Uniting Expertise with Sarah and Jessica at BBP (Linkedin Live)

This week Nikki and Ali speak with Sarah Sonnier, Data Scientist and Jessica Williams, Controls Engineer at BBP. 

They discuss the challenges of integrating IT and OT,  AI's usefulness in tasks like programming (with some human intervention), and the story of the dynamic duo's origins.

Transcript

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another live episode of Automation Ladies. We've got four of us today.  Me and Allie.  If you don't know us,  hi, I'm Nikki Gonzalez, one of your hosts. And I'm Allie G, the other one. Yeah, there you go.  And we have two guests today that wouldn't come except as a pair. And that's the only way that we would want it because we met them as a pair at ICC last year and that is the ignition community conference  put on by inductive automation.

They are, well, I guess I'm not going to describe what they are.  Maybe you guys can get into that. But, yeah,  actually we, Ali and I did a talk and we had no idea that it was being live streamed around the world and then,  inductive automation was so nice as to post it yesterday. And, yeah, so that is out there along with the transcript and the full video.

Even if you're not,  an ignition community member or didn't go to ICC, I think initially this stuff was gated, but you can actually watch the whole video. I probably shouldn't be telling people this. Um,  no, it's official. It's officially out after, like, a specific it was a long wait, though. There's a there's a waiting period until the general public can, but it's out now.

So you can come watch it.  And one of the lessons that happened. Yeah. One of the many lessons we learned was that our polos are not flattering on stage whatsoever.  But that's all right. We live and we learn. That's our style here at Automation Ladies. So Sarah and Jessica, thank you guys so much for coming on with us.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us. So, um, I wanted to, I guess let's take, , one at a time and, , if you guys can tell us kind of an introduction, let's start with just a quick, like who you are and where you're at, where you're calling in from, it looks like you guys are both at home or maybe, Sarah, you're in the office, but yeah, tell us who you work for and where you're at.

And then we'll, I'll ask kind of your personal background story again.  In a separate question, Jessica, can you go first? Yeah, sure. So I'm Jessica Williams controls engineer and I am I'm working remote.  So I live in Daphne, Alabama, our home office is Baton Rouge. And so we both work for BVP and we have an IOT brand called site sync, which specifically is what Sarah and I kind of work for.

And so we do a lot of integration, trying to make IOT really easy to. Scale and deploy. And so specifically it's more away in communication that we're focused on. So we, as Sarah can tell you all about does some software development and have kind of an offering that makes it really easy to join sensors to a network.

 And so that's who we work for Sarah, I'll pass it over to you.  Hey, I'm Sarah Sonia and I am in the office in Baton Rouge.  I borrow someone's office. It's very cushy, but yeah, we work at VPP. I've been here about 5 years. Jess has been here 3 and I don't know. It's just like a really fun place to work.

I really enjoy working with Jess. We really just like that new level, especially coming in and working on tech together, something new. Like, it's good to have a. Pair or partner to work with it. We just found out each other.  Yeah. And how did you find that at the same company? I know  traditionally,  you know, women are scarce to start with and then kind of women, your age or women that you have something else in common with, or actually jive with is a whole nother thing from just having some women around.

So we could tell immediately when we guys met when we met you guys in Folsom that that there was definitely a friendship there in addition to being colleagues. So that's really cool. Do your does your job allow you to work like hybrid flexible from home? Or do you guys have full time work from home and full time in office positions? 

We're flexible. We believe that you work best do. I guess you should work where you work best. So for some people, that's fully remote. Some people that's in the office. I come in the office often because I'm dealing with hardware sensors, and it's easier for me to troubleshoot that in person than asking someone else to troubleshoot it.

But I wasn't touching sensors.  Do you think do you feel you would have that flexibility  where, like, you know,  if you couldn't and someone had to, could you get someone to actually help you? Like, do that?  But that's really cool and that's very unique to jobs. I think that's it is very unique, especially for an engineering firm.

I feel like. Especially right here. Absolutely. It is. Yeah. That's the flexibility of the future. I'm working from home today. I actually hate working from home.  I do. I have a full time remote position, but I choose to go into an office because my children are small and they currently stay at home. They're homeschooled by their dad in,  They'll be going to school, like away from the house in the fall.

So I might start working from home more often. And then, yeah, I guess we'll ask our, normal 1st question,  and again, maybe we'll start with you, Jessica. But can you give us a little bit of a background as to how you got into working on in the industrial automation space? Did you know anything about being a controls engineer?

Like, early on? Or what was that journey for you to get to where you are now? Yeah, not at all.  So I started in this kind of pursuit of controls engineering in college. And honestly, I was looking for a job in Birmingham area because I was trying to stay for the summer in Tuscaloosa cause I went to UA.

 And so I was just  searching around for any place where they would hire chemical engineers, which is what I was majoring in at the time. And so I was searching around, I came across PVP actually, and applied for a controls engineering internship. Not really knowing much about what it was.  I knew it was automation and I thought it sounded really cool.

And that was about all I knew. And so I got that internship started and then had,  Stephanie Funk at our company teach me everything about DCS. Um, distributed control system. So I learned that that's kind of where I got my start and I started, , doing the programming there. I came on full time after a few terms of an internship with PVP doing DCS.

And then recently I've switched over to IIoT. And so I  got really excited. We had a group, That  had been doing a lot of it. Sarah was spearheading a ton of it,  where they were really making strides and making this really easy, making it a possibility for companies to deploy at scale really easily.

