The Zeugwerk team on-site with customers in mechanical engineering. Photo: ©Zeugwerk GmbH/Raum15, D. Jelemensky
“The developer in charge is on vacation right now. Can you call back in two weeks?”
A sentence no machine builder likes to say and no customer likes to hear. Yet it happens more often than you might expect.
Not because the developers are doing poor work. Quite the opposite. There are genuinely talented people in these teams.
The problem lies elsewhere: every site, every team, and sometimes every individual developer has built up their own style over the years.
The moment someone has to take over an unfamiliar PLC project, it becomes a struggle. The code is structured differently, the logic is not immediately obvious, and dependencies are unclear.
Suddenly the whole project depends on exactly the one person who originally wrote it. In my view, that is a structure problem, not a people problem.
And that is precisely where Zeugwerk comes in.
We help machine builders establish a shared standard for their PLC development, drawing on our long experience and the Zeugwerk tools we have built for exactly this purpose.
To get there, we align the different coding styles within a company, create a stable code architecture, and develop standards that make PLC software easier to understand, maintain, and scale. Developers no longer start from zero on every project. And collaboration between teams becomes straightforward enough that it is not just “that one colleague” who knows their way around a project.
The result:
- a clearly structured code architecture
- more flexible and efficient teams
- drastically reduced sources of error
- less dependency on individual key people
- more time for actual process development
Here is how we approach it:
Everything begins with an initial conversation where we look at where the company stands today:
- Is there already a technical foundation in place?
- Where are the friction points?
- What needs to be standardised for the teams to actually benefit?
From there we develop the right path together, combining hands-on experience, technical depth, and the appropriate Zeugwerk tools. Depending on the starting point, this results in an individual standard, the use of existing Zeugwerk tools, or a combination of both.
In our view, good PLC software must be built in a way that lets companies work more efficiently today and integrate new functions, technologies, and components more easily tomorrow. That is future-readiness in everyday practice.
That is exactly what Zeugwerk is for. Get in touch.