Many facilities rely on a small number of experienced engineers to keep legacy systems running. When those individuals retire, critical system knowledge often leaves with them, creating risk for downtime, troubleshooting, and future upgrades.
Across the industrial sector, companies are facing a major demographic shift as seasoned engineers retire from the industry, taking decades of unwritten, proprietary system logic with them. When they walk out the door for the last time, facilities are unknowingly left to high risks of extended downtime, major onboarding costs, and stalled timelines because no one knows the nitty gritty of how the control system components and legacy equipment really work. As a control systems integrator and Main Automation Partner, E Tech Group helps organizations standardize, document, and modernize control systems to preserve operational knowledge and reduce risk during workforce transitions.
Operational resilience isn’t just about preparing for Industry 4.0/5.0 and the digital transformation; it’s about preparing for generational turnover and the labor culture transformation. And that requires a deliberate, strategic engineering framework – just like those you’d implement when replacing a legacy control system – to systematically extract, codify, and standardize unwritten logic before it’s keeper moves down to their new Florida retirement home.
The Human Aspect of Industrial Control Systems
We usually talk about the hardware of plant infrastructure – reactors, conveyors, PLCs. But your senior engineers and operators are an important piece of that structure – entities that are both hardware and software, harboring mental models and undocumented adjustments that keep the physical assets on track. Think of it as human knowledge component of industrial automation systems.
Over decades of continuous operation, code changes are made on the fly during middle-of-the-night mishaps; process sequences are tweaked to handle unexpected material variations; mechanical wear and tear is compensated for with strategic software workarounds only a true expert would be able to pull off. These changes and their how-tos are rarely documented at all, and even more rarely placed in a centralized repository.
When you don’t have documentation, all you’re left with to pass on that intricate knowledge is oral tradition. Failing to document this “invisible infrastructure” introduces three major risks to any operation:
Exponential expansion of downtime
When a failure occurs in an unmapped or unknowingly altered system, finding the root cause becomes an attempt to translate the Rosetta Stone, where teams waste hours decoding archaic programming styles or trying to understand undocumented interlocks.
The onboarding bottleneck
Bringing a new automation engineer up to speed shouldn’t take two years, but if they’re meant to learn what is essentially a lost engineering dialect, it might. When control systems lack standardization and clean documentation, the learning curve is steep, expensive, and filled with signposts that might as well be petroglyphs.
Project and progress paralysis
When the time comes to execute a facility automation system expansion or control system upgrade, the engineering phase can be continuously stopped up by mystery code that takes weeks to reverse engineer. It’s akin to a forensic investigation – the system integrator must overcome a major workload just to establish a baseline, which means more cost, more time, and broader project scope.
Why You Can’t Just Place Legacy Knowledge in a PDF
The instinctive response to an incoming retirement is to tell the engineer: Well, simply start writing down all your processes and any changes you’ve made to the equipment and/or system. But this rarely works. If you were trying to preserve a near-extinct language that only one surviving member of that culture knows, simply writing it down wouldn’t preserve the sounds, tones, contexts, and nuances of the language. You speak with them, listen to their stories, body language, tone, and learn their social customs in the hopes you can create a standardized framework by which the language can be used by generations to come.
It’s no different with a senior engineer – you don’t think about the nuances and details of every little thing you do on your process line; attempting to write it all down comprehensively just isn’t realistic. There’s a dynamic, conditional, organic facet to diagnosing a system that you can’t write down. To bridge that continuity chasm, this knowledge must be converted into active, programmatic standardization.
A Strategic Framework for Preserving System Continuity
Mitigating these risks requires its own type of FEED Study as you prepare for the transition to a new controller of your control system. It turns operational wisdom into universally understood control frameworks:
Phase I: Language Audit and Logic Extraction
Like any automation project, the best way to start is with a discovery process. A specialized systems integrator should conduct targeted code reviews alongside your team. Similarly to an apprentice learning a trade, pairing an integration engineer with your internal experts gives them insight and experience into the unique strategies and protocols your talent has developed over decades.
Walk through the complex logic blocks. Why were they developed in the first place? What are they meant to fix or avoid? Every workaround should be captured and flagged for remediation. The output of this “anthro”-IT/OT audit is a comprehensive system baseline that maps (1) how the facility operates today and (2) how it was designed to operate 20 or 30 years ago.
Phase II: Code Normalization and Object-Oriented Migration
Once the unwritten rules are uncovered and understood, that language has to be translated so it can be engineered directly into the automation layer. This is achieved via code normalization. During normalization, custom, unstandardized logic is replaced with standardized add-on instructions and repeatable user-defined data types.
For instance, if a retiring engineer has a unique method for tuning a highly sensitive and somewhat temperamental temperature loop, that precise methodology is built directly into the control system. Since the wisdom is codified into the system, it’s now accessible to any engineer, regardless of their tenure or familiarity with the equipment.
Phase III: Establish a Unified Namespace (UNS)
Regardless of how valuable Carl was for the decades he somehow kept legacy components running even on their last legs, individual dependencies are not advantageous (or smart) for companies to rely on; data must be decoupled from localized hardware, which is where UNS architecture becomes essential.
A Unified Namespace (UNS) creates a centralized data architecture that serves as a single source of truth across the facility. A globally-accessible language for the entire facility – no Google Translate needed. Instead of data being trapped inside specific equipment, sensors, or people, every asset and data point is organized into a clean, hierarchical structure that mirrors the entire plant’s physical setup and automation architecture. This way, a new engineer can easily locate, interpret, and utilize the data across the entire factory automation system.
Cultivating a Culture of Coding Integration
Just as the preservation of near-extinct languages is an ongoing endeavor involving forensic phonology and detailed codification, codifying the knowledge of your expert engineers must be an ongoing operational philosophy. Once your existing automation and control systems are normalized and documented, maintaining that baseline requires diligence:
Enforce Rigorous Coding Standards
Make operational language a part of corporate engineering standards; dictate how code must be structured, configured, and version-controlled. Every modification should follow the same layout so when the new engineer retires in another 30 years, the code means the same as it does now – no forensic language study needed.
Integrate Knowledge Transfer to Automation Projects
When upgrading controls, replacing equipment, installing new lines, etc., make comprehensive asset documentation and clean code structures a mandatory deliverable from your system integrator. The best factory automation companies are brand and vendor-agnostic, so just one of their many proficiencies is the ability to understand how to integrate different platforms and products and make your system speak the language you need it to.
Leverage Modern SCADA Integration and HMI Design for Intuitive Diagnostics
Modern control system technology is all about making data visible, understandable, and intuitive – taking the workload off the operators and eliminating many of the transitional difficulties we’ve discussed. Diagnostic control panel screens should clearly surface system interlocks and alarm to root causes. If a machine won’t start, the HMI should tell the operator explicitly what happened so they don’t need to dive into the PLC code to figure it out.
Building Resilient Automation Requires a Bit of Anthropology
Losing a valuable asset like Carl doesn’t mean you also have to lose his expertise and depth of understanding of the control system and equipment. By treating operator knowledge as a critical asset that must be engineered, standardized, and integrated with the automation system architecture, you can transform a major risk into an opportunity to modernize.
Bridging the continuity chasm builds a facility resilient to turnover, primed for rapid scaling, and easily maintained as engineering talent comes and goes. And by choosing an automation systems integrator with offices across the continent who can support systems at all levels of integration and transition, you have someone you can call at 2 am on a Saturday so you can troubleshoot, optimize, and upgrade while leaving Carl to enjoy his retirement.