June 2019

55 www.drivesncontrols.com June 2019 GAMBICA SUPPLEMENT n PLC code was rewritten or ported to a new platform? Or how much business or market share would you lose if your competitors engineered their machines to connect seamlessly into the world of Industry 4.0 and cloud- based analytics? Business contingency and strategic planning Often your business strategic priorities will not go down to the PLC programming level, but I would suggest that they should. The benefits of well planned, specified, structured and written code will not only produce a reliable and high-performing machine, but it could also make your business strong and profitable as a result of being ahead of the competition. On the flip side, poorly developed code or inadequate resourcing can put a company at risk, either from production delays while code is written or rewritten, or may place a company at severe competitive disadvantage while other machine vendors in your industry steal your market share and customers. As a minimum, I’d recommend that machine-builders should take references from their past projects and use recruiters with specialist knowledge in the automation and engineering sectors. If using a contractor, try to find one with expertise across different platforms and industry sectors, and if it is a single person contractor, you’ll need to plan for back-up for when they are not available. Manage your engineers and contractors so that you get access to, and secure storage of and source code for, work which will need to be in an editable format. Remembering that good software developers will always deliver well-documented code, but make sure you get it agreed for new projects. And finally, for best practice, ask for independent advice on how to specify modular code. This will ensure you have maintainable and future-proofed software development, in turn making any future machine variants easier to deliver. There are benefits and challenges to working with employed software developers, as there are for working with contractors. In an ideal world, you have an engineering manager who understands fully the management of code development, but few companies can afford that luxury. By taking care of the management and planning of machine automation code development, you can move away from having risks that you can’t be expected to understand, to making your software development reliable, secure and a core strength of your business, reducing delivery times, cutting costs and putting you ahead of the competition. n Jan Hemper has 22 years of software engineering and industrial automation experience and has been technical director of InControl Systems for 20 years. He has also written a White Paper on this subject, which is available from info@incontrol.co.uk DIGITIZATION REQUIRES DATA Sensors and Automation Solutions from Balluff sales@balluff.co.uk | Phone: 01606 812 777 | Visit us at www.balluff.co.uk