Upgrading controls without losing a production week.

Food and beverage plants tend to run controls longer than other industries, partly because the process itself does not change and partly because downtime is so expensive that nobody volunteers to be the one who touched it. Eventually the processor becomes unsupportable and the decision makes itself.

The technical work, migrating from an SLC 500 or S7-300 onto current hardware, is well understood. The difficult part is scheduling, and preserving process knowledge that exists only inside undocumented ladder logic written by somebody who left years ago.

We work through the existing program before writing anything, documenting what each section actually does, and we agree the cutover window and rollback plan before touching production. CIP sequences, batch records and sanitation logging all get carried across deliberately rather than reproduced from memory.