Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

A Day in the Life: Mastering #scada Troubleshooting

7 Feb 2025 · 2 min

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1:37

In this interview excerpt, a SCADA maintenance technician describes a typical workday that is largely reactive and varied. He characterizes his role as "firefighting," handling emergency calls and on‑the‑fly issues rather than following a strict schedule. While the E&I department has planned work, his SCADA responsibilities involve immediate problem resolution, often remotely from home, using tools like Wonderware, RTUs, and PLCs. He emphasizes that most of his expertise—especially troubleshooting complex data and system faults—was gained on the job over seven years, rather than through formal manufacturer training. The technician enjoys the challenges, values the rapid problem‑solving skills he has developed, and acknowledges that newcomers need several days to acquire the same proficiency.

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The question I have for you though is, so what does a typical day look like for you?
So we're maintenance, anything goes, honestly. If you— it shouldn't be like this, but typically we call it firefighting. So I fix issues on a day-to-day basis. It all depends. There is scheduled work for the E&I department, but since I'm in SCADA, it's more of, hey, we have this issue right now, can you fix it? And emergency calls. So for me, it's nice because I could be at home and if they call me after hours, I can remote into the system and take care of the plant. As far as my day-to-day goes, anything goes. It's fixing the SCADA issues on the Wonderware, and, you know, we work on RTUs and instrumentation. It's just all over the place here, honestly. Just yesterday, I was connecting to a PLC that had faulted out. You know, they're quick and easy fixes, but you got to know what you're doing, right? You know, so— You can't just go in there and what took me 7 years to learn takes me about an hour to finish. But for a person starting out, I would say, you know, it's a learning experience, takes several days for someone. I'm so glad that I got the experience. This stuff though, with data, it's more of on-the-job experience. You're not going to learn all this from training, what the manufacturers have to offer. You have to run into the problem in order for you to learn and know the system pretty well. Very challenging at times, but— I like a challenge, and I like solving problems and troubleshooting.