So I got really interested in it and,  moved over to that team. And so that's kind of where, how I got to where I am, but it worked out really well too, because a lot of this stuff is like a intersection between it and OT. And so coming from that OT space and then having Sarah and all these data science.

Experts on the side. It's cool to be able to represent both of those sides. Very cool. So you said you found out about controls engineering kind of in college. What made you want to get into chemical engineering?  So that was just something in high school. I really. I came from a family of engineers and I feel like that's  the classic like everybody who grew up in a family of engineers becomes an engineer.

 And so I kind of knew from an early age I wanted to do that and then, , fell in love with chemistry and the industrial process involved with that. And so chemical engineering was just kind of the easy choice from there. I'm curious about which DCSs like you were introduced to because  For your age, like that's awesome.

Like, should I like know about DCS and been exposed to it? Yeah, no, it was a huge blessing. I feel like any other company I wouldn't have gotten to do nearly as much. And so that's why I absolutely loved BBP and went full time. But it was Yokogawa was the brand, DCS, that we covered.  Very cool. Sarah, how about you?

 I came to UP as an intern as well.  I'm actually from the business school at LSU. So we have like an information systems degree and I really wanted to be a data scientist. I hear business to business degree. Yep. Yep. I come from my dad's an engineer. But I went the other way  and then had to merge the two somehow, right? 

Yes. Yes. That's been quite the journey coming for business. Oh, I can balance with accounting and I can do economics. I'm like, oh, and there's TCO over IP. Like what?  But I was looking for an internship. I wanted to be a data scientist. My husband's actually in the industrial field. So I was helping him look for jobs.

And I was looking, can't pass BVP. I was like, wow, I'm doing data science. That's pretty cool. And I came in to a job.  The entire, like, IT OT, that's literally,  the most perfect, like, yeah, bestie story I've ever heard,  between IT and OT because all they do is this,  all day long, so I love that that's your guys , origin story, basically, , oh my god. 

The opposite of what you're going to see, like, mostly out there right now,  right? It's convenient when you get on calls with customers, too, because I never feel like I'm, , going into it alone. You know, if I'm on a call with an I. T. team,  I'm like, always bringing Sarah,   please  answer these hard questions.

It's a totally different language that that's, I think, 1 of the biggest reasons they fight so much is they both need,  I. P. I. addresses, right? But outside of that,  those devices are not the same and servers are not VFD drives.  And so , it's just like  this battle of speaking totally different languages and even requesting totally different  language.

, like my most recent, uh, Work endeavor includes,  having to talk to an I. T. Department that can only speak, you know,  destination I. P. And source I. P. And all these other terms that I've never heard of until I took my trace route,  training trace route con shout out to Josh Varghese. Um, but yeah, I think that was really good.

The trace route. Oh, your audio is back. Good. I was about to give everybody, uh, James Davis gave some good advice. He said the audio was choppy, but the captions picked it up perfectly. So if there's any further audio issues, everybody just make sure to turn on your captions. That's pretty good. The AI is getting better. 

Is that something that you guys talk about at work at all? AI?  Are you using it? Are you not using it? Are you scared of it?  What are your thoughts? Yeah, Sarah, I'll let you speak to that. All right. I'm going to try.  I use a lot of like, co pilot and my daily work. I do a lot of programming.

So it's really helpful. It builds on a lot of the blanks and helps flesh out things for me. It's like having, a toddler come and like. Flesh out an idea for you, but it's not all the way there.  Yeah, it kind of gets it. Um, I appreciate the keystroke savings like that's awesome, but I don't know maybe another 10 years I could I'll be nervous but not at this point  Yeah I don't think personally I don't think it's ever going to replace any of us that need to interact with other people and You know, like what you guys in doing meetings,  there's just zero Chance that ai could do that.

I think it is a useful tool, but I like your description of it being like a toddler because it's like sometimes I'm like, wait, the number of iterations it took for it to get what I wanted. Like, was that actually helpful? And like you said, it's great when you're like, want to fill in the blanks a little bit or structure something a little bit.

But it's interesting to see. I mean, it is moving fairly fast. So I would, yeah.  Sometimes I think like, oh, yeah, this is it's going to take forever for it to get that good. And then you see something like the new,  image generation, like the video generation. And you go, whoa, that took a leap real fast.

Right? So, I'm just curious and interested to see for sure where it's going, but I think in our industry in particular, it's not like. There's a mass market that's the same as like consumer applications or deep tech. So,  yeah, I don't know.  Everybody has their different thoughts on it. But I remember, so I took the ICC transcript from the video that I mentioned earlier, and I asked chat to turn the transcript of the talk into a, an article, just like to try to take it from, you know, Nikki said, and then Ali said, And  it did like two tries and it condensed it into a very generic description and I was like, nevermind, nevermind, I guess that's what the prompt engineering is for people that actually know what they're doing.

So,  I validated over to Emily Merritt instead, because she actually knows how to use those things  for good content.  Yeah, fair enough. No, it is a learning curve to try and get something productive back.  Yeah. So you really have to train it. Like I would say maybe it's like a low level intern that if you really want to put the effort in to help that person get up to speed on actually being helpful, then I'm sure you can.

Yeah. But sometimes it's faster to just do it yourself. Yeah, somebody gave me code from a flow computer the other day, and they're like, could you transform this into Python so we could put into ignition? And I had never seen this code before. So I popped that into chat to BT and I was like, could you make this Python?

