Why audit the control system separately
Electrical infrastructure and control systems age differently and fail differently. A switchboard can look fine for decades with routine maintenance, while a PLC program can accumulate undocumented patches, a SCADA alarm system can quietly become unmanageable, and firmware can fall years behind vendor support - all without an obvious outward sign of trouble.
A control system audit is a focused, technical look at the systems that actually run your process - not a general walk-through, but a structured assessment of hardware, software, documentation and performance against what a well-maintained system should look like.
What we assess
PLC hardware and firmware - processor and I/O module condition, firmware version against current vendor releases, battery and backup status, and spare parts availability.
Program structure and documentation - logic organisation, commenting standards, use of hardcoded values versus parameters, and whether the running program matches the documented version. Undocumented changes made during past breakdowns are a common finding.
HMI and SCADA application health - screen navigation and usability, tag database organisation, historian configuration, and alarm management. Alarm rationalisation is often overdue - systems accumulate nuisance alarms over years of operation until operators start ignoring the alarm system altogether.
Control network communications - PLC-to-PLC, PLC-to-SCADA and field device communications. Identification of unreliable links, protocol mismatches, and single points of failure in the communication path.
Change and version control - how program changes are managed, backed up, and tracked. Sites without a clear change control process are the ones most likely to be running an undocumented, drifted version of their control logic.
How findings are reported
Findings are organised by system and prioritised by risk - what is likely to cause a problem, and what the consequence would be if it does. We separate issues that need immediate attention from items that can be planned into the next shutdown or budget cycle.
Where the audit identifies hardware approaching end of vendor support, we can scope a dedicated control systems obsolescence audit to build a replacement roadmap and budget case.