Nearly half of a typical control estate is already discontinued. Do you know which half?
Capture is the ECS site audit. Engineers walk your plant and catalogue every PLC, drive, HMI and I/O module, back up what can be backed up, and hand you a findings report plus a Command Centre already populated with your estate. One visit. No downtime.
Five things, per device, in one place.
Every device, located
Building, area, line, machine. Part number, serial, firmware. Every PLC, drive, HMI and I/O module photographed in place, so nothing on the register is a guess.
Backups, catalogued
PLC and HMI programs backed up where accessible. Each one stored with the software, version and cable needed to restore it. Not a folder of files: a restore kit per device.
Documentation, captured
Electrical drawings, manuals and OEM documentation gathered and attached to the device they belong to, so the drawing for a panel lives with that panel.
Network, mapped
IP, node and MAC addresses, communication protocol, primary cable. What talks to what, recorded per device.
Lifecycle, assessed
Every part number checked against the manufacturer’s lifecycle status: active, phase-out, or discontinued. This is the finding most sites have never seen in one place.
Passwords and backups live in Command Centre. Never in a document.
Credentials and program backups are held encrypted and access-controlled in the platform. Capture does not create the risk it was hired to remove.
Two things. One to read, one to use.
The findings report
A short document for the people who sign things off. What you have, what is at risk, and what to do first. Written for an operations or finance director, not only for an engineer.
Your Command Centre, populated
The full inventory, photos, backups and documents, live in the platform from day one. The report tells you what matters. Command Centre is where you act on it, and where it stays current.
One UK food manufacturing site. As recorded.
From a real ECS audit, site anonymised. These are the figures in the export, not a projection.
Eleven controllers with no spare to buy and no program to load onto one. Those are the lines the report puts first. A further 75 devices could not be backed up on the day, each recorded with the reason, which is a finding in its own right.
Read the full audit-readiness case study.
Half a day to scope. One visit to know.
Scope
A call to agree buildings, lines and site access. Half a day of your time, at most.
Walk
ECS engineers on site. Every device photographed and catalogued where it sits. Typically one to three days, depending on the size of the estate.
Capture
Backups taken where accessible. Documents gathered. Every part number checked for lifecycle status. Devices that cannot be backed up are recorded as findings, with the reason.
Deliver
A findings report for the people who sign things off, and a Command Centre populated with your full estate. Walked through with you on a call.
No production downtime. Panel access needed; isolation only where your site procedure requires it.
Nobody wakes up wanting an audit. They wake up with one of these.
- ·An audit is coming: BRCGS, a customer, an insurer, NIS.
- ·Obsolescence is starting to bite and nobody knows the full exposure.
- ·A key engineer is leaving, or has already left.
- ·You have acquired a site and do not know what is in it.
- ·The board has asked what happens if a line controller fails.
Useful on its own. The start of everything else.
Many customers stop at Capture, and it stands alone. For those who want the inventory kept current, Command Centre is already populated and ready. For those who want an ECS engineer inside the PLC at 2am, Connect sits on top of that. Capture is the first step of all of it, and it earns its keep even if you never take the next one.
Questions we get asked
Yes. Capture stands alone. You receive the findings report and a read-only export of the full inventory. Command Centre is where the data stays useful over time, but it is not a condition of the audit.
No. Panels open and machines running, unless your own isolation procedure says otherwise for a particular device. We work around production, not through it.
Those are findings, not failures. We record exactly why each device could not be backed up, whether that is a password, missing software or the wrong cable, and what it would take to resolve. On a recent site, 75 devices fell into this category. Knowing which ones is the point.
Into Command Centre, encrypted and access-controlled. They are never delivered in a document or emailed. If you take Capture without Command Centre, credentials are handed over securely and separately from the report.
A short scoping call, then typically one to three days on site. The findings report follows within two weeks.
Yes. Most estates were built by several OEMs over decades, and most of what we catalogue was installed by somebody else.
Find out which half.
A short call to scope it. One visit to know what you have and what is at risk.