What “RESTORE CONTROL” Really Means
IKONIKA: a typical Saturday.
At IKONIKA, Restore Control isn’t a slogan.
It’s what happens when an engineer walks into a running plant with systems that look fine on the surface — but everyone knows they’re one power dip or network fault away from stopping production — and quietly brings it back to a state where it can be trusted again.
One of our manufacturing customers had a packaging line that had become their most unreliable.
Frequent power fluctuations and aging equipment meant that any small fault, a single drive or network hiccup, could drop the entire line. They’d been patching it together for years, scavenging obsolete drives from idle lines or even other facilities just to stay running. Eventually, the supply ran out.
It wasn’t just a reliability issue. The customer also wanted to improve safety across the line, but their existing system couldn’t support modern safety functions until the underlying controls were upgraded. The hardware — older PowerFlex 4 and 160 drives, an obsolete PLC, and a DH+ network — simply couldn’t evolve any further.
Over one weekend, the IKONIKA team replaced every drive and PLC in the affected section of the line with modern, Ethernet-based, safety-rated hardware.
The upgrade moved the system from a patchwork of hardwired and legacy network connections to a clean, Ethernet/IP structure. The new drives included Safe Torque Off capability — allowing the line to reach a safe state without cutting power entirely — and the PLC was migrated to a CompactLogix safety platform to support that functionality.
The installation wasn’t done by dropping in a new control panel.
To minimize downtime, the team rebuilt everything in place, reusing the existing cabinet and I/O. That decision cut cost and installation time, but it also meant that once the first component came out, the job had to go straight through to completion before startup.
Code migration brought its own challenges. The old logic included layers of legacy programming that had been copied and modified through years of incremental changes. Every rung had to be checked, with unused sections stripped out and diagnostics added to help the maintenance team troubleshoot faster in the future.
Even small things like keeping every HMI button in the same place were deliberate — ensuring operators could return Monday morning and run the line exactly as before, without retraining or confusion.
By Sunday night, the new system was running — safety-rated, networked, and ready for future integration with the rest of the line.
From the outside, nothing looked different. The control screen was familiar. The cabinet looked the same unless you opened the door.But inside, everything was current. Every device now visible on Ethernet, every drive networked, every fault traceable. The control system was protected by a UPS, insulated from the voltage drops that had caused years of trouble.
The maintenance team was especially enthusiastic about the new diagnostic visibility. They could finally see what was going on in the system, and the line had a clear path for integrating data and safety upgrades across the rest of the plant.
That’s what Restore Control looks like at IKONIKA. Not big announcements or shiny new panels — just quiet, deliberate work that turns fragile, improvised systems into dependable infrastructure again.
Restore Control means taking something that barely holds together and giving it the strength and transparency to keep running, safely and confidently, long after we’ve left the site.
