Manufacturers rely on their automated machinery to meet production quotas. Unfortunately the rapid obsolescence of automation equipment often leaves key machinery difficult to support or worse – non operational.
We offer a cost effective upgrade path that can be adapted to a broad range of electronic control equipment scenarios, particularly for equipment 6 years and older.
Is your ageing Automated Machine unsupportable?
One of today’s more significant issues is the short product life of electronic control equipment, in particular HMI (Human Machine Interfaces) and PLC based controllers. To reduce costs many machine builders integrated the HMI and PLC platforms into one Panel PC. An example would be CoDeSys for the PLC and Wizcon for the HMI interface both running on one of the many brands of HMI Panel PC using a version of Windows as the OS.
Is your Controller Obsolete?
Not only does the Panel PC hardware become obsolete and unsupportable, but so do the software packages including the OS. The Wizcon Scada/HMI package used widely for 21 years ended its life in 2007. Windows versions also reach their “end of life” with support no longer being available. i.e. XP and Vista.
What is the solution?
There is no clear cut answer to this question, but as software development costs have now become the most dominant expense in automation equipment, it makes good sense to try to find an upgrade path for the existing automation programs before a failure occurs.
The scenario presented above is real, and happened to one of our customers. For the obsolete Panel PC the solution was to use a replacement model that also included Windows 7 Embedded and CoDeSys (Beckhoff Twincat 2), whilst the Wizcon HMI application was migrated to Indusoft Webstudio.
Please submit the following form if you wish to receive more information about the benefits of an “Automation Risk Assessment”.