PLC Obsolescence & Spares Risk Audit
Before spending on migration, know what you are actually exposed to. A written audit of every PLC, drive, HMI and SCADA node in the plant — supply status, spares position, criticality and the cost of the outage each one can cause — with a phased plan and indicative budgets.
Request an Audit WhatsApp Our EngineersThe Problem an Audit Solves
Obsolescence is usually discussed in the abstract — someone says the plant is old, someone else says it still runs, and nothing is decided until a CPU fails on a Saturday. An audit turns that into a list: what is installed, what can still be bought, what can only be bought refurbished, what is genuinely unobtainable, and what each failure would cost in lost production.
With that in hand, migration stops being a single large capital request and becomes a sequence, ordered by risk, that can be spread across budget years.
What We Survey
PLC CPUs, racks, power supplies and I/O by exact part number and firmware. Drives, soft starters and servo systems. HMIs and panel PCs. SCADA nodes, versions, operating systems and licensing. Networks and legacy fieldbus segments. Safety systems and relays. Programming software and licence availability. Panel condition and wiring. And, critically, where the programme sources and backups actually live — on a maintenance laptop, on a server, or nowhere.
What the Report Contains
An installed-base register by line and area. Supply status per item: current, mature, discontinued, unobtainable. Spares held versus spares needed, with a recommended holding list. A criticality ranking that weighs failure consequence against replacement difficulty rather than treating all hardware equally. Single points of failure, including the undocumented-programme kind. A phased migration plan in stages that fit real shutdown windows, with indicative budgets per stage. And the quick wins — backups taken, documentation reconstructed, a small spares buy — that reduce risk immediately at almost no cost.
Where It Usually Leads
Most audits end with three or four immediate items worth doing in a week, one line that genuinely needs migration inside the year, and the rest deferred with a documented reason. That is a defensible position to take to a board, and it is a better use of capital than migrating the plant in the order the vendors suggest.
After the Audit
Annual maintenance, programme backup and version control, Siemens spares supply, and remote PLC and SCADA troubleshooting so that most faults are diagnosed before an engineer travels. ATMAN Group is a project, service and spare-parts provider; we are not an authorised Siemens channel.
Request an Obsolescence Audit
Tell us roughly how many lines and control systems are in the plant and we will come back with the survey scope, the time it needs on site and a fixed fee.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does an audit take?
A single-line audit is usually a day on site and a few days of reporting. A full plant with several lines and a mixed estate takes two to four days on site, depending on how much documentation already exists.
Do we have to commit to migration afterwards?
No. The audit is a standalone piece of work with its own fee and its own deliverable. Plenty of audits conclude that most of the plant can safely be left alone for now, and that is a legitimate result.
Can you audit systems that are not Siemens?
Yes. The survey covers whatever is installed — Allen-Bradley, Mitsubishi, Delta, Schneider and others — because the spares and supply-status question applies to all of them equally.
What if we have no drawings or programme backups?
That is the most common finding, and it is the first thing we fix. Reconstructing an I/O list and taking verified backups is cheap and removes a large part of the risk before any migration is discussed.
Do you work on makes other than Siemens?
Yes. Siemens is our core platform and our deepest expertise — S7-1200 and S7-1500, legacy S7-300 and S7-400, TIA Portal, STEP 7, WinCC and WinCC Unified. We also program, modify, troubleshoot and upgrade Allen-Bradley, Mitsubishi, Delta and other major makes, and we handle migration from any make to Siemens or within the same make.
Do you supply the panels as well?
Yes. Panel engineering, supply and commissioning are part of our scope — control philosophy, GA and wiring drawings, component selection, testing and site commissioning — so the panel, the programme and the field instrumentation are answerable to one team.