Challenge
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. This quote by Benjamin Franklin emphasizes the importance of site surveys for industrial environments. With time, money, and resources on the line, site surveys act as a crucial first step to plan for maintenance, spare parts, upgrades, and mitigate the risk of unplanned downtime. This critical information was needed by a leading American food distributor to better understand the health of their plant’s automation infrastructure. Automation Group was engaged to thoroughly assess their automation hardware and operational technology (OT) networks and provide a comprehensive site assessment report. This report would clearly identify risks and opportunities as well as crucial steps to upgrade and strengthen their automation infrastructure.
Solution
The customer’s plant had three buildings which included over 500 control panels. Automation Group analyzed numerous factors and data points to determine areas of risk and opportunity across their plant. This included the lifecycle of parts that are currently being used on the production floor as well as the equipment’s life cycle positioning ranging from active to end of life. Automation Group’s certified professionals also evaluated existing processor types and quantities across the plant and documented the customer’s OT network infrastructure.
The data collected from the site assessment was then organized and analyzed to serve as a roadmap for facility improvements. Automation Group formulated a comprehensive, well-structured report for the customer’s management, engineering, and maintenance teams which outlined upgrade recommendations and a clear timeline to implement these upgrades based on the priority level.
Results
Automation Group worked closely with a plant electrician to complete an on-site assessment of all control panels and OT networks in less than eight weeks. The data from the site assessment was used to provide a comprehensive report outlining automation infrastructure by area, OT network architecture, obsolescence, and recommended paths forward to modernize. The site assessment resulted in a proactive plan to reduce the customer’s likelihood of future controls hardware failures and provided a clear roadmap to strengthen their automation infrastructure.
