wait for hardware to come so you could work on your project? So you're not delivering your projects during the timeframe that you promised your customer you were going to deliver the project. So it's just messing up with people's bottom lines. And so now, with this system, you do have flexibility. You're able to deliver your projects within the time that you promised you would right, because you can just pick and choose and you can distribute the control as well within different vendor platforms.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That's what my time at Festo one of the things like that's really important is you want to size the right thing for the job, but sometimes that perfect size isn't in stock or the lead time is long, and so you then really you want those options right? Yes, you may use a sub optimal solution this time, but it, you know, in the grand scheme of delivering or not delivering, it is in fact the optimal solution, right? So to have the ability to kind of mix and match and have, you know, some things like that I was going to say, like spares, or in this case we're talking like valve manifolds, right, slotting different things in and having certain types of sizes maybe in stock, exactly, exactly. I'm going to, just before you dive in, before we dive into the demo, I'm going to answer a couple of questions from the audience. So I apologize.
Speaker 1:I guess we're having a little bit of issue in some cases with buffering and people having to X out. I think our friend David Garcia also told me that during our last live stream he was having trouble. Linkedin was kind of kicking him out of the event and then he'd have to come back in. So if you guys head over to the YouTube Automation Ladies YouTube page. It may be streaming better over there. You can just search for Automation Ladies on YouTube and it should be live streaming there. I know we have at least a couple people over there watching right now. That would be one way.
Speaker 1:And then I wanted to answer this question will there be a recording available? So, absolutely, this is currently streaming, but then we will be available for replay anytime, both on LinkedIn and on YouTube. So our apologies for that. I don't know what's going on. We've never had issues with StreamYard up until about three, four weeks ago, so if this is a continuing problem, we're definitely going to have to look into that. Yeah, so it's apparently a common problem, and we have somebody joining us from brazil. Hello, mariana, thanks for uh joining us. I guess that's one of your team members there, so it's always awesome.
Speaker 1:I think also, you know, as women, we want to see more women represented, so I we like to push any women that we meet that we find their work to be incredible or interesting or whatever, to say like oh go out there and show it more or, you know, represent, but it's also it can be a lot of pressure, it can be some people just aren't used to it, you know, and it's an expectation that shouldn't be put on us just because we need more representation. Now you need to do that in addition to your job and you know, whatever. So I just want to acknowledge that anybody that is, you know, coming out to do it, it's also just really, really nice to have support. It's one of the things we learned at OT Skatecon. We had a lot of first time speakers and it made a huge difference the fact that we talked about ahead of time that hey, if they freeze up or if they, you know, need some help, like let's be a supportive audience, Because and we had people comment on that afterwards that actually was a really enriching part of the experience, because some of the speakers did stumble and kind of like feel awkward, and then everybody cheered them on and then they just got more confident versus, you know, sometimes when a speaker stumbles and they know they've messed up, everything gets more awkward after that because they just lose all their confidence.
Speaker 1:So thank you all friends that come and to support our guests in the comments. I appreciate that. Oh yeah, perfect.
Speaker 3:Yeah, shout out to Audrey who's?
Speaker 4:in who's been mentioning some stuff in the comments. She's yeah, so Audrey works. Yeah, audrey works with us. She's a part of our team up in western New York, so she's helping us out by putting the website there for you, a Toro, where you know where that organization, that non nonprofit organization, is that you know. And one of the things I thought I'd mentioned also is that it's not just end users and manufacturers.
Speaker 1:You do have in universities you've got systems integrators and distributors that are joining the organization as well.
Speaker 3:I mean, there are systems integrators that want to be in the front end of this new technology. Like you said, nikki, I'm going to steal that Win win, win, win.
Speaker 1:All right. So I think we're up for demo and actually perfectly on time. We like to, you know, I like to say we're probably going to talk for the first half hour because I really like to you know, not just get into product, but a little bit of like why the product, why does it matter, why should I care? Why is my attention on this? So I think we've set the stage for that perfectly. So, talita, feel free to share your screen whenever you're ready, and I'll try to arrange everyone around so that we can see things yeah, let me make sure that I shared that.
Speaker 1:Okay, right, are you good?
