New White Paper from Bedrock Automation Enables Comparison and Calculation of Industrial Control System Lifecycle Costs

Aug 7, 2018

By: Robert Bergman

Bedrock Automation, maker of the Bedrock® Open Secure Automation (OSA) system, has announced the availability of the fifth in its series of white papers supporting implementation of Open Secure Automation (OSA). The new whitepaper, Chapter Five: Industrial Control Systems Life Cycle Cost Analysis – Quantitative Evaluation, delineates 450 different factors that impact costs across the following six phases of the industrial control system (ICS) life cycle: engineering, installation, commissioning, maintenance, system, and cyber security.

“While increasing open connectivity presents many opportunities for business improvement, it also introduces new control challenges. Mainstream vendors are redefining their offerings to address these new opportunities, but each is approaching the situation differently and may not always present all cost factors in a way that they can be compared easily. We built an evaluation guide to help users in the process of evaluating different vendor brands of PLC, SCADA, DCS or other industrial control technology,” said Bedrock founder and CEO Albert Rooyakkers.

The Product Evaluation Method is divided into six sections covering different life cycle phases of an ICS asset. Each section defines the criteria against which different vendor’s offerings can be compared. It also provides ranking scores to enable users to rate each vendor’s offerings based on their ability to meet the specific requirement. The document guides users in totalizing and normalizing the ratings to weigh the raw scores according to their overall contribution to the ICS’s life cycle valuation. An accompanying Excel spreadsheet is available to automatically calculate valuation.

To download the White paper and workbook visit www.bedrockautomation.com/revolution. Previous chapters are available at this link as well.