ENGR 5123 - Factory Control Academy
Course Description
This course is designed for experienced technical professionals in manufacturing automation and controls, OT/industrial networking, and IT/OT integration who are responsible for defining, designing, integrating, maintaining, or scaling smart connected systems. This training is intended for practitioners and technical leaders in roles such as Automation/Controls Engineer, OT Systems/Network Engineer, SCADA/MES or integration engineer, Industrial/OT Data analyst/engineer, Maintenance/Reliability technologist, and digital manufacturing or plant/operations leadership supporting architecture and deployment decisions. Ideally participants will have experience and familiarity with traditional automation platforms (PLC, HMI/SCADA, and industrial networks) and be ready to deepen their capability to define and develop scalable digital architectures, apply common standards and governance, and integrate and contextualize data from diverse shop-floor and enterprise sources.
Date: Monday, April 27 to Thursday April 30, 2026
Classes are held from 8:15am to 4:45PM
Light breakfast, full lunch, and snacks provided daily
Fee: $1,800/person (discounted from $2.250). Members of the Digital Foundry get an additional discount of 10% to 20% depending on their membership terms. Contact Alyssa Pistininzi at amp7089@psu.edu for information on membership status so we can provide you the correct discount code.
Course Outline
Topics covered for each day
DAY 1:
Digital Foundry & Smart Manufacturing
Introduction to SCADA
Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition
How do people interact w/ machines
Data visualization
What is SCADA
SCADA Components
Managing Projects
DAY 2:
SCADA Building Blocks – Tags and Data
SCADA Building Blocks – HMIs and Dashboards
Machine-to-Machine Communication
DAY 3:
SCADA Alarming
SQL Database Configuration
Unified Name Space
Connected Factory
DAY 4:
Connection to
Industrial Robots
Production Plant Floor
Machine Shop Floor
Legacy Systems
Data Silos
Architecting the Smart Factory
Training includes over 15 hands-on labs and student exercises to apply learning using industry relevant equipment and devices.