Speaker 5:yeah, no pressure, there we go, and I don't have to rearrange anybody, just one minute before you guys get me to, to put this on so perfect. No, it's good, it's good, it was just before. Oh, that's good, that's good. So this is um, ecostruxure Automation, expert Engineering Tool. Right, it's EAE for the close friends, which we all are, and we we call it ea. Um, so, um, this is the engineering tool. This is how we, we design and we develop our projects here.
Speaker 5:One thing that I uh, that I like the? Uh the most, and that is different than the traditional automation, uh, traditional poc skater architectures. When we're developing, when you're, when you start a new project, the first thing that you need to decide is where do you want to run, right, what is the hardware that you're going to use for this project? And in here, this will be the last thing because, as Itoro said, we're giving you options. So you just need to think about your process, what you need to develop here, and then later on, you can decide where you're running, and if you want to change that later, it's okay as well. So there's no problem with that, and that is really different here. So, just by installing IAE, you get a bunch of libraries that we develop for you. So we have a lot of things that are already done, the most common things that we use when we're developing projects for our process. We have some segment related stuff. So everything is done here for you. But of course everyone can develop its own library based on our library. So we give you something to start. So there is that, and then here when we're developing, the developing how can I say mentality that we need to have here is very object oriented.
Speaker 5:So in this demo that I brought here for you it's a pumping station demo. So you will see that we have the entire pumping station all encapsulated into one little square here. That's our block, so we can reuse multiple times. So that's easy to do. And what is a pumping station made of? Right? So you can, we can dig into the, into the software, and see what do we have. So we have a block here that will control all of that. And we have our assets, that are the pumps here.
Speaker 5:So the pumps are all laid out here as little blocks, and this is just automation programming. We program the pumping stations. You can do the same way that we always do. But there is something special about the way that we do these blocks here. It's that you're not only doing the control part of it, we also have the SCADA part of it integrated, so you can develop your own symbols and faceplates and everything and all the communication between the HMI and the PLC will be done for you. There is zero effort. It's basically just dragging and dropping objects here. So we just drag and drop the pumps here and the communication is done for you. So this is already everything encapsulated into one block. So later I'll show you guys.
Speaker 5:But to create a new pumping station, it will be pretty simple and this is how we program things here is how we program things here and later on. When we want to decide where I want to run this code on, it's basically click away. So I have a mapping option here where I can decide between all of the hardware that I have here on my project. That I'll show you guys later. Where do I want to run that. So if I want to change right now that it's running on a M580 deep pack and I want to change that to a soft deep pack, I'm just remapping and okay, that's done. So there is no hard time between to change from one platform to the other. Our time to change from one platform to the other.
Speaker 5:Then here I have an example topology here for you to show the flexibility that we have available here we have what we call the Eco-Runtime. That is the runtime that will run in every device. That is part of universal automation. Schneider is not the only vendor that is part of universal automation. Schneider is not the only vendor that is part of universal automation. We have other vendors with universal automation offers as well that can run this runtime. But on Schneider's time we can run the runtime on M251, m262, m580 DPACs. Those are all hardware offers that someone that works with Schneider is already used to.
Speaker 5:But we also give you the option of doing something different, like making your PC a PLC. So you can have a software DPAC running here on my Windows PC. Or I can have like a Raspberry Pi running Linux. That can be a PLC as well, so you can go very small. Or you can run it on a data center server. You can create just a VM, because our Linux PLCs they run on a Docker container, so it can pretty much run anywhere and it's pretty light. What about drives? What about variable frequency drives? On a Docker container, so it can pretty much run anywhere and it's pretty light.
Speaker 4:And then on top what about drives? What about variable frequency drives?
Speaker 5:Yes, so that's another thing that we're also doing different. We have our ATV offer that it's well known, and we have like a very small module that you can just attach to your drive and then your drive can also be a PLC on the network, like I have here, so you can deploy and then it can be a part of a bigger architecture like communicating with all the devices.
Speaker 5:That's pretty unique, right, but if it loses communication for some reason it will also control itself, because you have the PLC embedded on the drive itself, when our customers are doing let's say end-of-life upgrades for the hardware, right?
Speaker 3:Remember, traditionally you're removing everything and you're rewriting your code. But, like Talita is showing here, you know when you want to swap out your hardware, the software still is the same, right? So you don't have to rewrite the software. So you know, that's one of the principles of universal automation. Because it's portable, so you can use it in multiple hardware devices and you don't have to keep rewriting like we do traditionally. So, I'm sorry, Go ahead like we do traditionally. So I'm sorry, Go ahead.
