Pro-tips: Site visits & tours

Pro-tips exist to help professionalize the services you offer. (When you are in controls, you are very rarely the end customer.) Sometimes you have the luck to see what others in your region are doing. Take them up on it!

For instance, I have found a number of peer firms near us have fully contracted out controls teams. You can see the amount of money poured down the drain and make a better argument for continued investment in your own. One tour showed a sites with ~20x ControlLogix PLCs, when only 4-5 unit processes existed. Each one of those was perhaps $5-10k, while an ethernet card would have been half of that! Another showed a team with three times the staff for the same work... but who got it done much faster. (Who would have thought?)

You can also advertise your services by offering improvements! One site that I visited could have made dramatic improvements to their control system by reading my blog post on alarms. If I were in the private sector, I probably could have made an offer on the spot.

Any time you are asking for a tour, I recommend buying lunch for your guides afterwards. It gives you a few extra minutes to interact with them and make connections.

Good luck!