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.

Most users of GE's Genius I/O system love the technology and don't ever want to part with it.  But when a line is shut down or the machine is upgraded or a new PLC standard is introduced, the Genius blocks might get escorted to the back door.

But don't throw them away!  We will make sure that your old Genius blocks find a good home.  We will offer you a check or credit for used Genius blocks.  It doesn't matter if you have the terminal strips or not - we'll take just the electronics. 

Call me personally at 1-704-227-4604 or my buying cohort, Jim, at 704-227-4622, and we will get you an offer on your used Genius blocks right away.

On May 31, 2011, GE IP (formerly GE Fanuc) discontinued the 90-70 PLC product line.  Introduced in 1990, the GE 90-70 PLC line had moderate success around the world in mid- to large-sized PLC applications.  While a good deal of investment was made in the development of CPU Redundancy and the capabilities of the higher end CPUs, like the IC697CPX772, IC697CPX782, and the IC697CPX935, there were not a lot of changes in the product line over the past 10 years.

As we have written in the past, it is tough on a company when a manufacturer discontinues a key component of your automation scheme.  Because of the power of the 90-70, this PLC was more likely to be the core of more sophisticated, and critical, control schemes.  The manufacturer does their homework and creates a migration plan that moves the 90-70 user to the latest PLC, or PAC, solution.  Of course, that is not done for free - integration costs, new hardware costs, downtime, re-wiring of the I/O structure - all add up to a pretty major upgrade project.  And just because the manufacturer says its time to upgrade, it doesn't mean that it is in your budget this year, next year or five years from now.

So what do you do?

Realizing this burden on your business, Qualitrol has positioned itself to Extend the Life of your PLC system. Now is not the time to figure out how to fund a major PLC upgrade or conversion.  And if the system is working properly, why the need to change it now - it could conceivably continue to work flawlessly for many years to come. 

We have thousands of 90-70 parts in stock, tested through our unique quality process, and ready to ship today.  And we are committed to supporting this line for years to come.  We are still fully supporting the Series Six that was introduced in 1980 - and are equipped to do so until the last Series Six is controlling an application.  So you know we will be committed to the 90-70 for years as well.

Remanufactured parts (with a 2-year warranty), in-house repairs (with 3-5 day turnaround), phone support (from a former GE Hotline tech support specialist), field support thoughout the country, and programming tools make up our support offering for the GE 90-70.

So, we have you covered, for years to come.

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.

Manufacturers who are still running legacy Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) systems - like a GE Series Six, GE Series One, Allen-Bradley PLC-5, or Siemens S5 - are often confronted with one scary question - "How can I get to the program in my Legacy PLC if I ever have an emergency?"  Many older PLC programs used programming software that had to run under - gasp - DOS.

So then the bigger question becomes "How can I run my DOS-based programming software on my Windows-based laptop?"  Well, it can be done, but you have to wrestle with ansi.sys and config.sys files which gets harder and harder with each release of Windows.

Then you have to deal with a maor hardware problem - laptops don't have serial ports any more.  USB-to-Serial connectors work sometimes but that is another path frought with trouble.   This just doesn't seem to get any easier....

Until now.  Qualitrol International is pleased to announce its Logic Developer Platform (LDP). It removes ALL of the headaches in Legacy PLC Programming.  NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED - IT WORKS RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX!

• Don't worry about getting DOS to run under Windows or getting the software to run properly - We've already done that for you!
• Don't worry about getting the USB-to-Serial converter working properly - We make sure it works before we ship it!
• Run multiple PLC Programming packages from one programmer - eveen from different PLC manufacturers!
• SHHHHH....We don't call it a computer so IT will never know it is one...but it is a full-functioning unit that runs any Windows application like email, Internet Explorer, and has a solid state drive option so there are no moving parts.

Users of Legacy PLCs are all over this new device.  Never has one PLC Programming device solved the problems of Legacy, DOS-based programs while still being a viable programming tool for Windows-based programming software.  Just another innovative product from Qualitrol International.

In late 2002, GE Fanuc moved its popluar Series Six PLC system to 'Obsolete' status.  While many manufacturers throughout the world who used the Series Six had already replaced the 20+ year old PLC with a new, faster, sleeker model, many saw no reason to replace the system, as long as we can get spare parts and keep it running.

For years, Qualitrol International had been supplying parts and repairs for the Series Six.  Once this announcement was made, customers from all over the world came to our site to get the parts and repairs needed to keep their Series Six running.

