Outsourcing of automation engineers — a remote team for Siemens systems plus on-site commissioning

We provide automation engineers for the time you need them: for one project, for a migration or for a season. The team works remotely and travels for commissioning, and you deal with a single counterparty — a Polish company, a contract in Polish and one invoice instead of several purchase orders.

When outsourcing makes sense

Four situations come back most often. A project peak: two investments land in the same quarter and maintenance cannot take people off the floor. A migration with a deadline: swapping controllers inside a shutdown window needs more hands for a few weeks than the plant employs permanently. A missing skill: multi-axis motion, a WinCC Unified deployment, or tidying up a project left by a previous supplier. And a staffing gap: the automation engineer left, recruitment takes half a year, and the machines keep running.

There is also a case where outsourcing is not the answer. It does not replace an in-house engineer for day-to-day shift support or on-call duty; a remote team works project by project, to an agreed rhythm, not on a call at three in the morning. If that is what you need, we say so instead of selling a model that will not work.

How the cooperation works

The team works remotely and is led by one named engineer — responsible for the scope, familiar with your installation, and not swapped halfway through. We keep a fixed rhythm: a short call at the start of the week, the task list for the next one, a report on what was done. Access is set up with your IT department, on named accounts, limited to defined devices and logged.

Working hours overlap: the difference between Poland and Türkiye is one hour in summer and two in winter, so a question sent in the morning is answered the same day rather than overnight. Project management, documentation and commercial matters are handled by Team Knocknock in Polish; technical communication inside the engineering team is in English.

Skills

• Controllers — Simatic S7-1200 and S7-1500 in TIA Portal, S7-1500T for motion tasks, ET 200SP and ET 200M distributed I/O.
• Visualisation — WinCC Comfort on panels and WinCC Unified on operator stations.
• Drives — parameterisation and commissioning of Sinamics G120 inverters and Sinamics S120 servo drives.
• Migrations — S7-300 to S7-1500, Step 7 V5 to TIA Portal, WinCC V7 to WinCC Unified.
• Machine safety — safety circuits and functions designed to PN-EN ISO 13849-1.
• Electrical design — EPLAN schematics, component lists and as-built documentation.
• Data — OPC UA, integration with a production monitoring system and data exchange with the ERP.

Industrial robots are out of scope — we do not have that competence and say so before the offer rather than learning on your project. The programming work is described in more detail on the Siemens PLC, HMI and SCADA programming page, and the turnkey scope, cabinet and commissioning included, under industrial automation.

Work on site: posting and permits

Commissioning, acceptance tests and training happen on site and are planned in blocks rather than single days. This is where a point many offers skip has to be made: an engineer from outside the European Union needs a residence title and a work permit to work in Poland, and those formalities take time. They are handled by the manufacturer as the posting employer and are built into the date in the offer. The practical conclusion is simple: we do not promise someone on site tomorrow. Everything that can be done remotely — programming, tests on a stand-in rig, diagnostics — is done remotely, and visits are reserved for what genuinely requires presence on the shop floor.

How we charge

Two options. An engineering day for tasks with a closed scope, and a block of days per month when the scope moves: you reserve a number of days and set priorities with the lead engineer as you go. The block works for migrations and seasonal peaks, because it does not require pricing every small item separately. The rate and the minimum term go into the offer after a conversation about the scope — without knowing what the engineers would work on, no number would be honest. Travel and accommodation for on-site work are charged separately and shown in the offer, not discovered on the final invoice.

Confidentiality and security

An NDA comes before any code or documentation changes hands. We work on named accounts, with access limited to agreed devices and every session logged — the same regime we apply to remote service. Project sources, a description of the changes and updated schematics stay with you after each stage, not at the end of the relationship. That is not a goodwill gesture but a condition we would insist on as a customer: a plant has to be able to continue with another company without archaeology.