There are certain types of industrial project failures that quite often can be traced back to a single decision made right at the beginning of the project: who was brought in to design and implement the control system. The failure first starts to show itself about six months down the line when a process upset produces some behaviour that nobody was anticipating, when an operator isn’t able to navigate the interface fast enough to respond, or when a legacy system that was sold to them as being easy to integrate turns out to actually need a workaround that nobody has recorded. By the time that happens, the consultant who made the initial mistake has usually long gone and the problem is all the client’s.
What Consultants Do That General Contractors Can’t?
Control system consultants are all about bringing together electrical engineering with specialist expertise in programmable logic controllers, distributed control systems and SCADA platforms along with Human Machine Interface (HMI) design. They are involved throughout the whole project lifecycle, from initial process analysis and system design right through to programming and commissioning, and then onto operator training and post-commissioning support. Experienced Control System Consultants also provide documentation that supports long-term system maintenance and operator training beyond the initial handover.
Now a general electrical contractor will just install the hardware as per the spec that’s been given to them. A consultant, however, will actually generate the specification themselves. That requires a pretty in-depth understanding of the industrial process that’s being controlled, its possible failure modes and so on. This is what actually matters most in projects where new hardware needs to be integrated with existing older equipment, where there are particular safety requirements to contend with or where a staged upgrade is being made from an older system.
The Legacy Problem Driving Most Australian Industrial Projects
Western Australia‘s got some of the most process-intensive industrial operations in the country and a lot of them are still running their control systems on technology from the early 2000s. These obsolete PLCs on old platforms create a single point of failure risk; if a processor card fails and there’s no replacement available then the whole site just stops.
SCADA systems running on old operating systems just can’t connect to modern data infrastructure, cloud monitoring or current cybersecurity frameworks. That leaves a whole lot of operational and security blindspots. For consultants working on these kinds of projects, the first thing they usually do is carry out a thorough audit of what actually exists, how it all works together and what the path forward to a modern platform looks like without disrupting the process that’s being controlled.
Cross Platform Experience as a Practical Plus
Different Australian industrial sectors tend to favour different PLC and DCS platforms, simply because of where they’ve traditionally been installed and operational requirements. You’ll see Allen-Bradley ControlLogix and CompactLogix in manufacturing environments, Schneider Modicon platforms in the utilities sector, Siemens S7 systems used across a lot of process industries and Honeywell and Yokogawa DCS platforms dominating oil and gas operations.
When working with clients who are using systems that are a bit of a mixed bag, a consultant with genuine cross-platform experience can assess what the client actually needs and recommend accordingly. When you’re bringing in new equipment from one vendor and it needs to work with an existing system from another, cross-platform competence makes all the difference between things just working smoothly or requiring a costly intermediate translation layer.
Quality of the Operator Interface Is the Real Factor for Uptime
SCADA/HMI operator interface determines how effective the operator monitoring and alarm handling and decision making is going to be. The bad operator interface will increase the cognitive load for operators, slow down their reaction and contribute to process upsets and unscheduled downtime, despite the technically correct process control logic used.
Good operator interface design uses the client’s graphics standards when they are available and builds the system which is coherent and navigable in any case. An operator with the experience in using the interface reacts faster to abnormal situations and recognises the emerging problems sooner, thus managing the system better.
Where the Projects Succeed or Fail?
Control systems have one common flaw: while during factory acceptance tests they work well, during the commissioning they behave unpredictably due to non-representative conditions at the time of the tests. Discipline in the project means proper documentation of all the test results, change control and commissioning procedures, and passing the whole thing to the client at the end of the project.
Post-commissioning training is not optional. Untrained operators use the workarounds which in time become the substitutes for the process control logic implemented in the system.
