Overcome Five Major SCADA Migration Concerns
Manufacturing processes thrive on consistency: make the same things the same way—regardless of who is working, or when production is happening. On the other hand, technology flourishes through growth, change, and innovation.
Even though manufacturing companies have evolved alongside technological advances like Automation, SCADA, robotics, and the Industry 4.0 revolution, it has become increasingly clear that the fundamental needs of manufacturing and technological innovation are often at odds with each other.
Compared to consumer and business-facing technology, manufacturing companies are typically 5-10 years behind the curve. Examples of this phenomenon include:
Ethernet networking connected devices on the plant floor in the mid-2000s, a decade after the internet had taken hold.
Cloud computing became popular in the early 2010s, while manufacturing didn’t start adopting it until the early 2020s.
Compared to the typical SCADA systems, even the licensing model of Ignition followed this trend. Past industry-leading software focused on per tag/screen/client/server licensing plans, while years earlier popular consumer and business software as a service (SaaS) platforms pioneered the “unlimited” licensing model adopted by Ignition.
A note about Ignition’s licensing model: while unlimited licensing was a welcome change for consumer technology, many industry people didn’t take Ignition seriously as a SCADA solution for many years because it flew in the face of industry trends.
Now, after Ignition has been adopted across nearly every industry—and nearly across the entire globe—Corso Systems has decided it’s time to make switching to Ignition from any other SCADA platform faster and easier.
After removing the barriers to entry, we’ve continued to remove the common hurdles and pain points of adopting a new technology, so that we can help many more people gain the immense value of using Ignition to run their manufacturing process.
We understand that many manufacturing businesses—from owner-operator shops to large enterprises—have major concerns when facing a much-needed SCADA migration. Fortunately, Corso Systems has the tools and strategies to mitigate or eliminate many of these common but formidable hurdles.
Avoid High Labor & Licensing Costs
The first and most painful hurdle businesses encounter when considering a SCADA migration is the enormous labor cost of a manual migration. Beyond the financial costs, there are often indirect costs incurred when your subject matter experts need to spend significant time explaining the intricacies of the system to the migration team. Later, your experts will need to spend additional time reviewing the work—along with constant data validation to ensure nothing is broken during the migration process.
The second financial impact comes with buying the necessary hardware along with the software licensing for the new system. The process of pricing out what you need may take a significant amount of time working with sales people to pin down everything you need. When migrating from a legacy system with a complex licensing model, there can be significant confusion when comparing apples to oranges between the old and new systems.
Corso Systems solves the first pain point with our Automated Conversion Tool. First, we’ll work with your team to get a backup of your current system, then we’ll leverage our extensive SCADA platform expertise to understand what you have and how it is structured. Next, we’ll determine the information we need from you to migrate the system. With this approach, we’ll significantly reduce the time your team needs to spend with us so that we understand your system. Finally, our automated conversion process nearly eliminates the labor costs involved in the conversion.
The Ignition platform—along with Corso Systems’ expertise—solves licensing issues. We’ll provide a clearly defined system architecture with all of the licensing requirements spelled out ahead of time. Ignition’s transparent pricing model combined with Corso Systems policy of passing along our Premier Integrator Discount gives you the peace of mind knowing that you are getting the best deal possible for your migration project.
Reduce the Overall Project Timeline
Another major hurdle for most SCADA migrations is the slow process of a manual migration. For a large scale SCADA system, a manual migration might take several months to a year—even with a large team working on the project in parallel.
During this time, you will likely have ongoing project management and check in meetings with the migration team—all of which can require significant and ongoing involvement of your teams and leadership.
Fortunately, by using the Corso Systems Conversion Tool, we can reduce the entire project timeframe to just a couple of weeks. During this short time, we will finalize the tag structure, perform the migration, fine-tune the design of your migrated screens, deploy the new Ignition project to your system, and begin the validation process.
Sidestep the Risk of Complications
The friction between manufacturing and technology is rooted in the ever-present risk of complications. A migration can open the door for data discrepancies, lost production, and unplanned downtime—all very real concerns.
The Corso Systems conversion process helps mitigate these risks by automating most of the data validation process. It also allows you to run your existing system and the new system in parallel to verify functionality before implementing the cutover.
If issues are found, they can fixed easily and we can re-run the conversion at the click of a button to update the entire project at once.
SCADA Training and Maintenance
Most of your team is already familiar with your current system, and learning a new technology suite is not everyone’s favorite cup of tea.
Working with Corso Systems allows you to take advantage of our extensive in-hour Ignition training program and materials for getting your team up to speed quickly and easily.
We also provide long term support for our conversions and any project we work on to make sure you have the support and team you need to keep your process running smoothly for the long term.
Meet Regulatory Requirements
Another question we are often hear is if Ignition can support regulatory requirements from governmental agencies, trade organizations, or others.
Fortunately, Ignition is capable of supporting a wide range of regulations. We have built Ignition projects to conform to 21 CFR Part 11, numerous licensing and oversight organizations for regulations such as metallurgical processes. We have even worked with companies that need to automatically submit reports to the EPA for various discharge monitoring requirements.
If you need to meet regulatory requirements to run your business successfully, Ignition can get the job done!
Wrapping Up
We have built a powerful tool to help bring legacy manufacturing systems up to modern standards—all while reducing the inherent risks in any technology migration.
Our process automates as much data validation as possible, and help get your team up to speed with how to use and maintain the news system for the long term.
We can help you reduce overall costs. Additionally, in most cases, Ignition licensing will be a fraction of the annual cost of most other SCADA platforms on the market.
