Abelara Ascent

In this episode of the Abelara Studio podcast, Dan, Dylan, and new Integration Engineer Jacob dig deep into the architectural realities of containerization. Starting with a simple task to map out Dan's containerized plant simulation environment ("OJ East"), Jacob documents his week-long journey migrating a stateful stack from standard Docker containers to a local Kubernetes cluster using the kind...

Most manufacturers we talk to aren't asking for more software. They're asking for less. Forty applications. A dozen integrations holding it all together. We cover: The supply chain ↔ factory floor disconnect, and why the language of customer POs almost never lines up with the work orders that actually get run Why standard cost variances catch you at quarter close instead of when you can still do s...

The conversation begins with an introduction to predictive maintenance and the expert panel. Glenn Gardner discusses the evolution of predictive maintenance, highlighting the transformation of the industry over the past 20 years. He then delves into the concept of vibration as a predictive technology, providing a detailed explanation of its relevance and power. The discussion shifts to the role of...

Why does AI fail in the factory? Three reasons: unstructured data, fragmented data, and no governance. At MX.0 Southeast in Greenville, SC, Zack Scriven sits down with Matt from HiveMQ and Remus from Concept Reply for a field panel on why most manufacturers aren't ready for AI — and what to build first. They cover what a Unified Namespace actually is (two definitions), where it's being misused, th...

🔴 LIVE from ProveIt! 2026 Whiteboard Q&A with Walker Reynolds & Dylan DuFresne Wednesday morning on the ProveIt! Main Stage, Walker Reynolds returns to the whiteboard, and he is joined by Dylan DuFresne, Co-Founder & Solutions Architect at Abelara. This educational style is what the industry 4.0 community loves: Real questions. Real Unified Namespace architecture. No slides. No script...

At ProveIt! Conference 2026, Abelara did something different. We built a fictional bottling company called Cappy Hour and re-enacted a problem manufacturers face every day: data is flowing, infrastructure is in place, but leadership still can't answer basic operational questions. What ran yesterday? What's in the tanks? How much product is going down the drain? Glenn Gardner plays the president of...

Recorded at Fuuz HQ in Detroit, this conversation brings together Craig Scott (Founder & CEO of Fuuz), Dave Crysler (Founder of The Crysler Club), and Zack Scriven (Abelara) for a real, operator-to-operator discussion on what actually drives manufacturing results. This is not a vendor pitch. It’s a grounded conversation about how manufacturers really scale: what works, what breaks, and where t...

The conversation covers the experience of building realistic simulators in Ignition, creating detailed tag structures, and the transition from accounting to industrial controls. It also delves into go-live events, post-implementation support, and the process of improving development processes and training interns. The discussion further explores training AI models, script development, and leveragi...

The conversation explores the importance of historical data with context, the challenges of data collection and storage, and the role of unified namespace in data management. It delves into the need for context in time series data, the impact of historical data on decision-making, and the challenges of implementing a unified namespace. The discussion also covers the significance of understanding d...

You spent half a million dollars on a unified namespace. Six months later, your plant manager can't answer a simple question: what ran on Line B yesterday? Despite the sensors. Despite the dashboards. Despite the check you wrote. In this episode, we walk through the Capybara Inc. case study — a fictional multi-site beverage bottling operation built entirely from real problems. This is the story ev...

You have an MQTT broker. You have dashboards. You have data flowing from PLCs. And you still can't make any decisions. That is pilot purgatory. And it is more common than anyone in the industry wants to admit. In this episode, Ricardo Santos, Director at Tupinix, joins Zack Scriven and Dylan DuFresne to walk through what it actually takes to get value from a Unified Namespace in a CPG and food and...

The podcast features a discussion among industry experts in manufacturing, focusing on the evolution of technology, the impact of Ignition, and the collaborative nature of the industry. The conversation delves into the challenges faced by end users, the importance of community, and the need for education and guidance in adopting new technologies. The conversation delves into the challenges and opp...

Summary Dylan DuFresne and Zack Scriven go tool-by-tool through the five platforms that run most serious industrial stacks — Ignition, Flow Software, Litmus Edge, HighByte, and Fuuz — and answer the question every IT/OT team is asking: when do I use which, and why. This is Episode 2 of the Prove It series on Abelara Ascent, building toward the live reference architecture at the Prove It conference...

Abelara Lead Architect Dylan DuFresne walks Zack Scriven through the multi-site industrial automation stack Abelara planned and deployed for its Prove It 2026 sponsorship — naming specific vendors at every layer of the stack and explaining the architectural reasoning behind each choice. Starting at the edge (Opto 22 controllers), moving through site-level infrastructure (Ignition, TimescaleDB, Flo...

Summary Zack Scriven sits down for an impromptu conversation with Dylan DuFresne (Lead Architect & Co-founder, Abelara) on three of the industry's most-abused terms: "digital transformation," "unified namespace," and "Industry 4.0." Dylan's core argument is that the terms themselves are buzzwords — vessels that vendors fill with whatever they're trying to sell. The only useful question is what...

Summary Glenn Gardner (Abelara co-founder) sat down with Craig Scott (Fuuz CEO) at Fuuz HQ after spending a week embedded in bootcamp with the Fuuz team. The conversation threads through three topics: the unusual culture Fuuz has built around genuinely caring about manufacturing, the architectural decision to be the MES "shim" between ERP and the plant floor, and how democratized plant-floor data...

Summary The Abelara team — Glenn Gardner, Zack Scriven, and Dylan DuFresne — just spent a week at Fuuz corporate headquarters for bootcamp. In this roundtable debrief, they give their unfiltered take: what they loved, what needs work, how Fuuz compares to Ignition and Plex, where it fits in the stack, and why a greenfield site should probably run both Ignition and Fuuz together. The conversation c...

Summary Glenn Gardner frames the quality problem every manufacturer faces: DPPM spikes and nobody can figure out whether it's a catastrophe or a blip — because the data lives in a dozen different systems. Steve Modrall walks through how Fuuz solved this for HighBar, the world's first solar-powered steel mill, deploying MES, WMS, yard management, scale house, and vendor portal in nine months. Craig...

Summary Glenn from Abelara visits Fuuz corporate headquarters during boot camp week and sits down with Steve to walk through the real manufacturing pain points that Fuse solves — from the supply chain and factory floor divide, to quality traceability, bill of materials wars, real-time variance tracking, and the multi-plant standardization trap. Steve frames Fuse as the system that lives "where the...

Dylan DuFresne walks through Abelara’s reference architecture for modern industrial systems — from edge controllers through Ignition’s tag gateway pattern, UNS publishing, historian integration with Timebase, Flow Software for contextualization, and enterprise-scale deployment with HiveMQ cloud bridging and Fuuz as an MES layer. The episode covers how to phase these components in with zero technic...

Dan Prudhoe spent 15 years building industrial systems at a large chemical manufacturer — scaling from beta Ignition in 2009 to 70+ gateways across 30+ sites. In this ICC 2025 conversation, he walks through replacing a legacy Unix MES with Ignition, adopting Spark Plug B and MQTT, hitting MQTT's limitations, and building an enterprise event mesh with Solace that streams millions of tags from edge...