And that was very helpful because I had no context for what this flow computer was doing, what language it was like, that was pretty cool. Oh, yeah, yeah,  and it does it can do all kinds of things. Like, yeah, translate. I'm always trying to think of, like, is this a good thing to try it with or not? Um,  yeah,  other than sensitive information and data, unless you have your own corporate AI, that's with its own, you know.

All of its own rules and things like that,  then you have to just be careful what you put into chat. Absolutely. Is is, uh, ICC last year where we met the 1st time that you've been or have you been,  years before. So, that was my 1st, Sarah, you've been to a couple, right? I've been to two. So we went last year as a, we exhibited, right, Jess, last year, and we did a little tiny talk at the beginning of the ICC, and they were like, oh, there should be eight people there, and it was packed.

Y'all's was packed, too. Like, there was standing room only. We couldn't even get in. Yeah,  at first there was not very many people and I was like, oh, this is fun. Like, not that I mind speaking in front of people, but I was like, yeah, of course, not that many people are going to come see our talk. And then by the time it actually started.

Yeah, it was, it was pretty full. It was a great time. Do you go to industry events often? Or is that kind of a treat for you guys? We've done it pretty often in the past couple years.  Just kind of, we have a live demo that we'll take around of  the sensor ad. We do like a QR scan sensor ad and it goes into Ignition tag browser.

And so we definitely brought that to ICC because it was Ignition, but we'll take it around to other trade shows as well. So we're doing that pretty often lately.  Just to get in front of customers and be able to make it something they can see instead of just hear about. Yeah, it's really nice to meet people in person.

Yeah, so Allie and I, Allie, do you want to talk a little bit about OT SkaterCon?  Yeah,  so again, shout out to, TraceRootCon, which I think it was the first time he's ever done it as like a Open event. I think he'd normally just like does, you know, two days of his training and it is like Josh varghese is like personal experience basically 15 years of experience where he actually started in plc's and then transferred into industrial control or industrial networking and  Yeah, so anyway  trace root con inspired ot skater con ot skater con is my version of covering Within two days basically and understanding that people's attention span is you know, 30 minutes for like new information And also with the idea that  I don't want to talk for two days straight, which is how josh does his and Uh putting all those ideas together Um, I came up with ot skater con and have asked, you know, a lot of my friends that are  really smart at what they do,  and really experienced at what they do,  in different, , places in our industry to come and talk for 30 minutes about , their section.

And some of these sections includes, uh, PLCs,  HMIs, VFDs, like types of IO,  servo drives. Process instrumentation, process equipment,  like discreet machinery.  There's a SCADA screen section. There's a, there's an IOT like, or IIOT and industry 4. 0 section. There's a preventative maintenance section.

 There's a section for historians. Obviously ignition will be mentioned in there.  So we'll factory talk, cause we're gonna have to talk about like what is used in the U S  or North America really.  And, each section,  includes hardware, software,  and like examples, and then like how to buy it.

So , like real hardware examples. So there's a theory, but like we're going to limit theory to  you know, five minutes in the beginning of something and then really go into like, how do you use this information that we're giving you? And we have teachers from all across the board. Caleb Travis is actually known as like the PID loop,  Wrangler.

 And he is from Texas.  And so  he's actually one of the main teachers.  On top of Courtney Fernandez  so there's just like everywhere from you know The robotic side to the process side because that's kind of the way that like pce works  but all of us coming together to collaborate and  teach Stuff that we  are extremely passionate about and that's part of why we think that like it's going to be a big deal And it's going to be a big event and you should get your tickets Before March 31st,  and the reason  I'm sorry to hijack.

This is your interview, Jessica and Sarah, but  the interplay between you guys and your expertise and how you work together on projects. That's 1 of the ways that we want to see smaller systems integrators,  even bigger ones, bigger ones and smaller ones, right? Everybody has different strengths and capacity constraints and things like that.

And being able to. Even if it's not your core area, being able to speak each other's language enough to collaborate. We think is really important, and so I went to that training at Josh's training as well, and I don't have a need for network training. , I'm not going to touch that in my job, but I do work with a lot of people that do work on that stuff.

And I work with people that need to buy. You know, routers and switches and all kinds of things like that. Firewalls,  cabling, even connectors, right? And so the more I know about the applications and, you know, the needs and the struggles and things like that, and the resources that people need around that, the more helpful I can be in my job.

Add a little bit of value, I can make recommendations and I just think the more that we get together and kind of learn a little bit of each other's language a little bit of each other's areas of expertise. We can be that much more powerful and connecting the dots for customers. Who  necessarily don't know, maybe a whole lot of any of it.

Right? But they need to know how to get the resources who to work with. And I think we, as, you know, the service providers to the manufacturers,  the more we can have that kind of community spirit and point them in the right direction. If we aren't. What they need,  the more we all benefit, 

do you agree with that statement or how do you guys feel about, you know, collaboration  in the community in the industry? I think ICC or the ignition community is a great example of that. Everyone we've met. There's been so helpful and sharing and it's great community to be a part of, but definitely.

Again, with me ingesting it and OT, like being able to work together and say like, Oh, this is my expertise. This is your expertise. Can you help me out? And honestly, like the space that we're in is really complicated. There's so many layers. So it's a networking side. There's a hardware side. There's the middleware to make it all work together.

It's a lot for a customer to come in and be like the master and then know exactly what. Every piece needs to be so they come to us to say, Hey, I need this to work. Can you make it work? Jessica, can you make it work? And yeah, we absolutely can. Maybe not by ourselves, but we can absolutely find somebody who can make it work.

