In this guide 6 sections
Buy generic project software for tasks, time and invoices. Consider building only where your work is unusual: tag lists, driver licences, HMI screen revisions and factory acceptance records tied to each site. Test any vendor with one live project’s tag list before you sign anything.
What generic tools already do well
Task boards, timesheets, shared calendars and invoicing are solved problems, and a SCADA integrator gains nothing by rebuilding them from scratch with its own engineers. Missed deadlines? Unbilled hours? Buy a tool.
Be honest about how much of your trouble sits there. Many owners find the mess is somewhere else, inside the spreadsheets that hold the real engineering data and that only two people know how to read.
List the five files people open most. Those files show where the work lives. They also show who owns them, and that person is the one to interview before you buy anything at all.
Where SCADA work breaks the mould
A project is not just tasks. It carries a tag list with thousands of rows, each linked to a PLC address, an alarm limit and a screen. It also carries driver licences that expire.
Generic tools store all of this as attachments, and an attachment cannot answer which tags changed since the last factory acceptance test. A tool that treats the tag as a record, with its own history, can answer it in seconds.
That gap is the real case for custom software. A missed revision on a water treatment screen can send an engineer to site with the wrong build. Costly trips follow.
- Tag lists with address, scaling, alarm limits and screen
- Driver and runtime licences with server and expiry
- HMI screen revisions and who approved them
- Factory acceptance test results by tag or loop
- Site acceptance and punch items per plant
Ask the vendor hard, specific questions
Give the vendor one real tag list exported from your engineering tool. Ask them to import it, flag duplicate addresses and show a change history for a single tag, all while you watch the screen. No demo, no deal.
Ask how licence expiry reminders work, and who receives them. Ask whether two revisions of an HMI project can be compared side by side, screen by screen, with changed alarm texts highlighted for review. Find out who keeps the tag history and acceptance reports if you leave.
Watch for vague answers about exports. You want files you can open without the vendor. A CSV of tags, a PDF of every acceptance report and the raw history of changes are a fair minimum to demand in writing.
When building makes sense
Build when your edge depends on how you run projects, such as a standard commissioning method, reusable screen templates or a support model with remote access logs. Software that mirrors this becomes part of how you win work.
Building costs attention as well as money. Someone on your side must own the requirements and answer questions weekly, because without that person a build drifts away from the real workflow within a few months.
A middle path often works: buy the task and billing tool, then build a small module for tags, licences and acceptance records.
Decide with a small trial
Pick one running project and one finished one. Load both into the candidate tool, or into a rough prototype, and ask the engineers to find five facts they normally hunt for across folders, emails and old laptops.
Record the result in a short sheet: question asked, time taken, found or not. A decision made from that sheet is easy to defend to partners and your auditors. Keep it simple.
Then choose, and set a review date six months out. Decide in advance what result would make you switch, such as engineers still keeping private tag spreadsheets on their laptops.
SCADA project tool scorecard
Each requirement is scored in its own row of this sheet. Rows cover tag list import, tag change history, licence expiry reminders, HMI revision compare, FAT record by loop, punch list and data export. Columns hold priority, generic result, custom result and demo notes.
Open a blank worksheet to printQuestions owners ask
Can a spreadsheet run SCADA project data?
For a few small jobs, yes. It breaks when several engineers edit one tag list at once, when revisions pile up or when acceptance records must link back to tags.
Do we need to build everything from scratch?
No. Most firms buy tasks, time and billing tools. Then they add a focused module for engineering data. That keeps the build small and the risk low.
What should a vendor demo show?
Importing your own tag list, tracking a change on one tag, a licence reminder and a factory acceptance record. Generic slides are not evidence.
Who should own a custom build internally?
A senior engineer or project manager who knows the workflow and can answer questions weekly. Without them, requirements drift.