Soft Control - Support Contact - Breakdown Support, Spare Parts, Backups, Battery Replacement

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The following outlines the levels of Support and Troubleshooting services offered by Soft Control for the PLC / HMI systems. The continuous availability of this service is made possible by the payment of a monthly retainer fee. This allows Soft Control to prepare for a system failure on your plant thereby greatly increasing the chances of successfully restoring your process.

The principle activity of Soft Control is the operation of a 24 hour PLC support service. 24 hour support has been operational since 1995. In almost all cases it is academic that we have not written the control code to be interrogated, on hundreds of occasions we attended breakdowns using the PLC programmer and have pinpointed the cause of the failure ( often a field device which would have been impossible to locate without the use of a programmer or other specialised equipment ).

Typically our Client base is made up of Companies for which a production failure means jeopardising the supply of materials or parts to the end user. Except for Christmas Day and New Years Day the Soft Control 24 hour support service is always available.

Typical range of customer requests. Which are tailored to your needs!

24/7 Breakdown Support configured to suit your requirements.
- Each Breakdown you will receive a detailed site report (Example to the right)

£ 300,000 worth of stock with thousands of parts at your disposal.
- Bonded supply of PLC parts for your plant

Modem Support with a typical response time of less than 30 minutes.
Rmote support of equipment from various manufacturers.
Annual Maintenance

Site survey encompassing:
- Identication of PLC modules
- Drive Safety Systems
- Identifications of specialised high risk modules
- Infra-red survey of electrical systems
- Energy saving.
- Diagnostic Test

Planned Maintenance routines
- Replacement of backup batteries at the recommended intervals
- Backup of PLC / HMI / SCADA application software / setup data / licenses.

PLC Updating for absolete units

Diagnostic Network Testing

The process for responding to Breakdown requests

From the moment of the initial call Soft Control will be working to get to solve your problem as quick as possible 24 hours a day.

The typical procedure for a engineer is shown in the following steps ( Tailored to your needs ) :-

Step 1 - On your first call you will talk directly to a engineer who will try and resolve the problem over the phone depending on the situation

Step 2 - For companies with remote support we can connect to your systems within 30 minutes via the internet

Step 3 - An on site visit

Response times

Our typical respone time is under 1 hour to arrive on site, depending on location of the breakdown,

Standard Response Times (Dependiing on Traffic):-

The Response Rings Explained:- Each ring represents 59 minutes starting from the inner moving to the outer ring for example the center of the ring is 1 minute the outer ring is 59 minutes
City	Desponse Time
Wolverhamton	Less than 1 hour
Birimingham	1 Hour
Liverpool	2 Hours
Cardif	3 Hours
Plymouth	4 Hours
Edinburgh	5 Hours

Ring	Response Time
0	Less than 1 hour
1	1 Hour
2	2 Hours
3	3 Hours
4	4 Hours
5 +	5 Hours or more

The process for logging support requests

When a support customer rings up for a breadown we require specific information includes machine name and controllers attached which allows us to find the backed up version of the controller on our server and bring the relevant compatable equipment

which will help us diagnose the problem.

If you are not a support customer we will not have a backup of your system and may require documentation and a program backup without this information the problem may take longer time to fix.

At the end of the breakdown a detailed site report will be given