Right? Yeah. No. And I love what you said too, about just like learning each other's languages. That's something I've seen with me and Sarah as well. Like you could have a short conversation with Sarah and think she was a controls engineer, or you could maybe have a short conversation with me. And so it's just such a cool thing because, yeah, you're building credibility with customers because you're able to speak to something knowledgeably, just because you spend a lot of time talking to somebody who's an expert at that.

So we love what you guys are doing with that. That O. T. skater con. We would love to be involved. We should talk to you guys about the I. O. T. section because that sounds awesome. But I think. You're doing a really cool thing about just like pulling people together. And yeah, anytime I get the opportunity to learn things from Sarah and her team, I absolutely want to because it just makes you that much more confident going into a call or going in person and having a discussion in a trade show with somebody who doesn't necessarily do exactly what you do.

 You can still kind of discuss on their level instead of trying to bridge the gap. Absolutely, that's a great point. So, speaking about IOT, I feel like I hear that a lot.  Oh, hello. We have a little guest, even though she's not supposed to be here. This is this is Elsa. Everybody else.  And then can you please  hi Elsa out there?

Thank you.  Yeah, we haven't had a child or dog interruptions on the show since I stopped recording at home. Just gotta roll with it sometimes.  Makes it more fun. It's good. Do you have any cats that can visit today, Allie? Um, she was on the table before we started, but like, yeah, she left. She got mad at me. I don't think she wanted the lights. 

Yeah, I've got this like ring light.  Um, but yeah, we were talking about I IOT. Oh, yeah 

The industrial internet of things is not just  So I like when I think of IOT, I think about people  automating their house Okay, so that's what I think i'm like, okay,  you have an app and  you can  do  everything  in the app,  you know To your house temperature lights, like, whatever can move,  if you can actuate it somehow, like, they figured it out.

But,  the Internet of things has been very slow in the industrial world until, you know, now we have tools and things are exploding.  But  for a long time, you know, we had a very, very, very slow way of updating anything.  And by the way, these systems are all out there right now, and they are dying to be replaced by something that is smarter than than what's there, because there is still customers that are totally under utilizing their data.

And so,  that's why I  put and the word industry 4. 0 together, because. They're,  you know, buzzwords, but they're related to like a strategy that has to be used,  because of the fact that like data is so incredibly,  powerful, and makes money and saves money. And so it needs to be really what drives business,

um, and so there's all these companies that make software, but there's also companies that make the end use, like IO link sensors. Like  how many different vendors of IO link sensors do you know? It's, you know, it's infinite.  And I don't know where I was going with that, but, , I IOT and industry 4.

0 is,  Not going anywhere and  that's like the basis of the company that you work for right  can you  talk about like What industry 4. 0 means to you because it is a trigger word like some people aren't totally on board with how it's used like how the word is used  And no one's gonna argue that data is Extremely valuable, and harnessing as much data as humanly possible from your process and using it to make business decisions.

No one's arguing against that. But still people get triggered by the word industry 4. 0.  What has your experience been in that? And  what do you think about that?  Yeah, for sure. I think my biggest thing coming from controls and DCS and all that kind of world Was I never really thought about how much like Dark data there was, which is exactly what you're talking about alley, where it's like, you have so many manual valves out in the process, or you have so many pumps or compressors without a vibration sensor on it.

And you could be doing predictive analytics, or you could be not having to send operators to go do rounds, to figure out manual valve positions during shutdown. And just so much of that, like I never, I had never considered until I saw what was available on the IOT market. And I mean, the reason you're not doing that today was because previously  the price of it was ridiculous, but these I I O T Laura Wayne sensors are like a 10th of your traditional wireless cost.

And it's like opening up all of this, all these different worlds for these plants where they can see data that they hadn't seen before. And then they end up getting ROI within like a year of installing the system, just because they're able to make so much better decisions and they're saving money by getting ahead of lead times for predictive analytics solutions.

And so it's just cool what you're. Enabling plants to do, can you, for those of us that don't know, or anybody in our audience, can you explain what low red when is yeah, Sarah, go for it a  long range, low power, wireless, a wide area network. So, basically, they are. battery powered sensors that have a lifespan of five to seven or even up to 10 years, the report on exception so that they, only use power when something happens or heartbeat, which is pretty cool.

And they use a radius band and I'm not going to get all into it, but there's a radius that band that allows them to be really efficient and they send their data off and we can use it. So we're able to use sensors. They use Laura wands to, to. Access the stranded assets or be able to get that data. You were never able to afford to didn't want to afford to measure before.

And then you get some really cool things  like just the same vibration analysis to determine when something going to fail. We can do preventative maintenance or. Monitoring arcs happening somewhere like, oh, never is able to access that, but now it's easy to install easy to get the data and we can store it.

And then as a data scientist, like it's really cool.  That's where I got come into this where we've collected the data. We've got it somewhere. What what can we do with it? And the potential is limitless. They got the digital twins. They've got the  Historians, you can do machine learning, you can pop some AI on it, like, there's so many cool applications you could do at the same that we've never had before.

Yeah, I, that parallel in my job right now is there is dark stock. I like to call it, which during the supply chain challenges, everybody was trying to get parts everywhere. And there's.  Tens of thousands of independent, small distributors that have stock in their back warehouse or systems integrators with overstock of something they bought for a project and they didn't use.

