Support and Sustainment, a concept which is being used in IT industry for a long time but is really new in Industrial Automation. Third party support and sustainment is a method to create an effective and efficient operations environment in which day to day management activities are managed by the external service providers who have expertise in that filed. This method makes the service provider accountable for the performance and the functionality of managed service but does not assume overall responsibility of the system. In this way, internal automation department can focus on the integration of the old infrastructure or the development of new projects rather than spending time on maintenance of the existing automation.

In the present scenario, internal Controls Engineers are struggling to implement the new strategic project because the support responsibilities are consuming most of their time. Because of this situation most of the companies are ending up hiring automation contractors to do those strategic projects like implementing SCADA System, Integration of machines or a production line with PLC or installing robots on the production line. As the consequence of implementing this model, the contractor has the knowledge of application but the internal automation staff has to rely on training from contractor for the SCADA, PLC or Robot systems they implemented, which is another expense on the top of hiring a contractor for that project.

Therefore, the goal of hiring service providers for Support and Sustainment is to change the model and shift the load of daily tasks or maintenance to the external parties and let the internal automation team focus on the strategic projects. To implement this, the company and the service provider need to sign an agreement under which the service provider will be responsible for the assigned activities under a signed payment structure. For example, if a Controls Engineer is on an emergency leave in a plant than a Controls Engineer from service provider who is trained for that application can cover the shift for that period which will eliminate the cost of hiring an extra engineer on company payroll just to deal with this kind of situations.

Innorobix Automation is an expert at service providing and creating custom software applications.

We provide Ignition services:

1. We will help you discover what Ignition software you need.
2. We have experts available to get your Ignition projects developed and done.
3. We have expert Ignition developers that can develop new Ignition modules that you want.
4. We can provide you and your staff with onsite or remote training on Ignition.

If you have any Controls Automation or IIoT’s related questions, feel free to contact us.

Rahul Aery

Control System Specialist

Innorobix Automation Inc.