It was a logical consequence, explains Federico Ares, Automation Project Engineer at Aluar, to use Versiondog. From 2005 to 2010, the Argentinian company went through a growth phase during which most of its production facilities were upgraded. The number of controllers in his area of responsibility increased from 100 to 300 PLCs. The majority of these are Siemens S7-300 and S7-400 controllers. When it came to managing the software versions of all these controllers, the weak points in the existing workflows and processes quickly became apparent, as data backup and documentation had previously been carried out manually. In the course of the growth phase, the automation and maintenance team also expanded rapidly to over 100 employees. As a result, the documentation of software versions was mostly irregular and increasingly incomplete. This in turn led to unnecessary additional work when it came to identifying and analyzing errors. The risk of incidents that not only impaired operational processes but could also lead to production downtime in the medium term increased. There was also a risk of safety risks remaining undetected.

Ares remembers the lengthy search for a suitable data management system. Ordinary text-based "standard" version management solutions were simply not suitable for versioning binary/proprietary data. Software solutions specifically designed for version management in automation, on the other hand, largely lacked support for different controller manufacturers or did not provide a solid version management architecture. Aluar was also concerned about automating the audit processes to ensure that the correct and approved program was actually running in the controller. In addition, all existing processes and tasks at Aluar have to be audited for quality assurance purposes - this also applies to the systems. For this reason, backups are now automatically taken from all control units on a weekly basis. If the backup does not match the current version in the control system, i.e. processes and parameters no longer run as specified, the system issues an alarm. This gives the maintenance team the opportunity to react quickly and rectify errors before anything worse happens. When asked whether the data management system leads to greater plant and process reliability, Ares replies: "In my view, the biggest benefit is that Versiondog has allowed us to take our best practices to the next level. We have significantly reduced our administrative workload and are still able to keep our project archive and directory structure in order, check changes quickly and effectively and lock components to avoid version conflicts." And this is also of great benefit for machine safety.

Version management with more responsibility

Thanks to Active Directory integration, the automation and maintenance team takes on more responsibility when it comes to version management. "The user is logged in with their personal signature and is therefore also personally responsible for their work," says Ares. With the help of the detailed change history, it is always possible to trace who made which changes when, where and why. The direct exchange between maintenance staff has become more intensive and better as a result of working with the data. "Our employees now have a tool to communicate with each other more effectively." In the past, employees usually only dealt with their own tasks and projects. Now, however, they are able to see the big picture and focus on which colleague is currently working on which control system.

The Easy Client, one of the system's applications, is particularly important for Aluar. The client contains all the basic functions for managing data in automated production, but is still easy to use - which is why it is so popular with maintenance staff who do not have in-depth software knowledge. The range of functions includes check-out, editing, versioning and check-in of components. With these functions, a user can make software changes quickly and easily and manage and save software versions.