And it's not connected to anything. And when you think about,  the potential of those things, dark assets in the world that nobody knows about, because they're not connected. Or they can't see because they're not connected. Elsa, go,  go please into the living room.  And there's a wave of like connecting all of these, you know, pump stations out there or like whatever that you used to really need to watch.

And,  you're not sending people out there because we do have a labor shortage too. And so we do need data and we need it wireless and we need it.  Yesterday.  Yeah, no, for real. It's been cool. I mean, there's just so many different things that you can do. Like, we have people,  doing like liquid level tracking on not only like tank farms.

We've replaced a lot of systems to with wireless. That wasn't working the way people had expected.  And doing that for tank farms, and then also we're doing, we did 1 application with porta potties where they were doing the level of the different port parties to figure out which ones they needed to go and pump.

Then, so it's just  ridiculous the amount of things you can get ahead of, like, inventory stock for different,  traveling chemical totes throughout a facility, and then you can do asset tracking on those totes  to figure out where the different chemicals are. So just a limitless amount of different sensors out there on the market.

And then the nice part about the module that Sarah developed is you're bringing all of those different manufacturers and sensors decoders under 1 roof is you're able to use. Any of the ones that you want without having to do a different vertical software platform for each different kind. That's huge.

So you're kind of,  yeah, so that was a huge driver of the module. And Sarah can tell you a ton more about that, but the decoders were a huge hurdle to getting people to deploy these systems because it was difficult to do that. And then also all these different manufacturers,  had different proprietary softwares and different decoders, and then,  you know, She was able to get it all in one place and going into ignition without the customer having to deal with any of those handoffs that were happening.

Very nice. Sarah, do you want to talk a bit more about that? Cause I would love to hear. Sure. Whatever details you want to share on the process, how you got to be working on that project  or any technical details you want to share. For sure, I'm trying to think Jessica gave a really good overview of the environment and how it goes all together.

But essentially, we just have a module with an ignition that can accept data from these sensors and format them into UDT. So they are usable in your ignition environment. So that's going to a historian. If that's going out spark plug B to X, Y, Z, and if that's pie, if that's.  Azure IOT. It's pretty much limitless.

Something I really enjoy working in the ignition platform is they're so it's so open. I love working in open source communities.  And I think more things should be open. Honestly, just having that kind of open framework and being able to work with that is really cool. Yeah, me and Jess work together on interfaces within there.

, she's got more of a design eye than I do. I'm more functional. The button works. Excellent. She's like, actually, what if the button had this color? Like whatever you say, Jess. And it's just I try not to slow you down too much. No, it's much, much better. Cause if I was doing it, it would just be gray boxes look very much like a.

A wind forms from 98  talking about HMI design, right? That's kind of , these screens and things. I know there's some standards out there now. There is a new standard, or maybe it's not very new, but, like, is it an ISA standard that kind of does say that, like, most of most things should be great.

High performance HMI. Yeah. It's what they call it. High performance. Okay, is that something that you guys are adopting or do you have  your own way of doing things? Like, I'm sure it's a controversial topic. I'm sure amongst people. They like, some people are like, I like my greens and reds and it's also it's also customer driven to if they have that, if they're pushing that standard and some larger corporations are absolutely pushing that. 

Yeah, absolutely. And that was a huge thing when I was in was, we would go to customers who. Only we're implementing that only gray scale, and they would have like, running great only for different alarms and confirmations. But,  it hasn't been a huge thing in ignition yet that we've seen with the customers we've dealt with.

 But we do try and,  if they already have existing ignition screens, or we're converting them from an old system to a new 1, and they want to kind of keep that format. We're essentially just doing custom screens.  With that in mind with whatever they prefer. So, do you guys work on,  I guess, custom customer applications or more internal processes and things? 

Of  it. Okay. So, yeah, it's both. It's not any different to me. It's I have a list of requirements that I can deliver those requirement questions of who's giving me the requirements. Do you think that you'll get ever get bored doing this?  I don't think so. I don't think. Yeah, I think it's so different every day and we'll get that software package to  all the customers who are implementing that Lorwyn system mostly.

But then on top of that, they'll want, you know, I want a custom screen to visualize my tank farm, or I want a PNID reminiscent page where I can see the different And like, red or green on open or closed. So  it's something different, really, for every use case that we see. And there are so many sensors, like, constantly coming onto the market  and it's just unlocking more and more types of data that you can bring into these.

So I don't think so.  And yeah, we're constantly bringing Sarah more dev projects, so I'm sure  she's not afforded anything.  I want to make a point , and maybe this is not what everyone's thinking, but  when it comes to Skada, it's not just screens.  So like, and when we comes to data, it's not just displaying it on a screen, which is one of the main things we do with it is display active,  or live data to you, but like, just like hysterizing alarms and even hysterizing data, um, is the other part of SCADA that like is kind of hidden and people don't talk about.

And it's a gigantic part of working with SCADA is not just. Oh, I make HMI screens, which, um, or I make SCADA screens like that. Does it like, that's not normally one job that like, usually there's a lot more involved to it, like, uh, all that other information I just talked about, but also even how those devices talk to each other and then your OPC servers and all kinds of just like interconnections that need to be made between different vendors of software makes it just so incredibly hard.

To navigate and so you can just be a like I I O T specifics integrator because there's it's like gigantic in terms of hardware and software available for you. Um, and, uh, Yeah,  I always lose my thought at the end of it. But like,  I'm sure lots of thoughts, good thoughts came out of it.  I think you're absolutely right, though.

