Charlotte, NC · Independent since 2016

Industrial automation, PC-based control and plant data, from the rack to the report.

Automation & IIoT Services is the engineering practice of Dale Ross: PLCs, motion, drives and plant data, from whichever vendors are on your floor. Mitsubishi Electric is our deepest specialty: Dale has worked with it since 1988, nineteen of those years inside Mitsubishi Electric Automation. We fix the machines nobody can read, migrate the ones you can't buy parts for, and get the data out so you can see what's really happening on the line.

1988First Mitsubishi A-Series PLC program
19 yrsInside Mitsubishi Electric Automation, 1997–2016
1990First PLC class taught; still teaching certified courses
AnywhereHave laptop, will travel. On-site wherever the machine is; remote support everywhere
We work with
  • Mitsubishi Electric
  • Allen-Bradley
  • Siemens
  • Omron
  • GE
  • Sharp
  • Fuji Electric
  • JTEKT TOYOPUC
  • KEYENCE
  • FANUC robots
  • CODESYS / IEC 61131-3
  • Ignition
  • ICONICS
  • OPC UA
A stick figure runs with a butterfly net on a long pole, chasing data bits that flutter like butterflies
Our motto

No data is too small to capture.

A one-scan glitch, a torque spike, a sensor that's a few milliseconds late. The small stuff is usually where the answer is hiding, so we go after every bit of it, down to sub-millisecond resolution when the problem calls for it.

Featured product

AIS HMI: an HMI that grows into SCADA.

Live line screens, OEE, ISA-18.2 alarm management and maintenance tickets, in any browser, on any device. Alarms open tickets, the maintenance app works on a phone, and the right people get an email. It grows with you, from one line to the whole plant, and becomes your SCADA. No second platform to buy.

The AIS HMI: plant overview with OEE, station status and an alarm list, with the maintenance app on a phone
What we do

Deep controls knowledge, applied where it is hardest to find.

Most integrators can program a new machine. Fewer can open a twenty-year-old one with no source, no comments and no OEM, work out what it actually does, and make it better without stopping production. That is where we spend most of our time, on Mitsubishi and on whatever else is in the cabinet.

01 / CONTROLS

PLC, motion and drive engineering

Programming, troubleshooting and start-up across every MELSEC generation, servo and motion controllers, and FREQROL inverters, plus Allen-Bradley, Omron, Siemens, CODESYS and other IEC 61131-3 platforms. We read the program you have, not the one in the binder.

  • MELSEC
  • Allen-Bradley
  • Omron
  • Siemens
  • CODESYS
  • Motion
  • VFDs
02 / MIGRATION

Legacy systems and migrations

Undocumented machines, discontinued drives, obsolete PLCs. We decode what is running, document it, convert it to current hardware or a clearer language, and plan a staged path that keeps the line producing.

  • A→Q→iQ-R
  • Sharp→MELSEC
  • Ladder→ST
  • SFC→ST
  • Reverse engineering
  • Drive replacement
03 / DATA

Manufacturing data and IIoT

Getting reliable data out of machines and into SCADA, MES and databases: OPC servers, edge gateways, traceability, OEE, and the network plumbing that makes it dependable.

  • Sub-ms capture
  • OPC UA / DA
  • SLMP
  • MQTT
  • SQL
  • Ignition
  • ICONICS
04 / AI ANALYSIS

AI-assisted data analysis and root cause

When a machine stops now and then for no recorded reason, opinions don't fix it. We capture high-speed data, then use AI tools to work through captures far too large to read by hand, test each hypothesis against a model of the machine, and let the numbers decide.

  • AI analysis
  • High-speed logging
  • Torque trending
  • Simulation
05 / PC CONTROL

PC-based control and industrial PCs

We have been putting PCs on the factory floor since 1996. IPCs, real-time Linux, C Controllers and soft PLCs, chosen and set up so they behave like controls hardware, not office computers.

  • IPC
  • C Controller
  • RT Linux
  • Windows
  • Soft PLC
06 / TRAINING

Training that sticks

Mitsubishi Electric University certified classes and custom maintenance courses, taught by someone who has supported these products in the field for decades.

  • PLC
  • HMI / GOT
  • Motion
  • GX Works
  • Maintenance
How we work

Evidence first. Then change.

Every engagement follows the same discipline, whether it is a two-hour remote fix or a multi-month migration.

Read what is really there

We decode the running program and machine configuration, not the outdated printouts, and write down what every part does.

Measure before we guess

Capture plans, data loggers and stop-reason logs turn “it jams sometimes” into numbers you can rank.

Prove it off-line

Changes are built and tested against a simulation of the machine before anyone touches the real one.

Change with a way back

Every change ships with documentation, a test plan and a rollback. You keep the knowledge, not just the fix.

Our rule

Our own tools write the code and the configuration; the vendor's software checks it. Every file we produce is opened, compiled and verified in the vendor's own engineering software before it gets anywhere near your machine, and we never connect to a running PLC without your say-so.

AI-assisted analysis

Your machines already record the answer. AI helps us find it.

A single shift of high-speed data from a servo machine can run to millions of samples. Paired with nearly four decades of knowing how these machines behave, AI tools let us search all of it rather than a sample, and get from “it stops sometimes” to a proven cause in days, not months.

  • Every cycle in the capture is examined for the pattern that comes before a fault, not just the few we happened to look at
  • Hypotheses are ranked, then tested against a simulator of the machine built from its real program
  • Findings come back as a plain-English report, with the data behind every conclusion
  • An experienced engineer decides what to change. AI speeds up the analysis; it doesn't touch your controller
Recent work

Machines other people walked away from.

A few current engagements, described without client names.

MEDICAL ASSEMBLY

Intermittent stops on a servo assembly machine

We reviewed the motion and PLC programs, laid out the possible causes, and set up data capture so the diagnosis rests on measurements.

  • Q-Series motion
  • Servo
  • Data capture
TEXTILE

Keeping 16 winders alive on drives that no longer exist

Undocumented 1990s drives failing faster than they can be repaired. We reverse-engineered the serial protocol, mapped every parameter and laid out a section-by-section path to current inverters.

  • RS-485
  • FREQROL
  • Gateway
METALS

Inspection line SCADA, rebuilt and proven on a simulator

A line that can't be taken down for testing. We decoded the iQ-R program, ran it against a plant model, and built a modern HMI with alarm management, OEE and a mobile maintenance app.

  • iQ-R
  • ISA-18.2 alarms
  • Ignition / ICONICS

Read the case studies

What people say

What clients keep telling us.

I know of no one more qualified than Dale Ross.
Distributor manager, 2017
He’s the guy I go to with PLC problems.
Plant engineer, 2020
Thank you for all the hard work you did… we made 400 pizzas in 3 days.
Start-up client, 2024
Who you get

One engineer who has seen your machine before. Probably several times.

Dale Ross wrote his first A-Series program in 1988, worked for a Mitsubishi drive integrator and a Mitsubishi distributor, then spent nineteen years at Mitsubishi Electric Automation as a field application engineer and application engineering team leader: the person customers, sales and the engineers in Japan called when something didn't work.

He was putting PCs on the plant floor in 1996, was a Microsoft MVP while doing it, and was Mitsubishi's go-to MES and manufacturing-data engineer years before anyone called it IIoT. AIS is that experience, working for you directly.

Start here

Have a machine that's misbehaving, or data you can't get to?

Send a short description, the PLC model if you know it, and what “fixed” would look like. You'll hear back from Dale, not a sales queue.

EmailDale@AutomationIIoT.com
BasedCharlotte, North Carolina