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This year’s Annual Global Alliance Partner Conference hosted by Schneider Electric took place in Las Vegas, NV in conjunction with their Innovation Summit. Johan Vanderplaestse, Senior Vice President Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric, describes the Alliance Partner Program as a “co-innovation across a unique ecosystem of industrial automation professionals.” Johan believes that “partnership is the key to delivering the efficiency, sustainability and profitability today’s industries need to thrive. SE Alliance partners are driving today’s industrial digital transformation.” George T. Hall Company (GTH) is proud to be a Certified Alliance System Integrator and Automation Partner with Schneider Electric (SE). With SE as our digital partner for sustainability and efficiency we believe our long-term goal of making the world a better place through automation is in our near future.

As described in the official event press release; “the Annual Global Alliance Partners Conference brought together an international delegation and cross section of Alliance partners to bring members closer to software-centric industrial automation solutions and business strategies to drive mutual growth.” At the Annual Global Alliance Partners Conference, Schneider Electric revealed the winners of the 2022 Global Alliance Partner Program of Excellence award winners. “These awards celebrate game-changing industrial automation deployed with EcoStruxure platform and honors best in class collaboration in IoT and digitalization for sustainability, agility, resiliency, and profitability.” SE describes the Excellence Awards as an opportunity to shine a light on supreme system integration, interoperability, and innovation that underpins next-generation industries. We are proud to announce George T. Hall was awarded the Global Alliance Partner of the Year Award for our outstanding growth in Control System Modernization.

Our VP of System Integration, Mike Howard, accepted the award on behalf of GTH. Mike Howard heads our System Integration operations which encompasses the many teams within the organization involved with automation projects. He plays an integral role in all areas of business here at GTH and is an impactful mentor and leader. As part of this exciting occasion Mike Howard had the opportunity to share the stage with Schneider Electric’s Global Director – MMM Segment Industrial Automation, Ahmad A Aly, to discuss the lessons GTH learned from one of the projects that put us in the running for the Global Alliance Partner of the Year Award.

This project had challenges based on the magnitude of hardware and minimal duration to complete the work. We developed a case study about this very challenging application, you can find out more here: Modernization – Large – Case Study Another success story is based around a SCADA modernization and PLC Migration project. The customer’s PLC hardware and SCADA software systems were no longer sustainable and had reached the end of life. With the advice of GTH, a plan was developed to reduce the risk of unplanned downtime. GTH deployed a new application in AVEVA InTouch and bridged across a generation of network technologies. Utilizing remote access appliances, the old and new systems operated in parallel through the process of acceptance testing and our client deemed the project a success.  We developed a white paper based on our experience that is available here: https://www.georgethall.com/scada-modernization/

While many integrators have experience performing SCADA and PLC modernizations, not many companies have been around long enough to have extensive experience working with both legacy and modern systems. At GTH, we have decades of experience serving as a platform-agnostic integrator and we are well-versed in working with a wide variety of software and hardware for SCADA systems.

We have developed proven methods and systems to help us further minimize downtime and risk during modernization implementations. A standard part of our modernization process is the extensive witnessed factory acceptance testing whenever possible. We also supplement this testing with thorough documentation for all our systems. Our industry certifications and partnerships provide our customers with early access to innovative technologies as well as higher levels of support. Our status as a Certified Automation Partner with Schneider Electric gave us access to software tools that reduce risk and speed up the process of converting old systems to modern PAC’s.

For more information on our expertise, you can visit our Expertise page or download our Company Profile for more information on our capabilities.