There's so many avenues and things you can do within SCADA. And I think that's what keeps it fresh because there's different applications, different ins and outs from the data flow and things you're going to do inside of it.  Do you like historians and, like, databases?  Can you speak on just that portion?

Because that scares some people. They're like, I'll make a screen all day long, but like, oh, don't make me query stuff. Like, how do I build this data?  How do I set exception and compression settings so that I don't blow up my database? Because by the way, everyone out there who's a noob is blowing up their databases, including me.

So  go alley. So I come from the business side, which means I come from more of a data database data focused program. So I'm very comfortable with databases. I come from an ERP background before this. So, like, when they say, Hey, like, can we put this together? I'm like, yes. I can absolutely do that. Please let me do that.

Um, so yeah, there's, that is complicated. It can get complicated. You've got your indexes and your primary keys. How do we query the state of the most efficiently? There's some really cool, historians or newcomers onto the market that can do it like really quickly. Like when I see databases and different ways of storing data, like I start nerding out, I'm like, Oh, it can be object oriented, like we can put it in a graph and I'm like, Oh, that's cool.

Well, and the graphs are gigantic to the customer. Oh my God. They need to see the graphs and you need to be able to produce graphs. And trend, just,  what is it, visualization of trending of real data is just like money bags. No, I'm just kidding.  . Although, Sarah, were you referring to graph databases? I was talking about graph databases or visual graphs.

Yeah, graph databases. Oh,  . So this is again, like when, you know. somebody's language a little bit you can decipher the context if you don't I would have also like if I didn't Work with databases before I probably would have also assumed we're talking about Visualization of data graphs like you have an Excel or you know, whatever  Because the same term can mean different things to different people  Absolutely.

Absolutely.  I was I think it was reddit yesterday Maybe somebody asked if it's even worth it to learn how to program PLCs anymore Because now we have so many different apps and non, you know, easier ways, I guess, in his plant, what he was looking at was they were doing some just monitoring applications.

And so they replaced the PLC with some sort of. App that just took some signals. It was like, is it even worth it to learn to program PLCs? Or are they just getting replaced everywhere? And I think he got, you know, educated pretty quickly that most PLCs are not just used for collecting data or monitoring things.

They're actually controlling things. , so very much. So, but what are you guys seeing on your side in terms of the obsolescence of skills or languages? Um, Versus, you know, keeping up with things. Do you need to know all the things from yesteryear and tomorrow?  Or can you I guess maybe you can just if you don't know the old way plug it into chat gpt and ask it to translate for you I don't know.

I think if I guess chat gpt ladder logic.  I don't know what it would do I think it would cry. I don't know. Um, I  Supposedly knows, but it won't, it'll tell you that it doesn't actually program.  But I think somebody did test it out and it does know a bit about letter. Interesting.  Being from the tech space, like I do feel that pressure to know everything and coming into this OTIT space, like there's so much more than I could ever know, like I can just hear about a protocol and be like, okay, like, we'll come back for this another day.

I don't think that.  Technologies or skills are going to be obsolete just because there are so many systems out there that rely on them. It's kind of like cobalt,  in the I. T. side where that data is in there. The systems are super important. So until you migrate them, and they're very difficult to migrate, you need people that can have those skills, maintain them and patch them.

What do you think, Jess?  Yeah,  I don't think honestly, DCS and PLC are going anywhere, just  the ability of, I think it's different applications and use cases call for different things. Yeah, and we're lucky within BBP, we have a traditional process automation group that has a DCS and PLC team. So when we go into a use case or a kind of an application that a customer is bringing to us, we're evaluating, hey, is this a wireless play or is this a, It's a more traditional kind of hand it off to our other teams  application, so we don't ever try to push like, Hey, this is the new up and coming thing.

You have to do this. We're just trying to figure out what's going to work best and last the longest for the customer.  And so, even within wireless, we're looking at the wireless triangle and figuring out, Hey,  which of these. Solutions is best. Is it hard? Is it more win? Is it? So it's kind of, it's a evaluatory process at the beginning.

A lot of customers will come saying, Hey, I've researched Lorraine and it's the thing for me. And some will just come saying, Hey, I have this.  I have this reading that I'm trying to get integrated into a PLC wirelessly or integrated to all these existing systems that I don't think are going anywhere anytime soon, but I think they're being added on to for sure, with all of these, wireless data that you're now able to capture and then join up at the historian level or just bring into ignition and view it with all of your PLC data.

I think it's a good compliment for existing assets and is out there, right? Yes.  Yeah, absolutely. They go together nicely.  It's a new Frankenstein out there. Yeah, because the stuff that works, that's been working for years is not going away. I don't, I don't think so. Um,  and they're definitely, though, I think more applications that in the past, we would not have automated.

With traditional automation or monitored for that matter, right? And that's where I think a lot of the new technologies can come in and compliment that make it less costly, more feasible, soft PLCs and virtual PLCs. Is that something that you guys mess with as well? No. It's a weird need to ask our PLC experts, but  I like to be willing to look at, but I haven't heard that  personally.

I was just in DCS. Yeah, yeah. So , we learned, , Siemens was nice enough to give us like a sneak preview of this last year. It's been fully released now, but they created a virtual PLC that can run on a,  high performance server. Edge, like a computer. , and that is one way I think that the evolution of PLCs is changing a little bit.

