Manufacturing companies often tell us that they’ve been using Ignition for quite a few years, they need to find a new company to partner with for technical support, upgrades and more. Sometimes manufacturing companies lose their support partner when they put projects out to bid and don’t choose the same integration partners every time.

Frequently, companies who need support services have large scale projects and either don’t have on-site staff to maintain or support the projects. Or sometimes their integration partners don’t want to support the parts of the process that they didn’t create or implement.

Regardless of why your company needs support for your manufacturing operations, Corso Systems is here to help. We aren’t scared of systems, integrations, or hardware we didn’t implement. We can support you and your company over the course of multiple projects—and our goal is to learn to speak your language so we can help keep your systems (and your business) running optimally.

We can support whatever you need help with! We can even provide 24/7 support with a dedicated support line you can use to reach out at any time. If you want additional fixed fee project style work as part of the support agreement, we are happy to help—on time and often under budget.

Our custom communication and support ticket platform is built on Ignition and provides a real-time, at a glance status overview and details of all your support request tickets, along with email alerts when tickets are created or updated. For this level of support, we also will typically have weekly meetings with you and your team to make sure everyone has the information they need to keep support turn around times as low as possible.

You should never be in the dark about why your process isn’t running smoothly, and we have helped many companies discover where they can make improvements with the most impact.

Ignition Support

Corso Systems has a lot of experience with Ignition. From individual machine controls for OEM equipment companies all the way up to managing critical operations at the largest manufacturing facilities in the world, we have seen it all.

Typically, Ignition support from Corso Systems involves getting up to speed with what you have now: figuring out how it works, and supporting your current situation. Next, we’ll work with your team to find and address any shortcomings. This step usually includes building out templates and data structures to make maintaining (and growing) your system easier, finding and addressing performance issues in your system, and building improved tools for your operators to run the process correctly and reliably.

When support customers are running a legacy SCADA system, we can apply our Ignition Conversion tools to bring their legacy SCADA and business system applications into the modern era.

Most of our support agreements also integrate critical alarms, device connectivity, and database connectivity status into our support system. This can alert us to problems we can fix before you ever need to pick up the phone.

PLC Support

Just like with Ignition, we can provide PLC support as part of a support package.

First, we’ll familiarize ourselves with your PLC logic, network infrastructure, and everything automation-related in your facility.

Then, we’ll work with your team to find and address existing pain points. Next, we’ll implement the changes along with a full quality control process to reduce the amount of downtime required to deploy any new automation methodologies to your process.

Along with our other support tools we also integrate notifications for critical process conditions and alarms from your PLC infrastructure so we are aware of situations as they are happening.

Operations Support

The other major offering within a Corso Systems’ support plan is understanding and improving your operations.

We’ll start by teaming up with your operators to understand the difficulties they’re experiencing with your current system. In many case, this is a lack of tools such as a straightforward startup checklist for starting the plant from a down state. Many customers start out calling us when the operators don’t have the correct information about a system’s interlocks that are preventing start up. Once we solve the immediate issues, we pour through the PLC and SCADA systems, understand all of the moving pieces, and build out a checklist screen the operators can use to monitor each step of the process.

As our experience with your system grows, we can even develop and/or improve on your existing training materials for faster and easier new operator onboarding.

Everything Else

Beyond the world of process controls and automation we can help support your company in many ways, including but not limited to:

• Improved recipe management

• Downtime tracking

• Alarm notifications and alerts

• Dashboards for visualizing the health of your process controls network and all connected devices

• Training and documentation for troubleshooting and addressing common reasons for outages

We have also helped companies streamline their manufacturing processes and business systems. This includes improving information flow throughout the company, and even integrating legacy platforms and standalone equipment into your overall automation strategy so you can monitor and control every system at your disposal.

Wrapping Up

Our goal is to do everything in our power to work ourselves out of a support contract.

If your team is calling us about the same problem more than once, it is our job to understand why, find the information and communication gaps in the process, and build a more robust solution to empower your team with the tools and training they need to do their jobs better.

We do this by fixing common nuisance problems, training your people to use the tools at their disposal, and keeping open lines of communication during the entire process. Where needed, we will implement fixes to the system so that operators have clearer information, reduce the need for training in the first place—and give them the tools they need to avoid needing to call us to solve the problem for them.

If you would like to join the list of our delighted customers, please reach out and schedule an intro call with Cody Johnson in sales, or use our Contact form! With Corso Systems support, you never have to worry about who will be there to help you when things go awry.