Speaker 5:Awesome. Yeah, no, that's perfect. That's it. We're all about efficiency here, right? So we want to make the engineer's life easier, and I think this is how we do it right? So we want to make the engineer's life easier and I think this is how we do it right. You have the flexibility to remap from one to the other. You have the flexibility of having the HMI designed with the controls and then inside one object, you have everything done for you.
Speaker 5:And another thing here as well usually when we have an application with multiple PLCs, we need to configure communication between the PLCs. You'll spend a lot of time doing that In here. All of those PLCs here, even the drive one, the one that runs on the PC they all talk to each other without any effort. Just by connecting one block that is mapped on one device to the other, they're communicating. You don't need to configure anything. So we're also saving you time doing that. Then in here also, when we're using EAE, we're all about the data. We want to make the data available to you. We want to help you take your decisions based on data. So we communicate using every industrial protocol that is available, but we also have, for example, an OPC UA server natively in each one of those PLCs. So if you're running in, we call it the ATVD pack, the version for the drive. So if you're using that, this will also be an OPC UA server on top of being a PLC. So that's also very nice.
Speaker 1:If you don't mind, I'm going to interrupt you for a sec, though, and see, Courtney, what are you thinking. I don't do PLC programming myself, so I haven't even seen, like all of the, as many of these IDEs as you have.
Speaker 2:I like this one for how graphical it is compared to a lot of others. Like you get into function block and you can kind of make a little boxy looking thing that connects to other things. But this is. You know, I like how this looks and I like that the SCADA is built in. Like the stuff you have to do to talk to SCADA is already built in. And obviously I'm a robot chick. So my brain always goes to how do I use this to talk to robots? Because that's a lot of times what I'm using a PLC to do. So I'm curious, like if I I want to choose, like different industrial protocols, could I make these talk to any robot? Or like where would I run into a challenge? There is what I'm really curious about.
Speaker 5:Yeah, regarding protocols, we can configure almost all of them. We have Internet, ip Modbus, tcp, opc way, mqtt Courtney, maybe that question would also be answered. We're kind of doing everything here. So you have the option to configure. It's up to the user, but we're giving you the ability of doing all this.
Speaker 1:There's automation types that go into that. I haven't read it myself, but and there's a link to it right, it's in the like first page of the link that Audrey provided provide some background information into the organization and then, as well as the standards, information. But yeah, I just wanted to I know that you know your questions are going to be, or your comments are going to be, more technique related, so I wanted to bring that up and then maybe we can just get to that a little bit later. I don't know if you guys want to bring this up now, but Ralphie's asking a question, you know, maybe we can address it at the end. But to kind of understand how similar this is or different from CODISIS yes, I could start.
Speaker 3:So, yes, it's almost like CODISIS, but it's a little bit different. So CODISIS is based on the 613. I'm not a CODISIS.
Speaker 5:Are you going to answer that, Itona?
Speaker 3:But this is based on let's say, it's 1499 standards, right? So this is based on function blocks. Codecs is not Codecs. Yes, it's open, it's kind of similar, but it's not truly open. With this it's truly when we say it's truly vendor agnostic. It is so you can take this code and run it, even on our competitor's hardware, and you don't need to recompile or anything like that. So it's truly when we say it's open. It's truly open, like you could take this and not even buy a Schneider hardware and run it and it would work.
Speaker 1:Of course this kind of has different flavors for different vendors. Yeah exactly, but they all kind of have their own way of running it right. As far as I'm concerned, yeah, but this is truly, truly open. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then I guess if you're okay with it.
Speaker 1:we'll take one more question before we move on in the demo and then a comment. But how old of ATV firmwares will work with this system? Is this a question we can take? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah, usually when we install the Deepak module, we usually update the firmware, each version that we have here will have its own firmware.
Speaker 1:Very cool, I guess. I'll throw out a comment here. You could even run the UAO virtual PLC runtime on a robot.
Speaker 5:You can do it without a problem, so we will update both of them together.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, courtney, did you hear?
Speaker 3:that. Yeah, that's good news, right, that's good news.
Speaker 5:Between you and Albert. I know that he also is probably going to geek out about the Skata server stuff and whatnot.
