Industry
Packaging machinery
Country
Germany
Software
Siemens TIA Portal · S7-1500 · WinCC · PROFINET
Duration
48-hour migration window
A packaging machine manufacturer needed to retire end-of-life Siemens S5 controllers across a live 12-station production line at a customer facility. The customer’s production schedule allowed only a single weekend shutdown window — the new S7-1500 system had to be fully operational by Monday morning. There was no option for a staged migration or a partial cutover. The system either worked completely at the end of the 48-hour window, or it did not.
GFE re-coded all 12 stations from scratch in TIA Portal, mapping every I/O signal to PROFINET field devices and updating the WinCC SCADA to reflect the new hardware. A parallel validation approach was used in the weeks before the cutover, allowing the new code to be tested against the running system without interrupting production. The 48-hour shutdown window was used to execute a migration that had already been fully prepared and validated. Monday morning: all 12 stations operational, SCADA live, customer production running on schedule.
12 stations
migrated in one weekend
0 downtime
during migration
S5 → S7-1500
full replatform
WinCC live
from Monday morning
Each project is staffed with engineers experienced on the relevant platform — TIA Portal, TwinCAT, Pilz, or Rockwell.
Practical experience with EN ISO 13849, SISTEMA calculations, and SRP/CS documentation for CE marking and TÜV review.
Support can be engaged for a single project or structured as a long-term team extension — without permanent hiring.
All team members are fluent in English, with additional language skills in German, Italian, Spanish, and more.
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Our customers















Our company produces safety-relevant welding assemblies for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.
Due to the fact that it has become increasingly difficult to find good engineers and designers for our design department at our location in rural Münsterland, we set out at the end of 2018 to look for new external solutions in the service market.
I really appreciate GFE’s flexibility and openness for new challenges. They are not afraid to start a new journey.
If I think about the external circumstances of the project we started together, we reached a learning curve and relating results that I did personally not expect.
We required additional capacity and professional support for our R&D Team especially for a new product development.
And GFE Solutions offers capable support by very well-educated engineers. High professionalism. On time delivery and great communication (native German speakers).
We are the company in constant need for plants for research or pilot projects of our clients. Last year we were working over the order in the field of medical technologies, which we succeeded to realize, including thanks to efforts of GFE Solutions team.
We were in need of help with our design department ressources and we had to move fast, internal ressources were not available and GFE was able to help quickly and competent. GFE works with dedication to the very needs of its customers, has a variety of specialists and has offered a fair price on a transparent basis.
We were looking for additional engineers to expand our construction capacity. You seemed to be a young, motivated Team and except your professional expertise, your personal commitment made me confident to work with you. The cooperation has been seamless and very productive from the start. We are happy with the results.
GFE Solutions is a specialized engineering services company. Our engineers are mainly from Eastern Europe – to our customers we offer onsite- and offsite-engineering-services. All our specialists speak and write fluently English, some of them German and other languages.
Phone: +48 798 763 604
For general enquiries: info@gfe-solutions.com
For commercial requests: inquiry@gfe-solutions.com
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