Scott Bader
IT Plant infrastructure is modernised with SolutionsPT and Exabyte Solutions
Scott Bader was established in 1921 and today is a £227 million-pound global chemical company, employing more than 650 people worldwide. With manufacturing sites located around the world it manufactures, sells and distributes a wide range of synthetic resins and polymers to many different markets and has built a reputation for innovation, quality and excellent customer service.
The challenge
The infrastructure at Scott Bader’s plant was installed in 2002 and centred around a legacy Rockwell SCADA system comprising of ProcessLogix PLC equipment and deployed on a single server with three PC clients out in the factory. The SCADA platform has been obsolete for several years and official technical support for this system was withdrawn in December 2012. All of Scott Bader’s machines were also running Windows 2000 Server, an obsolete operating system now unsupported by Microsoft. Critically, replacements and spares for the hardware could no longer be reliably sourced.
The ageing hardware environment was being pushed to its limits daily, maintenance costs for the system were rising and, due to their age, their reliability was in decline. Scott Bader was also finding it increasingly hard to find personnel qualified to troubleshoot and repair the older machines. Failures in the night or at the weekend left Scott Bader with no access to technicians or hardware spares, bringing production to a halt.
Excessive failure rates, difficulty in procuring spare parts and lack of qualified maintenance personnel all added up to an increased risk of downtime and exposure to security vulnerabilities—a significant expense for any manufacturing facility, but particularly for a process plant.
Scott Bader recognized the need to conduct a site wide upgrade of its control systems and infrastructure but knew that a full migration would need a carefully phased approach and that, in the interim, the business would require a solution to extend the life of its existing control system until the upgrade could be safely completed.
“We needed an architecture that would deliver 24/7 availability, whilst at the same time reducing costs and improving both resilience and security, SolutionsPT has the required expertise and understood the requirements of a specialist industrial IT system. They were able to suggest an architecture that could deliver the right level of availability and would complement VMware.”
Roger Sage Electrical & Instrumentation Supervisor