Speaker 2:I've got a robot in my garage, I want to put it on it. Yeah, somebody help me do it. The Skata server stuff and whatnot. I've got a robot in my garage, I want to put it on it.
Speaker 1:Somebody help me do it. Let's make a follow-up. I'll make it all the content. Let's keep going. We've got what about 13 minutes left?
Speaker 5:Let's do it. Let's do it. Follow me after this. Yeah, so all I really wanted to show was the HMI, because there's also no configuration here on the communication to the HMI, because we usually need to go over, even if it's OPC, ua, you need to configure the tags, but here done for you. So we just have a general map here with pumping stations that you can do, and then we can navigate and we can see the system running. It's controlling the level, just based on a set point, a very simple control here.
Speaker 5:And then I just want to show you how easy it will be, for example, to create a new pumping station. So, for example, I have five pumping station, I will create the sixth one. So just by copying and pasting, it's done here, my pump station number six, and I, for example, want to run it on this softdpac here. So I have multiple options. I just select one of them, all of those that I was showing in the picture Just now. They're here laid out for me. So I just select, and because it has this green single here, I know that it's mapped. Then I can just deploy to this one. Let me show you.
Speaker 1:I'm keeping myself mostly muted because up until now my dog was just whining.
Speaker 5:I'm going to deploy, and then we will create the HMI and we'll see how I'll pop in and out on the audio how easy it will be too.
Speaker 5:Okay, no problem. So I'm just deploying here, and while we do that, I will just create a new pumping station screen. So I just need to wait until it finishes compiling, but I will just create a pumping station screen, drag and drop, and everything will be done for us. So that's very nice. So let me yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We also, on top of that, we have a very good integration with Aviva, so we can integrate from your engineering drawings to generate the objects here and then from here we can generate the objects on a VivaSystem platform, so that you also don't have to configure communication, create the symbols, the objects and everything. So we also give you that. So I'll just create a pumping station here, my pumping station 6. Then, when I do this, everything is just done for me and then that's pretty much it. We're good to start a new pumping station Right on top of that. What we would have to do, being realistic here, is just configure the IOs, but the logic and everything will be done by you.
Speaker 3:And it took a really long time. So if you're a customer and you have engineers and you have projects that you have to do, think about using EcoStruxure Automation Expert to do those projects and think about the engineering efficiency and how much quicker you'll do the work. And it's uniform too right, so you're not introducing any coding mistakes or backfinger mistakes like we used to have, because this is just drag and drop like very easy to do. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's here, our pumping station six. I just missed the station name in here, but it's running, it's communicating and we don't need to configure basically anything here. So after you have your, library designed.
Speaker 1:It will be so easy for you to move forward and reuse and increment.
Speaker 5:on that yeah.
Speaker 1:That's one of the features that I like the most here. I won't tell you how many engineering hours we're putting on those HMI screens and stuff right now, but I you know. Oh, really, maybe there's something to be said about the Department of Efficiency for a lot of these ways that we're doing things.
Speaker 5:Oh yeah, we can save us some time of efficiency for a lot of these ways that we're doing things Absolutely. Oh yeah, we can save us some time.
Speaker 4:Well and that's where we're spending a lot of our time right now is in the water-wastewater segment, but really any oil and gas as well. You know these are energy and chemicals. You know these are all areas of efficiencies that can be driven and it allows you. I think the one thing I like that you say when you talk about this, is that it can be scalable, right, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hope it's okay. It can be scalable. Is that it can?
Speaker 4:be, scalable right, absolutely yeah, I hope it's okay. It can be scalable and as time goes on, there's going to be more and more vendors that have more of their products to plop on the network as well. So think about I was going to say, think about everything that can be connected to the internet and how you would want, or anything that could be connected to the system that you would want to collect data. Yeah, and we love to hear you know from real life use cases whether it's kind of either from integrators or from end users.
Speaker 1:And so I know you've mentioned before that you guys have kind of an evangelist over at Exxon that's currently implementing a lot of this, so we're hoping that maybe he would like to come speak at ot skater con to give us a you know, play by play or or the real world, like, hey, we did this, this is why we did it, this is how we did it, and, yeah, we have a few. Uh, we have another question from rafay uh, asking what about learning resources? Is there training for this website? Where do people want to go if they want to start getting familiar with this?
