By Jan Hemper – Technical Director

”… It costs nothing to ask, and will save you £££ thousands when you want to digitalise or need to upgrade”

Called in to discuss PLC & SCADA upgrades and digitalisation projects

I am often asked to visit site to discuss industrial digitalisation projects, or major SCADA and PLC upgrades. In most cases, these are well established industrial manufacturing facilities, in just about every sector you can imagine. And what I am about to explain can be seen in blue chip companies as well as SMEs, from building material manufacturing processes, through food & beverage sites, to even chemical and pharma plants.

The biggest challenges to all of these customers, when looking to either upgrade their automation systems, or to transform their business into a digitally connected enterprise fall into two main categories:

1. Obsolete PLC & HMI technology, that is still working, but with no commercially available spares or replacements

2. Lack of access to the control system programs, due to password lockouts or lack of original source code

Just these two issues present huge problems if ignored, so let’s deal with them one at a time.

1. Obsolete PLCs and HMIs needing an upgrade, do you know?

In the first case, why would any business choose to not find out if any of their control equipment cannot be repaired or replaced in the event of a failure. Ask yourself what the inconvenience would be if (and when) any one of your machines failed, when the best outcome is that you might find a control system replacement on Ebay, that is already 25 years old! And linking this into the second point, if you didn’t have software back-ups before the control system failure, you won’t have any software to install in the replacement. In this case, you will probably need to have a whole new control system, designed, built, installed and commissioned, and what would that cost your business?

Staying with the first example, many companies are looking to embark on digital transformation (or their manufacturing processes) and want to extract data from (and send data to) their existing machines. Doing that with obsolete control systems is somewhat crazy. It’s not impossible, but why would you want to transform your business on top of obsolete systems?

Using an upgrade as a place to start your digitalisation journey…

There is however an opportunity here, that if you do identify that a machine’s control system is obsolete, then it makes sense to kill two birds with one stone. What I mean here is to upgrade the control system, whilst integrating with your digitalisation plans. Indeed this type of work can be a great proof of concept for a new digitalisation project.

2. Do you have access to the PLC application software?

In the second case, not having access to control system programs, is a barrier not only for obsolete product upgrades but also when you want to connect your existing control systems into a site-wide smart connected factory. It makes no sense to double up with additional sensors, scattered all over existing machines, when all of the data you need to interact with, is sitting inside existing control systems. But why would you not have access to this data?

There are two main reasons; firstly, the equipment is old, unsupported and no one in your business has asked for source code and access to the controllers. Secondly, the provider of the machine or control system, wanted to keep this source code and block your access to the controller because either you didn’t ask for it, or they didn’t want you to have it.

In both of these cases, it can be very time consuming and costly to connect a machine control system into a digitalisation project or journey without this access. You will probably end up paying hugely for this, compared with what might have been free if you’d specified it at the time of purchasing the original machine.

But what are you to do if you’ve ignored these two issues?

We at inControl Systems are in the business of being a very competent control systems integrator, and work in both the areas of industrial digitalisation and PLC or SCADA system upgrades, so it’s in our interest to solve these problems for customers. We’ve got a lot of experience (and equipment) suitable for extracting programs from legacy machines so that either we can bring them up to date and back in support, or to connect those machines into a smart connected enterprise. Or as I mentioned before, you could do both at the same time.

The questions you should probably be asking of your automation engineers and suppliers:

Even today, businesses are buying new machines without asking critical questions which will cost them dearly in the future. Additionally, with more companies being bought and restructured, engineers and their laptops are getting ignored in these business changes, and as a result they are probably unknowingly losing not only knowledge and experience, but also software back-ups and passwords.

1. When buying a new machine (or control system), ask for the software source code of any PLCs, HMIs and SCADA systems and ask for any passwords to the controllers. This might come with conditions and costs, but it’s easier to ask during negotiation than 10 years after you’ve bought the machine.
2. When your in-house control systems engineer leaves the company, make sure you know where all their software back-ups and passwords are stored. Don’t let the IT team wipe clean old laptops without knowing what’s on there or taking a back-up.
3. When working with control systems engineers or contractors, make sure you get software source code and back-ups for everything they’ve done.
4. When asking for new control systems to be developed, or old ones to be modified, ask the engineer for all source code to be provided and commented. Otherwise, whilst you might be satisfied with the outcomes of the controls, when it comes to making future modifications, it could prove very difficult.

“The costs to the business in the later case, is often days or weeks of downtime, and tens of thousands of pounds to fix the problem“

Treat your automation investments with the same care as your IT & financial systems

I still can’t understand why company directors would on one hand never take short cuts when it comes to their finance, IT or business systems hardware and software, because they fully understand the cost of failure or those systems. But on the other hand, when it comes to their automation systems, they potentially unknowingly accept the risks associated with obsolete, unsupported automation hardware and software, with no back-ups for recovery or modification. The costs to the business in the later case, is often days or weeks of downtime, and tens of thousands of pounds to fix the problem.

Jan Hemper

Technical Director, inControl Systems

DISCOVER MORE

Learn about when and why to upgrade your SCADA System here: https://www.incontrol.co.uk/news/when-is-the-time-right-to-upgrade-your-scada-system/ 

Discover five key reasons to upgrade your ageing PLCs here: https://www.incontrol.co.uk/news/what-are-the-benefits-of-upgrading-your-plc-systems/.

Or if you’ve read enough and just want to speak to someone, we’d love to chat with you on: +44 (0)1246 959140 or email to mail@incontrol.co.uk