5 Critical Milestones in the Life of a Critical SCADA System

Life is full of milestones; moments when the decisions we make, or are made for us, can take us in very different directions. Some are unique to each of us, like a conversation with a friend in a beer garden on the top of a department store in Japan that inspires someone to go back to school. Others are more universal, like a young adult moving out on their own for the first time.

How we navigate these milestones determines how successfully we transition from children to adolescents, to young adults, and finally into fully formed grownups with jobs and responsibilities. How often in our lives would we have planned things differently if we had only known ahead of time the things we would choose to do. We could have started with the end in mind. 

You can think of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems the same way. They start out small and grow in size and complexity over many years. They must also navigate important transitions to correctly grow to meet the needs of the people who depend on them and not keep them up at night worrying. 

Let’s focus on five of the most important expansion projects in the life of a typical SCADA application, so you can better plan with the end in mind as you begin your SCADA software selection process. 

Manufacto Inc.

For our example we will use this fictional manufacturing company, Manufacto Inc. Let’s say that they have been running a cardboard box cutting and stacking machine deep within a large facility just outside a major city. First, we will take a journey through this timeline and see some common growing pains that can result in high maintenance costs and system downtime. Then, let’s go back to the top and see what this process looks like when you plan with the end in mind. 

Journey 1 – When things go off the rails, they go off the rails.

For this part, imagine that someone is reading to you in a spooky voice with a flashlight pointed up at their face. 

Project 1, 2011 – A SCADA Application for a Box Machine

Nicknamed “Big Ben” by those that used it, this thirty-year old box manufacturing machine was well made and worked reliably. Over time, the screen on the operator interface terminal (OIT) became dimmer and harder to read until it did not work at all. When the manufacturer informed them that this model of OIT was no longer supported, the Maintenance Manager saw a chance to implement a human machine interface (HMI) application that would talk to the existing PLC and provide basic visualization of the process. They contracted their local systems integrator, We Connect Anything Inc., to provide the SCADA/HMI software application and the computer on which it would run. It was no time at all before Big Ben was back to churning out boxes. 

Project 2, 2012 – A SCADA Application for Every Box Machine

A year later, things were going better than they expected. The operators appreciated the additional process information provided by the visual interface. Based on this success, they decided to do the same for their 11 other box machines. Though each one was part of a production line, only the box machines would get a SCADA/HMI software and server at this time. They invited back “We Connect Anything Inc.” to work their magic again. This too was a success.

Project 3, 2014 – A SCADA Application for a Whole Production Line

The Maintenance Manager found an article that described how SCADA systems can control an entire production line and forwarded it to his contact at We Connect Anything Inc.. They replied that they would be pleased to integrate all the different machines on one of their production lines but not with the software they were using. That product was deprecated by the software vendor and no longer supported newer operating systems. They now used a newer software platform that they were very excited about. The Maintenance Manager was disappointed that they would not be able to build on their existing applications but agreed to start over using the newer system.

Once they completed this expansion, We Connect Anything Inc., trained the operators on how to use the new visualization features that were now available to them, such as trending and alarms. This project cost significantly more than they had hoped, but everyone agreed that it was a step up from what they had been using. A qualified win.

Project 4, 2016 – A SCADA Application for the Whole Factory

Emboldened, the Maintenance Manager wanted to roll this solution out across their other 11 production lines right away but had to wait two years for approval. When he finally made the call, he discovered that their long-time integrator, We Connect Anything Inc., was no longer in business after their staff all won the lottery. 

The stressed manager reached out to the software vendor who eventually provided contact details for another company, Better Than the Last Guys LLC.  After a site visit, they informed the manager that their current application had been set up incorrectly and they should be using a totally different architecture for this SCADA software.

It seemed there was no choice but to completely redesign the existing SCADA architecture to monitor and control all 12 production lines, and their packaging machines, from a single system. So that’s what they did. Once again, it cost far more and took longer than they had anticipated. On a positive note, they added thin client connections to provide remote operation from the production lines using mobile devices. 

Everything seemed to be going great until the plant’s SCADA server failed across a holiday weekend. This caused two days of downtime while the software application was rebuilt from a backup image that was done two weeks earlier. The historical record for the previous two weeks and two days was lost, resulting in a permanent gap in their process history. 

When the system was finally up and running, the company launched an investigation into how this could have happened. Their recommendation was to add a hot backup server to the system. Like many SCADA products, the platform would not support more than one level of server redundancy. Additionally, they called for the system to be shut down once a week to back up the application to a tape that would be kept off premises. Since the system used a third-party Historian product, they would need to configure a separate backup methodology for that as well. The cost of this incident delayed several other projects that were planned for this period. 