I think more applications can benefit from that. If it's like, I, and I'm not the right person to describe this, right? But you have a traditional hardware PLC where like, it's completely tied to the piece of hardware. And the aisle on that PLC, and then you have the programming environment that that resides on that as firmware.

And then a virtual PLC, you would basically take that functionality, but run it in a container on a PC, not a PC. Sorry. A virtual high performance computer. That is maybe at the edge of the line, so it's more similar to DCS in that sense. Like, it's a little bit more distributed potentially. But you can then maybe run redundant  versions of that same.

PLC on another server. So, like, if your PLC goes down, you immediately have a backup that can boot up and,  run the same thing. So there's some advantages there. But then in that process of learning about the virtual PLC, I learned what, or kind of learned, right, that there's also soft PLCs, which have been around for a lot longer. 

But  there's apparently there is a decent difference between a soft PLC and a virtual PLC.  It's one of those areas where, like, I want to learn more,  but I don't think that from what I see, like, that it's replacing traditional hardware PLCs either. It's just certain applications really benefit from that.

Right, that's really interesting. Are you saying it's like running in Kubernetes or something like that? Like a Docker swarm? No, yeah, it's like traditionally like the a  They call it an emulator, right? It's like a PLC that's just like, that's not plc, that's an emulator, right? A virtual PLC is not an emulator of A PLC.

It is A PLC, but that. It runs independently of the hardware,  like, it can run on multiple different vendors hardware, for instance, and I think in the Siemens example, they had a couple of different vendors that were basically certified to run that PLC on it, but you could technically put it on any industrial. 

Uh, computer. And it might work it just won't be guaranteed for the performance. If you don't get 1, that's been vetted as the specs will work with this software.  That's pretty cool. Yeah, so always something to learn, like,  yeah, that's 1 of the reasons I love this industry and why I haven't been able to. 

Been able to, but I stepped out of it for a while and then I just, I really missed it because it's one of those places where, like, there's always something cool going on. Um, and unlike the tradition, the other side of the tech world where we're building, you know, social networks or software or the cool consumer tech, like, there's something about making the things that make the world go round.

That I like being in touch with, even though I'm not personally making any products  is the manufacturing world something that fascinated you guys at all? Or was it more just the engineering aspects  of the tech that you guys got into? Yeah, definitely. , so  I wasn't sure, honestly, when I started, I went into engineering thinking I was going to do research, actually, um,  Which couldn't have been further from the truth, but that's what I started out interested in.

So I did a couple internships with that, like spent the summers in labs. And then I got this internship and I was going to plants and I was seeing live processes and I was seeing things like actually happened and being made. And I just fell in love with that. I thought it was so cool. And then you, in my old DCS programming, you would.

You would write code and you'd go and install it at the plant and you would hit run and what you had programmed was actually, you know, manipulating the process. And so that was just something that was so cool to me.  And still is to this day with IOT,  to be able to see those dashboards bringing in the live data on a customer system.

It's just, yeah, I love it. Absolutely.  Allie, you also worked in a lab, right? At some point during when? Yeah, that was my 1st. I was scared that we're going to ever let me do engineering because that was my 1st job out of college was, uh, I was a. Research  or no research associate  and I did material compatibility, but yeah, I worked with a teeny weeny laptop and I didn't have my own desk.

I had a. Like lab bench and I like put on gloves and  tested all kinds of materials with other materials  and I work with biochemists  and biochemistry is insane  and actually now I have a customer that is actually very well known in the same industry as  That work that company I used to work for and like the people are all the same people They just like get recycled in these industries  and so But,  I'm intimate with labs and,  talking with scientists, because they speak their own language. 

Yeah, no, for sure. I feel like I came in with lab lingo and I figured out that that wasn't universal,  but it was fun. I have the utmost respect for it. Like you're saying, like, the biochemists and just the different I was doing. Liquid extractions in the lab doing the same experiment, you know, 80 times in a row.

And it was, yeah, it was a different kind of hard work. It was cool, but I do love manufacturing now too much to go back. I think I had a little bit of experience with lab automation when I was at Festo,  just little gantries for like testing samples and stuff like that. So that, that, that was pretty cool.

Cause you get to play around with some like robotics and automation, but it's not as critical. Like downtime in a lab is very different than downtime in a production facility of some kind.  And then the loads and things like that, like the conditions in a lab, most of the time, everything is so, It's really pristine and clean , or you have things that are need to be explosion proof and intrinsically safe because you're dealing with like crazy chemicals and stuff.

So  anyway, do you guys have any,  advice,  and I don't always ask this question, but since you guys are a little bit like you're both women, you're earlier on in your careers to any women out there that are girls that are in school right now that maybe don't know what IOT is or this industry. Do you have any tips or tricks or advice or warnings for them? 

Yeah, I don't have anything specific, but I think something was hard for me to learn was it's okay to be wrong because it's so new and it's so much to learn. It's okay to ask those questions, right? And the faster you can ask that question or fail, you can find your next solution, until you find the solution.

And so just not having that fear of. It's okay. Like it's okay. You can go figure it out. And I think we have that freedom here to go and experiment and try new things and ex and learn and that's been really helpful. I think that's great advice for anybody in their career, whether they're engineer or not.

 And on the engineering side, young engineers, men or women or anybody really?  I think it can be intimidating. You think you have to come in and. you know, get things right  and know stuff.  Even those of us that have been around for longer and those people that have been around a lot longer than me, they still don't know everything.

