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Plant Support Service Agreements from Process and Data Automation (PDA): Offering a Spectrum of Services to Our Customers

There are many advantages to Plant Support Services Agreements from PDA, however only at the point you need support, do you realize just how beneficial it is to have access to a spectrum of services!

Today, we are going to discuss three different, real-world cases in which our service agreement saved the day.

How easy is it really to switch between unique scopes of work? Very easy!

PROBLEM:

A national snack food manufacturer had the opportunity to put this to the test.  “We came to work to find that none of our front office computers would connect to our order entry system, could not connect to the internet and that our IT guy quit without any notice.  My first call was to PDA”.

HOW WE SOLVED IT:

After receiving the call from the plant around 9:30 that morning, PDA had a Digitalization Services Engineer onsite before lunch.  While this isn’t our team’s typical work, our client needed help and our team had the resources. After this emergency callout, PDA worked with the plant to temporarily rework the contract commitment of resources to allow someone from DSG to start their day at the plant for up to two hours a day to ensure that everything IT was behaving for the plant. Doing this allowed the plant to use their PSC commitment to solve this challenge without breaking their budget.

Once the plant fills the internal IT position, we will return to doing the more traditional tasks that we were busy with prior to this event. For PDA’s service department, the goal is to ensure that the client gets the most out of their contract, even if we need to be part-time IT for their office staff.

Can training can be part of our Service Agreement? Our answer is a resounding, “Yes”! When talking about the advantages of our Plant Support Service Agreement, employee training is often not thought of as part of service – but one of our clients discovered that training was their major need.

PROBLEM:

A frozen food manufacturer came to us and explained that their current maintenance employees didn’t have the HMI & PLC skills they currently needed. PDA sat down with them and worked up a plan to help.

HOW WE SOLVED IT:

PDA adjusted their Plant Support Service Agreement to offer training for six months. PDA did handle a little maintenance during the six-month but predominantly handled training. PDA built up a training resource for the client and provided ad hoc training to their employees and the client saw benefits in employee performance very quickly. At the end of that six months, PDA switched back to what their regular scheduled service agreement was. None of this had any additional cost and they remain a happy client.

How flexible is your service agreement and how fast can it change to meet our needs?  A Plant Support Service Agreement from PDA is the most flexible and fastest in the industry!

PROBLEM:

Corporate sales for a food manufacturer landed a big contract that required them to re-work one of their rooms with a very aggressive timeline to finish and the normal sales cycle was not fast enough.

HOW WE SOLVED IT:

PDA was able to re-work the service agreement so that they could handle the design portion (laying out control methodology, IO count, the panel builds) which saved them the time they needed to complete their new project on time.

Our goal is to make our service agreement work for the individual needs of the client and that also means being flexible enough to change course quickly when necessary.

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The Spectrum of Benefits of a Plant Support Services Agreement are easy to see:

• Fixed amount of expense on a monthly basis
• Fixed, variable, or combination scheduling monthly
• Scheduling to fit your needs
• Highest priority for incoming service calls
• Mixture of engineering, industrial IT, service, and other staff to meet all your needs!

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PDA is a full-service, CSIA Certified industrial control systems integration firm. Our Controls Engineering group specializes in physical automation system design, programming, and commissioning. We also feature a dedicated Digitalization Group (DSG) that connects automated equipment and systems to the business system environment including protected recipe systems, data collection and reporting, and data historian implementation. DSG can provide the systems you need to set your systems up for proper operation and then provide the tools you need to make sure you execute as planned.