Speaker 3:yes, we've got. I'm sorry to interrupt. Yes, we've got training. We've got training on schneider electriccom. So secom, or you could also reach out to us. We could, you know, send you, point you to the right direction. But absolutely we want to empower people to play with the software, try it out and how much, like all the things we talked about, how cool it is, how efficient it is. So, yes, we are, we want to train you, we want to get people trained so you can play with it. Because if we just give the software to you and you don't have any training, it could be not very good, right? Because now you're like this is a different way of doing things, right? So, very good question on the training. Yes, on SchneiderElectriccom. You'll see all the training there. Or you could reach out to us on LinkedIn. We'll send you the exact training links.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would highly encourage all of you that watch this either now live or watch this later. Connect with these ladies on LinkedIn. They're tagged as the speakers of this event on LinkedIn. They're here to, you know, kind of grow awareness about this in the community. We've got three different representations of areas from you know, within this, practice at Schneider, practice at Schneider, and they're, you know, open to networking with you and answering your questions or pointing you in the right direction, whether that's right now or, you know, six months from now when you watch this, but also if you're going to spend your time coming to something like this right during the workday.
Speaker 1:Usually we hope that it's a little bit entertaining, but of course you have to have a business reason and a lot of times again, if you're watching this out of more of a learning, curiosity standpoint, having just those connections later on, for when a business use case does come along, can be huge, right, because you may not remember everything you saw in the demo. Thankfully, you can come back and watch it anytime. But then having that person that you can reach out to or that you remember and I always encourage people if you connect with a person you don't know on LinkedIn through an event like this, either just say, hey, we were both on this event. Or, in this case, if it's a speaker, my favorite tip and I started doing this recently is I take a picture of the speaker while on the stage. Or, in this case, what you could do is take a screenshot of this and be like, hey, great job, I just saw your talk. Or, even better, post about it and tag that person. And then, when your friend request comes along, you bet that person's going to click accept, right, because you showed them that you were there, that you were interested, that you're friendly. And we all get enough like spam invitations from developers or whoever nowadays on LinkedIn, right? So it's just.
Speaker 1:I think the value of those quality personal connections keeps going up. The more we have ai and bot and just unsolicited activity all around us all the time. It becomes so nice to have a real trusted network of people that you can, you know, know, have some expertise backing up what they're talking about and you can reach out to them on your own time. Uh, so we have leo over. He says you have my attention. So, leo, I hope you'll be ready to learn more, and it looks like we have another friend here that maybe a couple of you know. I do know him and happy to see a fellow Brazilian here as well. But then he says back when I worked as an automation engineer. Absolutely, I was just speaking to. Happy to see a fellow Brazilian here as well, but then he says I wish he had a tool to use back when I worked as an automation engineer.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I was just speaking to some people this week. I remember when I started in automation. You know learning logic when I started working because it wasn't taught in schools and it took me months to be able and Courtney is nodding because you know that.
Speaker 2:It's not taught in universities.
Speaker 3:So you start working and they start teaching you and it takes you months to be able to program on your own and you're shadowing the senior engineers, right. So think about all the people that are, you know, retiring from the workforce and all the young engineers coming in. They're going to have time to learn ladder logic. What if we gave them a program that they're used to? They're familiar with function blocks, they're familiar with the look and feel of it. These guys can be productive in weeks. So think about your bottom line. If you're a project manager and you're trying to get projects done, right, you have people coming in from the streets pretty much who can help move the needle and be productive from you know, in weeks instead of months like in my day. So this is huge benefits. Not enough time to talk about everything, but that's a huge one. The workforce, the new workforce this is a huge thing, changer for sure.
Speaker 1:And I know one of the ways we've always done things in this industry is kind of keep it internal and then say there's a limited number of people and they know all of this and it's really valuable. And then everybody goes after those same people back and forth, and then they end up using the same stuff. Let say, well, we can only find people that know this. Um, and oh we, we go with this because we know that you know there's going to be technicians around that we can hire, that know how to do this already. Well, there's just not enough of them to go around anymore and we're not making a whole lot more of them unless we bring the kids that are graduating now into and and I know, some of these new mechatronics programs.
Speaker 1:So we work with a student from a central Virginia community college. She already graduated from there, but now she just got into a bachelor's mechatronics degree. Um, I won't say the wrong college because I don't remember exactly what college, but seeing it as a bachelor's degree, it's not that common. I mean, there's more and more of them now, but seeing this in school especially or if you don't see it in school, have it be close enough to things you've already learned makes a huge difference. I think for and I say kids. Right, but we were all like 21.
