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There are many advantages of having a Plant Support Service Agreement from PDA—and we can tell them to you all day—BUT—it’s not until you need it that you realize just how beneficial the spectrum of services can be. In our ongoing three-part series, we are going to discuss three different, real-world cases in which our service agreement saved the day.

A question we sometimes get about our Plant Support Service Agreement is, “How easy is it really to switch between unique scopes of work?”. Recently a national snack food manufacturer had the opportunity to find out.  “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”.

What happens now?

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 teams’ typical work, our client needed help and our team had the resources. After this emergency call, 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.

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!

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.