Audit-ready OT asset register in five weeks
Built an audit-ready OT asset register before a regulatory inspection.
A pharmaceutical manufacturer faced a regulatory audit with no centralised record of their automation assets. Documentation was spread across email threads, a SharePoint folder and two retiring engineers' laptops. The audit window was eight weeks away.
ECS ran a rapid OT asset survey and onboarding sprint, prioritising assets by regulatory exposure rather than working through the estate in sequence. Critical assets were documented first, with revision history, software versions and supporting documentation loaded into Command Centre.
Within five weeks, three weeks inside the deadline, all critical assets were documented with full revision history. The audit passed without a major finding on the automation estate.
The situation
An eight-week countdown to a regulatory audit, and no single place where the automation estate was documented.
What existed was scattered: email threads, a SharePoint folder nobody had curated in years, and the part that made the timeline urgent: two engineers who were retiring.
Why the timeline was the real problem
The documentation gap was solvable. The constraint was that the knowledge needed to close it was walking out of the door.
Retiring engineers hold context that isn’t written anywhere: why a particular workaround exists, which drive was replaced and never relabelled, what the code on line 3 actually does. Once they leave, reconstructing that takes far longer than capturing it.
What ECS did
The sprint was ordered by regulatory exposure rather than by walking the estate in sequence.
Assets that the audit would examine most closely were documented first, with revision history, current software versions and supporting documentation loaded into Command Centre. Lower-exposure assets followed once the critical set was secure.
Running it this way meant the site reached a defensible position early, rather than being 80% through an evenly-paced survey when the auditor arrived.
The result
Five weeks to audit-ready, three weeks inside the deadline.
The audit passed with no major finding on the automation estate. The register remained in place afterwards, which is arguably worth more than the audit result: the site no longer depends on individual memory for its automation record.
This case study describes a real ECS engagement, anonymised at the customer's request. Figures are as recorded by ECS at the time of delivery. Client name and precise site location are withheld.
This work was delivered through Command Centre. Talk to an engineer about your site.