Send 5 maintenance technicians on a vendor PLC course and you've spent thousands of dollars before anyone turns a spanner. Five working days off-site. Generic curriculum on equipment you may not even run. Six months later half the knowledge has evaporated because there's nothing to practise on. There's a better way: in-house, no travel budget, no Windows licence.
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The problem
External vendor courses charge flat per-attendee fees regardless of how many technicians you send. Whether you send two or ten, the per-person rate stays high. There is no volume discount for the maintenance team that needs ongoing upskilling, not just a one-off course.
Vendor training labs teach the vendor's flagship hardware in a vendor-controlled environment. Your plant may run Siemens on the utilities, Allen-Bradley on the production line, and Mitsubishi on a legacy conveyor. No single vendor course covers your actual environment.
An attendance certificate is not a competency record. When a safety incident occurs, thin documentation of what each technician actually knows and can do creates liability exposure. There is no objective record of individual skill level.
New technicians shadow senior staff until they are deemed ready. That process depends entirely on senior bandwidth, which varies, and produces uneven baselines across a team. There is no structured curriculum and no way to verify a new hire's starting level.
MerSETA learnerships and apprenticeship programmes leave PLC content in an awkward gap: too technical for classroom theory, too risky for live equipment. There is no structured, scaffolded PLC curriculum that sits between classroom and the plant floor.
The solution
Siemens, Allen-Bradley, Mitsubishi, Omron, Schneider, Delta, IEC 61131-3, and Instruction List — all in one platform on one subscription. When you commission a new line from a different vendor, your team can begin practising that vendor's dialect before the equipment arrives on site.
Motor start-stop, tank level control, conveyor sequencing, PID loops — each scenario includes fault-injection [VERIFY: Pro tier feature] that simulates the kind of fault a maintenance technician encounters in the field. The closest analogue to hands-on fault-finding without taking live equipment offline.
The admin console lets you build a new-hire onboarding path — foundational lesson sequence through to fault diagnosis on your primary dialect — and a separate advanced path for technicians being considered for promotion. Different paths for different roles, same platform.
Six structured interview preparation tracks give technicians practice on technical questions under timed conditions. Provides an objective basis for technical competency conversations during promotion assessments — more defensible than informal evaluation.
Exportable cohort and individual reports show completion status and progress. CSV-compatible output can be incorporated into existing HR and L&D tracking. The platform does not auto-generate SETA documentation — it produces supporting evidence for your existing process.
Senior engineers can prototype ladder logic for new equipment or control modifications before touching live plant. Working through the logic in a safe environment before commissioning reduces errors and saves time during actual installation.
What your engineers practise
The scenarios below mirror the situations a maintenance technician actually meets on the plant floor — motor control, seal-in interlocks, timed sequencing, and logical fault diagnosis — built and auto-graded in the browser. No live equipment to take offline, no travel, no vendor lab. The closest thing to hands-on fault-finding that does not stop production.
Early adopters
Case study coming Q3 2026 — A South African mining services operation needed a consistent PLC competency baseline across multiple shafts before a fleet-wide control system upgrade.
Case study coming Q3 2026 — A food and beverage manufacturer running a high-throughput bottling line was onboarding three new PLC technicians simultaneously while managing a plant-wide OEE improvement initiative.
Pricing
| Team size | Annual cost | Per engineer / month |
|---|---|---|
| 5 engineers | $995 / yr | $16.58 |
| 20 engineers | $3,980 / yr | $16.58 |
Vendor course figures are illustrative estimates only. Verify against current market rates before using in internal business cases. See full pricing →
What's included
Related pages
Create a free team account. No travel budget. No vendor licence. Every technician practises on the dialects your plant actually runs.
Create your team freeTell us your cohort size and what you run. We’ll come back with the right institutional access — and be straight about what the platform does and doesn’t do.