5 Automation Upgrades to Complete Before Your Year-End Shutdown

Most manufacturing facilities take a planned shutdown somewhere between Christmas and New Year's. That window is typically five to ten days — enough time to do meaningful work on your automation systems if you've planned ahead. The mistake most teams make is waiting until late November to decide what they're actually going to tackle with that time.

This is your November checklist: five automation upgrades that deliver real payoff from a planned shutdown, ranked by the combination of impact and how quickly they can be executed.

1. Replace Aging Pneumatic Cylinders and Valves

If your pneumatic system has cylinders or directional control valves that are five or more years old, a shutdown is the right time to swap them out — not after they fail mid-production in February. Modern pneumatic components are meaningfully more energy-efficient than equipment from even a few years ago. Over a full year of operation, the energy savings alone often justify the replacement cost, before you account for the avoided downtime of an unplanned failure.

What to look for: inconsistent cycle times, increased air consumption on your compressor, visible wear on seal areas, or cylinders that need frequent manual re-adjustment. Any of these signals that the component is living on borrowed time.

2. Upgrade Sensors Running Without Diagnostics

Sensors are the eyes and ears of your automation system, and they're often neglected until they cause a false stop or miss a detection entirely. A shutdown is the right moment to walk the line and replace any sensor that has been re-aimed or adjusted more than once in the past year.

Modern sensors with IO-Link connectivity give you real-time diagnostics and process data you simply can't get from a standard digital output. If you're planning to move toward predictive maintenance in 2027, IO-Link-capable sensors are the foundation — and a shutdown is the lowest-risk time to install them. The sensors that warrant immediate replacement: anything with physical damage, any unit producing intermittent signals, and any sensor that's been moved from its original mounting position.

3. Add a Variable Frequency Drive to Your Largest Fixed-Speed Motor

If you have motors running at fixed speed on variable loads — conveyor lines, cooling fans, pump systems — you're almost certainly wasting energy. A variable frequency drive (VFD) lets the motor run only as fast as the application actually demands.

In a typical conveyor application, adding a VFD reduces motor energy consumption by 20 to 50 percent. Payback periods are frequently under two years. A shutdown gives you the access time to properly wire, mount, and commission the drive without disrupting production. Start with your largest motor running on a variable load — that's where the return on investment is highest and fastest.

4. Audit and Tighten Your Electrical Cabinets

Control panels accumulate problems slowly: loose terminal connections, degraded wire insulation from heat cycling, breakers that haven't been exercised in years. None of these cause immediate failures — until they do, usually at the worst possible moment.

A systematic audit of your control panels during a shutdown can identify and correct dozens of small issues before they become production-stopping ones. Use thermal imaging if you have access to it — it reveals hot spots at connections that look fine to the naked eye but are on their way to failing. While the panel is open: verify all labels are current, confirm spare slots are properly blanked, and check that protective relay settings match your current load configuration.

5. Replace Any HMI Running an End-of-Life Operating System

If your operators are working with an HMI running an operating system that's no longer supported, you have both a cybersecurity exposure and a parts-availability risk that compounds every year. Finding a replacement display or controller that matches a 15-year-old part number gets harder and more expensive each time you try.

Modern HMIs offer touch interfaces that operators adapt to quickly, built-in connectivity for remote diagnostics, and vendor support that will last another decade. A shutdown gives you the time to swap the hardware, configure the replacement, and run your operators through the new interface before the pressure of production returns.

Plan Now — Lead Times Are Real

The lead time on several of these components — particularly VFDs and HMIs — can run four to eight weeks depending on the model and current supply conditions. If you're targeting a December shutdown, November is when purchase orders need to go out.

Affiliated Control's team works with plant engineers and maintenance managers throughout the Midwest to scope exactly this kind of project. Contact us and we'll help you build a parts list that fits your timeline and your budget — before the window closes.