Capital-planning season needs a modernization case backed by real risk, not a 2019 spreadsheet and a guess about which controllers are old.
Next quarter's capital-planning cycle needs a modernization case for the automation fleet — and the only inventory anyone can find is a spreadsheet last touched in 2019, half of it wrong. Nobody wants to greenlight a plant-wide audit two weeks before the budget meeting, and nobody's sure which controllers are actually urgent versus just old.
The inventory already exists. Every time an engineer parsed a program export this year — explaining a fault, diffing a backup, proposing a version bump — Rung quietly logged that controller's vendor, model, and firmware to the site's shared memory. Nobody built it on purpose. It was just there.
Every step here reads from files and the on-site relay's shared memory — nothing connects to a live controller. →
Plain language — no need to name a specific controller.
Pulls the site's PLC inventory, already built this year.
Cross-references lifecycle facts, pulls the I/O footprint.
Writes a migration + validation plan for the capital request.
The engineer never walked the plant, and never sent a fleet's worth of catalog numbers anywhere it shouldn't go.
The inventory doesn't reset after this meeting — it keeps building itself the same way it always has, so next year's capital-planning cycle starts from an answer too.
An engineering estimate, not a lab result — every site and fleet differs. It's the shape of the problem this capability is built to compress.
| Criteria | Without Rung | With Rung |
|---|---|---|
| Building the inventory | ✕A dedicated plant walk, or a contractor engagement, weeks before the deadline | ✓Already built from a year of ordinary troubleshooting work |
| Prioritization | ✕"Everything looks old" — a gut call with no lifecycle data behind it | ✓Ranked against vendor lifecycle status, not just visual age |
| Hardware footprint | ✕Re-opening each Studio 5000 project by hand to check I/O and comms | ✓Catalog numbers, revisions, and topology pulled instantly |
| Capital-request writeup | ✕An engineer manually drafts the justification from scratch | ✓Structured migration + validation plan drafted as a starting point |
| Data exposure | ✕Sometimes — a fleet spreadsheet pasted into a general AI chat tool | ✓None — inventory and plan stay on the on-site relay and local disk |
This is a composite scenario grounded in real PLC fleet-obsolescence planning, not a specific customer's numbers — every site and fleet differs. The value here is measured in time and audit dependency avoided, not a fabricated dollar figure. Vendor lifecycle facts should be verified against Rockwell's own Product Compatibility and Download Center (PCDC) before a real capital request ships.
Install Rung today, or talk to us about a design partnership for your site.