Serving the Teesside Business Community | 23
Applied Integration directors (from
left): Garry Lofthouse, Roy Coleman,
Lee Raywood and Graham King.
Don’t leave it too late to
upgrade your control systems
C
attitude is prevalent across operators
of all sizes, with many reluctant to
invest in upgrading systems that have
served them well.
“Far too many organisations have
no migration plan
“There are some we know with
critical applications that they are
pushing to the limits,” he reveals.
“They haven’t heeded our warnings
and recommendations and now
the systems are deteriorating,
critical faults are creeping in and
performance is taking a hit.
“We know we’ll eventually get a
call about a fundamental failure that’s
put a system into a critical condition
– and the crisis will be a disaster
because they’ve been using obsolete,
unsupported equipment that we can’t
replace.
“We’re trying to politely warn
some operators that when their
control system fails they might as
well turn off the lights and close the
door because they’ll be offline long-
term – and potentially permanently.”
arrying out upgrades and retrofits
of outdated control systems is
a major growth area for Applied
Integration, as an increasing
number of companies realise
their plants and factories cannot run forever
on outmoded equipment.
The Tees firm is already working with
a number of major names across the
automotive, pharmaceutical and oil and gas
industries – but they say it’s vital that many
smaller firms wake up to the risk of leaving
their business in the hands of obsolete
equipment.
Applied Integration director Garry
Lofthouse says: “We do expect system
upgrades and migration to be a major
growth area for our business because
decision-makers are starting to wise up to
the fact that it’s got to be done.”
He adds that a timely system migration
is far more cost-effective than suffering a
catastrophic failure that puts the very future
of a business at risk.
Lofthouse explains: “When an
organisation gets in touch with us, we
initially review their system architecture to
gain a full understanding of what they have
in place.
“We give the customer our expert view
of what piece of equipment is most likely
to fail first and then talk them through the
mechanisms we can put in place to tackle
their obsolescence problems.
“We work with manufacturers to consider
and create the best upgrade path, basically
delivering the simplest route to a full
upgrade, agreeing short-term fixes to keep
the operation ticking over and long-term
goals to protect the customer’s future by
ultimately replacing their entire system with
something better suited to the challenges of
the 21st Century.
“We’ll migrate the correct control
philosophies to the new system, checking
and testing them before implementing them
in an orderly fashion before the system
goes online.”
And, he says, it doesn’t have to be costly.
“We have some fantastic concepts to bring
to the table.
“We can even take a brand new piece of
equipment and run it as a virtual machine
whilst replacing the old software and
allowing the customer time to fund the
purchase of a new machine.
“To put it simply, act early and we can
make it relatively pain-free. Leave it too
late and it will be costly and probably
damaging to your business and its long-
term reputation.”
To talk to Applied Integration about
system migration and upgrade options,
get in touch via appliedintegration.co.uk.