We've discussed before how difficult vendors make your lives when they discontinue product lines well before we think they should (see When PLCs are Discontinued).  Suddenly you are faced with a decision of taking out the discontinued product and replacing it with your vendor's recommended solution (or finally letting the competitor's salesman in for a visit) or trying to get by repairing the parts that may fail or buying remanufactured products until your budget allows for a conversion.

If you find yourself needing to convert, your vendor doesn't always have a plan in place to give you some of your initial investment back.  Meaning, they may give a small discount off your new hardware, but they're likely not to give you much, if any, of a credit in trade towards the hardware you are taking out.  Why do they want to take it back anyway? And any credit doesn't offset the costs of re-wiring and re-programming the system.

So we have created our own PLC Trade In Program - simply send us a list of the PLC parts you are taking out of your current system and would like to trade in, and we will send you an offer for the parts.  In the vast majority of cases, we will offer you more for your parts than the manufacturer will.  GE, Allen-Bradley, Siemens, whatever you don't have need of.

As well, you will probably be left over with some spares for this older system.  List those parts too - we'll give you an offer on all of it.

This is a great way to offset the investment in the new technology and helps to ease the price of obsolescence.

Fill out our Trade In form for a quick quote on your unwanted PLC parts.

No PLC User likes to hear that the PLC that he has standarized has reached mature status and that the manufacturer will stop producing it in the next several years.  Immediately, contingency plans are created and the questions begin to fly - What is the migration path that the manufacturer is offering?  Should I change out all of the mature PLCs for a newer platform? If I'm going to have to make a wholesale change, should I just change vendors?  Or, can I hang in there for the next several years hoping that I can still get parts and find someone to fix the old system even after the vendor stops supporting the product?

In these days of tight capital budgets and uncertain demand, footing the bill for an unplanned PLC changeout is just not in the cards.  While migration is inevitable, you might be able to postpone it longer than you think.

For years Qualitrol International has been in the business of extending the life of obsolete, Legacy PLCs.  Whether it is the GE Series Six, Series One, Series Three or Series Five, the Allen-Bradley PLC-5, Allen-Bradley SLC 500, or the Siemens Simatic S5, Quailtrol combines quality repair services, millions of dollars of remanufactured and after market PLC parts, and knowledgeable field and phone support resources into a support network for your aging PLCs.  We provide years' worth of spare parts, high quality repair services for 20-year-old PLCs and have the manuals, software and documentation to get you out of trouble until you are ready to convert, not when the manufacturer tells you to. It's what we like to call a Soft Landing.

So when your PLC vendor of choice decides to pull the plug on your critical PLC line, rest assured that Qualitrol will provide the Soft Landing.