Project 5, 2020 – A SCADA Application for All Their Factories

In addition to this facility, Manufacto Inc., operated four other factories across the country. The engineering group wanted to deploy SCADA across all these plants to provide coordinated monitoring and control. A system architecture audit, provided by an external consultant, determined that their existing SCADA system would not be powerful enough to do this due to the polling nature it employs. Essentially, the more values the application needs to read in sequence, the more bogged down it gets. Worse still, two of the plants use a make of PLC that was not supported by their SCADA. Oh, and it had some serious security vulnerabilities. This means that Manufacto Inc., would once again need to start over with another platform if they wanted to make the leap to the distributed system that would allow them to remain competitive during an already challenging year.

Journey 2 – A Unified Platform Benefits Systems Small and Large 

This part you can imagine being sung to you by happy animated birds and mice. 

Project 1, 2011 – A SCADA Application for a Box Machine

In this alternate timeline, our integrator friends at We Connect Anything Inc., won the lottery a few years earlier and were unavailable when the Maintenance Manager at Manufacto Inc., wanted to replace Big Ben’s OIT. Instead, they turned to SCADA Masters Inc. This fictional company had already had to go out and find a new software platform to standardise on due to discontinued versions, lack of support, and frustrating licensing policies. The platform they settled on was a single install that included all the monitoring and control features they required, including the communication drivers for their existing PLCs plus hundreds of others, should they choose to add additional makes and models. Best of all, critical operator components like alarms, trends, and reports were preconfigured out-of-the-box. In no time, Big Ben was back to churning out boxes. 

Project 2, 2012 – A SCADA Application for Every Box Machine

A year later, things were going great. The operators appreciated the ability to create their own trends on-the-fly or quickly generate reports. The Maintenance Manager was pleased with the straightforward pricing and predictable support costs. Based on this success, they decided to do the same for their other 11 box machines. Since each machine was almost identical in design, they could simply clone the existing Big Ben application and make minor changes to each stand-alone application. This is when SCADA Master Inc., pointed out that their SCADA platform provided some other interesting options.

Rather than purchase separate computers for each of the 12 machines, they could use one application for them all and run it from two redundant computer servers. This would provide a level of automatic server failover and real-time data backup. While these were not part of the original project specification, the reduction in servers and discounted server bundle pricing significantly reduced the overall cost. 

Another option was to go ahead and buy the 11 new computers that had already been approved and configure those into a single application with all the redundancy they would ever need. In both cases operators would be able to monitor and control any box machine from any server. Permissions for each machine could be defined in each operator’s user account. Ultimately the Maintenance Manager chose this approach since he had something else in mind for the next project. In the meantime, everyone was happy.

Project 3, 2014 – A SCADA Application for a Whole Production Line

The Maintenance Manager found an article that described how SCADA systems can control an entire production line and forwarded it to his contact at SCADA Masters Inc. They replied that they would be happy to integrate all the different machines on one of their production lines into the application. 

In fact, it would be a good opportunity to update the current application to the latest software version which included useful new features and security updates. Since Manufacto kept their support contract current, they could move to the latest and greatest version any time they wanted. At the same time, they would increase the I/O tag count to accommodate the additional machines on that production line. The Maintenance Manager was pleased by how easy it was to update the license and that they would not need to separately pay extra for the communication drivers for the other brand PLCs that were now part of the line.

Project 4, 2016 – A SCADA Application for the Whole Factory

Emboldened, our intrepid manager wanted to roll this solution out across their other 11 production lines right away but had to wait two years for approval. When he made the call, SCADA Masters Inc. showed him how their current design could easily scale up. Each box machine was a grouped combination of related tags. These parent tags were themselves part of a higher-level parent that represented a production line. Each of these structures and their associated HMI pages and dashboards could be easily copied and pasted each time they wanted to add a new machine or production line. In this way, they could add the rest of the factory in no time. 

They also upgraded their licenses (and their firewall) to include an unlimited number of concurrent thin client connections that would allow authorized users to securely monitor and control their machines from any HTML5 enabled browser on their mobile devices.

Everything seemed to be going great until the plant’s primary SCADA server failed across a holiday weekend. The system seamlessly failed over to the secondary and the event was logged in the application’s history. No data was lost and no one needed to intercede in any way. Best of all, since the software includes its own fully integrated Enterprise Historian, this data was synchronized across all application SCADA servers. So, when the primary server came back online, all process and configuration history resynchronized automatically.

Project 5, 2020 – A SCADA Application for All Their Factories

Finally, the integrator deployed this system across their four other geographically separated plants using Manufacto’s Wide Area Network (WAN). Since the software used a reactive programming language, and not a polling-based approach, the size of the system did not degrade performance. 

VTScada Software by Trihedral

While these companies are fictional, the SCADA software described in Journey 2 is quite real. 

VTScada is an award-winning software that is responsible for some of the largest mission critical systems around the world for over 35 years. In addition to manufacturing, other mission critical industries that rely on VTScada include energy, oil and gas, municipal, national air traffic control, and national broadcasting networks. 

Try It for Yourself

Download VTScadaLIGHT

VTScadaLIGHT is not a time-limited trial. It is a free industrial license for up to 50 I/O that you can install on any personal or industrial license. It even has all the drivers you need to connect to most PLCs and RTUs.

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