How Much Are You Paying For Your Legacy DCS?

Your old DCS could be costing more to maintain than to replace. It’s a shocking thought, but it’s often true when all costs are considered.

If your process plant operators are still working with outdated DCS platforms, you may be putting production processes and product reliability at significant risk. You may also find that the costs of downtime and maintaining your old system is greater than migrating to a new one.

If you’re skeptical, wondering how such a thing could be possible, you’re not alone. When we make this suggestion to customers and prospects, 他们问, “A new DCS is going to cost millions of dollars, 在新设备方面, 工程成本, 再培训, and perhaps major infrastructure rebuilding. 我以前的总参谋部还在那里. How can I justify an expensive replacement project to management”?

The answer to this very reasonable question is found in a method of engineering, 经济, and financial analysis referred to as total cost of ownership (TCO), which tries to consider all the costs related to a product over its lifetime. The TCO of your car isn’t just the purchase price, but everything you spend on it: gas, 融资, 维护, 等., over all the years you own it. The same approach can be applied to a DCS over its lifetime, typically 20+ years. Let’s look at how MAVERICK applied this analysis in a DCS migration assessment for a large U.S. 造纸厂.

The majority of the DCS platforms in this 造纸厂 were obsolete and no longer actively supported by their manufacturers. Original replacement parts were hard to find and remanufactured parts had high failure rates. The control engineers and technicians spent a large part of their time just keeping the systems running.

作为分析的一部分, MAVERICK calculated the TCO for the old control system and then compared that to a projected TCO for a latest-generation DCS. 对于现有的控制系统, we documented the initial DCS installation costs, 后续的升级, 以及维护成本, including the time the control engineering and technician staff spent doing 维护-related work over a period of 24 years. 更重要的是, we also estimated the cost of lost mill production due to unplanned outages and upsets caused by DCS failures and other related issues. 最后, we extrapolated these rising costs over the next several years, as the systems became increasingly unreliable, and parts became harder to replace and remanufacture.

下一个, MAVERICK used bids from several DCS vendors to perform a similar analysis for a new DCS looking 20 years into the future. The investment cost for installing the new DCS was offset by several cost reductions and savings:

• The initial 维护 costs are very low and will increase slowly over the first 10 to 15 years with the new DCS.
• The initial upgrade costs are similarly very low and will be managed by formal programs offered by the DCS vendors.
• The cost of lost production drops dramatically because the new DCS is much more reliable.

When the extrapolated TCO for a legacy DCS was compared with the estimated TCO for a new DCS, the TCO of the new DCS was significantly lower, with the projected cash flow difference yielding a before-tax, 内部收益率为12.3%. Now, that’s something you can take to management!

This is just the financial side of the picture, but we know beginning a discussion with financial benefits gets management listening. There are also major performance improvements possible with a new DCS platform. Over many DCS migration studies and projects, we’ve seen marked improvements in process visibility and safety (improved HMI features), process operability (improved control functions and features), 报警管理, cybersecurity and utilization of new technologies, all resulting in reduced operating costs and measurable productivity improvements. Get a MAVERICK expert to assist you with a TCO analysis to prove the value of replacing your legacy DCS.

This post was written by 吉姆·福特. Jim is a senior principal engineer at BC菠菜论坛, 罗克韦尔自动化公司, and leading automation solutions provider offering industrial automation, 战略制造, and enterprise integration services for the process industries. MAVERICK delivers expertise and consulting in a wide variety of areas including industrial automation controls, 分布式控制系统, manufacturing execution systems, 操作策略, 业务流程优化, 和更多的.