Speaker 1:We wouldn't call ourselves kids, definitely not oh yes or even someone without a college degree right Like a mechatronics associate's degree. Those are becoming more and more common and you can definitely get up to speed on something like this super quickly and we need to be able to attract more people.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, and it's transferable mickey. It's transferable for for um computer science. I mean there's there's three times or four times in many computer science for people that are adjacent to this industry to feel like they can come in and they're not going to have a huge learning curve.
Speaker 1:That's impossible to get without going to specialty trainings that cost lots and lots of money or that they're going to be gatekept from any of these jobs because they don't know. Xyz hardware platform um, I think it makes the industry more inclusive in general as well for the tech to be more inclusive and more connected. A few more comments. Oh, carrie pierce is here. She's a machine vision integrator. She just recently had an anniversary at her company. Congratulations, carrie. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1:Leo, yeah, he wants to teach this to his students, so get him in touch with whoever is in the education space there as well. And then just some kind feedback. Thank you, param. That's really nice of you to say. He says thank you for the presentation. He's glad to be. I guess he's part of the schneider team.
Speaker 1:Um, and we had another, uh, great feedback here from ronald. Thank you so much for the amazing presentations and fantastic live demo. Um, yes, you did a fantastic job to lita and thank you a minute of it, so it really makes what we do worth it to hear that. It's worth it to you guys as well that are watching, although I will be frank with you. Um, I've always said this to Allie and Courtney like we don't do this for the audience, we don't research what you guys want to see and, you know, try to build out a campaign. We have the conversations that we want to have and we want to look at the stuff that we're interested in and I think just I want to be transparent about that, because that's really where this comes from. It's the only way that we're able to do it with the workloads that we have is it has to be interesting, it has to like fill our cup versus drain it. To do this, and when we hear some feedback that other people love it as well, it just makes it that much more enjoyable for me. So, for selfish reasons, I'm going to say I'm glad you loved it. We're going to keep doing it, keep showing up and keep telling us that.
Speaker 1:You know, maybe this sales stuff doesn't have to be done the same way as we've been doing it. Coming from a sales engineer a former sales engineer myself there's a lot of great things about a lot of the ways that we used to do things in the automation industry from a sales and relationship building perspective, but there's just a lot more. I mean, the future is kind of like these, maybe smaller communities that are connecting in different ways in different places, small communities part of one big kind of industry community. So with that, I would say we are up on time and go ahead and connect with these ladies, follow some of the links that we'll drop in the comments and keep engaging on this and then honestly drop to us as well.
Speaker 1:You can drop us a voicemail on our website, automationladiesio, or a message to us on LinkedIn. You can message the page. You can also email hello at automationladiesio, and we'd love to hear if you have any suggestions of other demos that you'd like to see. If you're the marketing person for a company and you want to pitch our demo, we're going to ask you to sponsor it. But if you're one of our community members that watches and you just have a particular product that you're really interested in seeing demoed, we will most likely reach out to that company and offer them to come demo it for us, because if you're interested, we probably are too. So with that. Oh, also one more thing If you're watching on YouTube, would you please hit that subscribe? We don't put, we don't edit our YouTube video, so we don't have SEO or click thumbnails or they say smash that like button.
Speaker 1:We've been learning from our kids what we're supposed to do to grow. So go ahead and subscribe it and if you ever find it in your heart to leave us a kind review on our website or anything, we would also really appreciate that. So thank you, ladies, so much for spending a little time with us here on this Thursday. I think we are super stoked to keep learning about this and maybe trying it on our robot and seeing what else we can do with this.
Speaker 1:Absolutely it on our robot and seeing what else we can do with this.
Speaker 2:Absolutely sure, I'll be.
Speaker 1:I'll be in your dm shortly yeah, everybody get to work, connect with each other.
Speaker 3:Have fun, let's learn, let's grow together, and even if you're not using this, there's a benefit for you knowing about it.
Speaker 1:So thanks everybody. Have a great rest of your week, uh, and we will be uh coming to you live, probably in some way shape or form um from anaheim next week, as we're going to visit courtney. So have a great rest of your week, everybody.
Speaker 3:Bye thank you, bye, thank you bye, bye.
