Choosing a PLC brand for a new plant has two very different answers depending on whether you own the factory or you are advising someone who does. This episode gives both, plus four more questions from the plant floor.
Subscribe for weekly industrial automation and manufacturing discussions.
Learn more at Joltek:
- Connecting an Allen-Bradley PLC to Ignition:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/connecting-allen-bradley-plc-ignition- Rockwell PLC Lifecycle and Migration Guide:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/rockwell-plc-lifecycle-migration-guide- Edge Devices, PLCs, IPCs and Plant Architectures:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/manufacturing-concepts-edge-devices-plcs-ipcs-industrial-automation-software-hardware-architectures- Root Causes of Downtime in Industrial Automation:
https://www.joltek.com/blog/root-causes-downtime-industrial-automationThe controller brand question is the one most people get backwards. The instinct is to compare spec sheets and price per point, and that is almost never what determines whether a platform works out over ten years. What actually matters is who supports it in your region, whether a local integrator has already deployed it, whether your existing people already know it, and how fast you can get a human on the phone when a line is down.
For a small plant you own outright, that logic points somewhere unexpected. CODESYS as the development environment, because it is inexpensive, approachable, and hardware agnostic. Ignition from Inductive Automation as the SCADA layer, because it connects to a broad spectrum of devices and web deployment is cheap. Hardware agnosticism is not a philosophical position here. It is a supply chain hedge, and anyone who lived through recent lead time chaos understands why. The hardware vendor then gets chosen on local distributor and integrator support rather than on the datasheet, with WAGO, Opto 22, and PLCnext all viable underneath.
For a manufacturer with multiple sites and a C suite making the call, the answer swings hard toward Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and Schneider Electric, for reasons that have very little to do with the controllers themselves. What is already installed, what the engineering staff already know, and the industry norm all outweigh the technical comparison. Pharmaceutical plants lean heavily on DeltaV. That is not an accident and it is not a spec sheet decision.
This episode also takes on the question that gets the strongest reaction from working practitioners. Why does every PLC and SCADA job posting sit under a maintenance or electrician title? The argument here is that producing ladder logic which runs a machine is the easy part, and AI has made it easier still. The hard part is building a system that is reliable, maintainable, expandable, and connectable. Program scope tags leaking into global scope, messages passed between areas, rungs nobody documented: that is what a plant inherits when the skill is treated as a commodity, and the technical debt lands years later on somebody else.
Also covered: whether you can power an Allen-Bradley Point I/O over PoE with a 90 watt splitter set to 24 volts, and why the Opto 22 groov RIO already solves that natively. Whether a trade school PLC track beats the electrician route, and why XIC, XIO, OTE, addressing, and scan cycle behaviour matter more than jumping ahead to motion and safety. Whether a two year controls associate degree is worth it with five years already in the field. And HMI design: why native graphics outperform imported assets, and how to apply ISA 101 selectively on standalone machines.
Timestamps
0:00 On site commissioning across Rockwell, Omron, and Ignition
0:50 Can you power a Point I/O over PoE?
5:10 Why running 24 volts is usually the simpler answer
7:00 The Opto 22 groov RIO as native PoE I/O
8:20 Trade school PLC courses vs the electrician route
11:50 Master the fundamentals before sequencers and motion
14:25 Pick the employer and the mentor, not the title
15:00 Why PLC programming gets classed as a maintenance skill
17:10 Reliable, maintainable, expandable: the real difficulty
19:40 The technical debt a plant takes on
21:20 If you had to build a factory tomorrow
24:45 Ignition and CODESYS for a small plant you own
26:00 Choosing hardware on local support, not spec sheets
28:40 What changes when you advise a C suite
31:30 Is a two year controls associate degree worth it?
35:00 What iOS app design taught me about HMI design
37:20 Native HMI graphics vs importing from other software
39:50 ISA 101 on standalone machines: adopt it selectively
Connect:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov
Joltek:
https://www.joltek.comSolisPLC:
https://www.solisplc.com