"Assessment" is a word consultancies use to sell a document nobody reads. It is worth being concrete about what one should contain, so that you can judge any proposal you receive — ours included — against something specific.
The problem it solves
Before you can plan equipment connectivity, you need to know what you actually have. In practice most plants do not, in the detail required, because the information is distributed across equipment manuals, vendor contacts, the automation engineer who set up the last tool, and a spreadsheet that is out of date.
The specific questions that turn out to be hard to answer from memory:
- Which tools are on HSMS and which are on serial?
- For each tool, which GEM300 standards are actually implemented?
- Which tools have remote commands enabled, and which have them licensed but off?
- Which have interface manuals we can locate?
- Where does each tool's data currently go, if anywhere?
- Which tools are the constraint on the MES rollout?
Until those are answered, any integration plan is guesswork, and any quote you receive is guesswork priced with a risk margin you pay for.
What the deliverable should contain
A tool-by-tool inventory. One row per tool, or per logical equipment entity on multi-chamber tools. Transport, GEM capability, GEM300 standards present, EDA availability, interface manual located or not, current data destination.
A complexity classification. Tools grouped by integration difficulty, because effort and cost do not scale with tool count — they scale with what each tool can and cannot do. A plant that is mostly modern HSMS tools is a very different project from one with a long tail of serial equipment, even at identical tool counts.
A gap analysis. For each tool, the difference between what it can report today and what your systems need from it. This is where the unwelcome findings surface, which is the point of doing it early.
An integration architecture. Where the connectivity layer sits, how it reaches each tool, how data gets to the MES and to everything else that wants it, and what the network and security implications are.
A sequenced roadmap. Which tools first and why. Usually driven by which are blocking something, not by which are easiest.
A defensible cost basis. Enough detail that you can price the work — internally or externally — without a further discovery phase.
If a proposed assessment does not commit to producing all of these, ask what it does produce.
What it costs you in time
This is the part that gets understated in proposals, so here is a realistic account.
- Access to equipment documentation. Someone has to find the interface manuals. This is frequently the long pole
- A few hours each from the automation engineer and the MES owner. Not full-time, but real
- Network access, or an escort, to observe tools. Subject to whatever your OT security policy requires
- A vendor contact for tools where documentation is missing. Sometimes the only route to an answer
Two to three weeks elapsed is a reasonable expectation for a plant-scale assessment. Materially faster than that usually means the inventory is being taken from a spreadsheet rather than verified.
How to judge whether it is worth buying
A fair test: would the deliverable be useful to you if you then went and did the integration work yourself, or gave it to a different vendor?
If yes, it is a real assessment. If the output only makes sense as an input to that vendor's own proposal, you are buying a sales document.
The corollary is that you should own the deliverable outright, with no restriction on showing it to anyone else. If that is not offered, ask why.
What we do
We run readiness assessments as a fixed-scope, fixed-fee engagement, typically two to three weeks. The deliverable is the six items listed above. You own it, and you can take it to another vendor — including one of our competitors — with our blessing.
We price it as a genuine engagement rather than giving it away, for a reason worth stating plainly: free assessments are sales activities, and they produce documents shaped to justify a follow-on sale. Charging for it is what lets the findings be whatever they turn out to be, including "your existing setup is adequate and you do not need us".
It is deliberately the smallest thing you can buy from us, so that the decision to work together is made on evidence rather than on a pitch.