So the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know and how much you have to rely on other people, right? Yeah. I wish, I wish I knew as much as when I was a senior in college.  When you know little, you think you know everything.  Okay, we'll come back to you.  So Jessica, can you tell us,  where people get in touch can get in touch with you?

, if there's anything that you've got going on that people can follow, , or what we should expect to see from you. In the near future, like events, you're going to be at or projects you're working on or anything you're excited about for the future. Yeah, absolutely. So,  you can reach us at site sync dot cloud.

And so that's our website, and you can do that contact us form, and that goes to my inbox and a few other coworkers. And so that's a really good place to reach out. If this is something you're interested in. And then also, we'll be at quite a few shows, so I believe intellect is our next 1 will where we'll be exhibiting. 

What does that stand for? I've never heard of that. So it's E N T E L E C. I'm not sure why it's named that, honestly, but  sorry Doug. Yeah, it's um, we'll have to look it up. And it's really, that's okay. We'll include a link to it in the show notes. We can do the research  before we publish this.  But it's a really cool show.

There's a lot of collaboration there as well between different vendors. It's an oil and gas field, and we're actually working with innovation lab. We're working with Opto 22. And,  I think that there is, Oh goodness. It's failing. Sex, serious link, snowflake altogether. We're going to build a live demo of data going from a sensor all the way out to the cloud.

It's going to be really cool. Oh, I love collaborative demos where different companies get together because that's the reality, how they end up working. Most places, right? It's like, I hate the 1 stop shop.  I'm sorry.  Energy telecommunications and electrical association.  There you go. Okay. There's all kinds of, I mean, there is a niche association for almost everything I have learned,  and I would love to go to all of them, but I wish I had all the time.

So, Sarah, how about yourself?  Anything in particular that you want to point people to or the ways that people get in touch with you?  You can find me on LinkedIn. And then I agree with Jess, uh, tightsync. cloud, that's our niche and specialty. And then I will be at Intellect doing that live build, which I'm really excited about.

And then Intellect is really cool. The guy who runs it, , Doug Miller, he, like, builds this whole broker to let all sorts of wireless. Come together and publish their data and PPT. And it's really cool to see everyone's booths that are there and distributing different ways people use the same technology stack.

It's really neat. So if you can go come see us, we would love to see you.  Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I apologize. This has been an interesting experience for me because I still have a little one that's not supposed to be here.  I normally don't walk out on recordings and then come back. 

But you know, such is life. So I appreciate your guys patience with me. Thank you for joining us. Thank you everybody else,  that was here. I didn't bring up comments as much as I normally do either. But yeah, Elsa and I, uh, say goodbye. I did come up with, uh,  the last rant. It wasn't a rant. I just want to say some closing stuff, um, about, about perfection.

Because Sarah touched on like, don't be afraid to be wrong. Um, literally everyone who's gotten to any position inside of their company or Or created a new company. None of those people got there by being perfect and tens girls tend to not want to do something unless they can do it perfectly. Um, and not, not to say that men don't do that, but like women are really hard on themselves,  when it comes to that.

And so. To go and be not amazing at something right off the bat is a terrifying thing for women um, and for probably all people but um, yeah, None of us got anywhere into this like incredibly complicated stuff that we do and and it is Like mind blowing not to like toot our own horn, but like the stuff that we get into is mind blowing but it's literally going to be mind blowing for you, too, and unless you're afraid to even You Come in here and like assert yourself and say, I have no idea what you guys are doing, but I'm not leaving.

And that's what you need in order to stay. And if you are afraid of perfection, you might leave prematurely. And so I want to make sure that that is said before we close anything is that you are hurting your future and like feeding your soul if you turn.  Turn off your opportunities prematurely because of your obsession with perfection.

Let it go We all suck at everything like and we can't get good until we like suck at it first and so please please don't run away because There is some incredible work to be done here at like collaboration everything But we can't do that if everyone's scared and runs away at the first thing. That's really hard And by the way, this stuff is hard.

So You That's all I wanted to say. I can't believe Very naughty, Elsa! Very naughty! She can't hear you because they got headphones on.  We'll be having a little talk right after this.  Busted!  Oh my god.  Well, uh, with that, thank you for joining us. Our website is automationladies. io, in case you didn't know. We have our episodes there and links to our YouTube videos.

We also have a YouTube channel. Please find us, Automation Ladies, on YouTube and subscribe. Um Elsa does know that very well. Like and subscribe, uh, for her YouTube channel stuff. Uh, she likes to watch. And then what else was I going to say? Oh, we have a newsletter. So one of my gripes with LinkedIn is we, we have, we have a lot of followers.

So thank you guys for following our page. We hope that you're following us because you want to see some of our content and the algorithm at LinkedIn. I don't know how they decide who sees what, but we want to invite everybody that follows us to all of our events. Um, and there isn't a great way to do  that.

Uh, so we put out a newsletter now. It's a LinkedIn newsletter. You can subscribe on LinkedIn.  And then we also have it  on a standalone mail server.  Application called beehive and,  so please subscribe to that. You'll get notified of events like this and then links to our past recordings and new episodes that we put out, um, other automation, ladies, news and events and, um. 

Those of you that are just listening,  once this makes it to the audio podcast, Elsa is just, uh, doing, but I don't know what you even call that hand gesture. It's hand puppet. Hand puppet.  Hand puppet, yeah, yeah.  So, but hey.  Elsa, okay. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your Thursday. Bye. Have a great time.

Have a great one.