Risk Assessment

Is your manufacturing equipment safe from losing it’s program?

Most automated equipment is controlled by Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC’s) which store the program in battery backed memory. 

If the battery goes dead or the processor fails and there’s no backup of your program you are dead in the water! It will cost thousand’s to rewrite not to mention the down time!! The process for recovering from a lost program is as follows:

	Contact the OEM and request a backup copy from them if possible. The problem is they may not be in business anymore or the copy they have may not be the most current version, lots of equipment gets program modifications after the original installation so what you get may need some tweaking!
	The next choice is much worse! Now it's time to start rewriting the program if the OEM failed, to do this will take time and lots of it we will have to discus with operators and maintenance personnel the original operation of the machine, identify all inputs and outputs and start writing. After the rough draft is finished it's time to put it into the machine and start the debugging process. All of this takes valuable time away from you production and cost thousands in programming charges, this process is to be carried out by extremely experienced programmers.
	The last option is the worst, if the cost of reprogramming is more than the value of the machine scrap it and buy a new one! Believe it or not this is a very real possibility as experienced programmers are worth a lot of money per hour.

The solution is simple!

 We will come to your location and  inspect all PLC controlled equipment and any other devices that require programs and/or setup parameters such as AC and DC drives, operator interfaces.

	After inspection we will upload the program from any and all PLC's found and save a copy on our laptop computer that will be will be burned to a CD later for your safe keeping.
	Other devices such as operator interfaces, AC drives, DC drives, servo motor controls if possible will have there parameter files uploaded and saved on our laptop or we will scroll though the parameters and write them down to be placed into a Excel spreadsheet and all this data will be included on your CD.
	Now if your equipment fails which it usually does at some point in time you will be able to purchase the repair parts and have the programs or parameters re entered with a minimal amount of lost down time and no huge bill for rewriting a program from scratch.

AND FOR A LIMITED TIME IT’S FREE!

Click on thumbnail of work sheet example for a full size image