Spotlight on SAGE.

Members of the delivery team behind a lower-cost remote telemetry project were able to present the solution at this year’s Ignition Community Conference in Folsom, California.

Ignition Community Conference, also known as ICC, is Inductive Automation’s annual global conference.

This year’s event saw a return to in-person presentations, with a virtual event scheduled to take place from October 3-5. In its 10^th year, ICC showcases forward-thinking solutions delivered using Ignition.

SAGE Group presented a recent project, titled ‘Exploring the next generation of remote telemetry monitoring’, which showed the impact of installing an Ignition solution across a regional council’s wastewater system.

The presentation, delivered by SAGE Automation’s Scott Avis, and Alexandrina Council’s Manager Sustainable Resources, Gary Lyons, was a project finalist in the Discover Gallery and demonstrates a solution that has seen the council gain real-time visibility, consolidated and scalable data, and optimised resource allocation.

The system was recognised for its use of IoT technologies and MQTT, as well as the implementation of a ‘mobile first’ approach, which allowed the operations personnel to utilise the full functionality of the SCADA system on their mobile phone, as well as handheld tablet and desktop PC.

Read the project overview in Ignition’s Discover Gallery

SAGE Senior Systems Engineer, Scott Avis, presents at ICC 

About the project

Alexandrina Council, based in South Australia, is one of the fastest growing regions of SA and experiences a significant population swell during the summer months as visitors arrive. For the council to account for this additional demand, as well as to improve the security and efficiency of their operations, they engaged SAGE to deliver an upgrade.

The council had more than 300 remote sites across at least six independent SCADA technologies and had very limited to no remote accessibility. This created a difficult asset environment to manage and meant maintenance teams were constantly traveling to collect data and spot-check the status of the different systems.

The council’s wastewater team had the vision to provide access to information from anywhere and to utilise data to drive their decision-making process in the same way that large water authorities are able to do.

Alexandrina Council's operators now have access to critical data on mobile, tablet, and desktop. 

Covering a large geographic area, the ability to use mobile devices was an important consideration, to ensure critical data could be accessed from anywhere in order to reduce the need for operators to attend sites to check alarms.

The solution implemented by SAGE has not only considered the way operators need to access data, but also how the system could be maintained with future growth.

Deployed in October 2021, the council has already seen many benefits from its rollout, including the improvement of on-call support.

Prioritising alarms, reducing travel time, and performance-based maintenance create direct cost savings for the council, allowing funds to be redirected towards expansion plans. It also provides the council with the core infrastructure for analytics and machine learning tools to increase those savings even further.

SAGE has been implementing Ignition solutions for more than 11 years, achieving Premier Integrator status in 2019.