And now, 8 years since GE Fanuc decided to no longer support the Series Six, there are still many people throughout the world who still have them in production. And you know what - Qualitrol is still providing quality remanufactured Series Six parts with a 2 year warranty, and turning around Series Six repairs within 2 or 3 days.  You can't get that kind of service anywhere else.  And Qualitrol will be in the business of serving Series Six users until the last call comes in.

As a Series Six user, you have to decide - do i keep my Series Six running for a few more years until I have money in my budget to replace it (knowing that you can get parts and repairs from Qualitrol until then) or is now the time that you say that it's time to put the ol' Series Six out to pasture and replace it with one of those sleeker, faster models? 

Well, Qualitrol is ready to help you with the conversion too.  For years we have promoted the GE-to-GE conversion solutions - either a wholesale replacement of your entire Series Six system or a more cost-effective approach whereby we simply replace the Series Six CPU rack (yes, in many models of the Series Six the CPU was made up of an entire rack of modules) with a new GE 90-70 or GE Rx7i CPU and your Series Six I/O structure is none the wiser and stays intact.  You can learn more about these options on our Series Six Conversion page.

Now, because of additions to our engineering staff, we can offer Series Six Conversions to any major PLC - Allen-Bradley, Siemens, Modicon or any other leading brand.  We can specify the hardware that will be equivalent to your Series Six system, convert the ladder program, help with installation and be on site for start-up.  Learn more at our PLC Conversion page.

Just go to our Contact Us page and mention that you want to speak to one of our engineers about a Series Six conversion. 

I was explaining to a customer recently the difference between Qualitrol's repair warranty and the warranty of most other repair houses.  I told the customer that when Qualitrol repairs a PLC module, we functionally test all aspects of the module by installing it in a PLC rack with other modules, uploading a program in the CPU that is designed by our engineers to fully test the functionality of the system and the repaired module in particular, and letting it 'burn in' for 8 hours.  If there is another problem with the module besides the one that it was sent in for, we typically find it during this testing process, and fix it before we send the part back. 

As a result, when we guarantee our repair for one year, we are actually guaranteeing the operation of the entire module, not just the circuit or failure for which the customer sent the part in.  If we fix the output circuit and then 3 months later the interface to the backplane goes bad, we fix it under the original one-year warranty.

In explaining this to our customer, I used the term "board level repair" to illustrate the fact that we guarantee the entire board, not just the repaired section of the board.  One of our repair technicians overheard me using this term and later set me straight on use of this term.

In most repair circles, the term "board level repair" refers to the act of swapping out suspiciously bad boards from a system and replacing them with new boards until the system functions again.  In fact this is not repairing the board, but simply removing the bad board all together.

This, of course, is on the complete opposite end of the repair services spectrum from the repair service Qualitrol offers.  I guess we should call our process "Functional Repair" or "Edge-to-Edge Repair" because it is fully comprehensive. (Learn more about our Quality Repair Process)

When I asked another of our long-time (over 10 years) customers why her company uses Qualitrol for repairs sent in by their customers, she said, "because you're easy to deal with and we never have had any problems." 

One of our Inside Sales representatives received a call the other day from a prospective client.  This visitor to our site had found just the part they were looking for, liked the price that they saw on the screen, but just weren't comfortable taking that last step to place the order on-line.  They picked up the phone and called our toll-free number.

"I see your price and I see you have 3 of these in stock ready to ship.  Is that really true?" the visitor asked.  "Absolutely," replied our sales rep.  "Just wanted to be sure," said the visitor, "since I have you on the phone, can I just give you my credit card information?"

This story illustrates some wonderful realities about internet shopping these days.  First, you want to be sure that the information you are seeing is accurate and can be relied upon.  At Qualitrol, we update our pricing and our inventory levels every 10 minutes, so what you see is accurate and up to date.

Second, some people want to deal with people.  They want to hear a voice on the other end of the phone and be assured that everything will be handled properly.  Especially if you are in an emergency situation.  With Qualitrol, you will get the same great service whether you place your order on-line or in person.

You can call us, email us, or chat anytime.  We have an after hours number that is avialable 24/7 in case you have a problem that can't wait until the next business day.  We have one technical support person and one order processing specialist on call all the time. 

Rest assured that our on-line transactions are secure and time-tested.  Or feel free to call us anytime.