PLC training for training centres — bulk simulator licences

This page is for the people who actually buy PLC training, not the people who sit through it. If you run a TVET college, an in-house training centre at a manufacturing site, or a private technical academy, the maths on PLC hardware does not work in your favour. One CompactLogix demo rack is R85 000 to R140 000 landed. A Siemens S7-1500 panel with sensors, a small motor and a basic HMI is R120 000 to R220 000. You buy three, you have spent R600 000 before any learner has walked through the door, and you still have one rack per six learners on a good day. Our Teams tier is the alternative we built for institutions in this position. One simulator seat per learner, an admin dashboard, exportable progress reports, and a price that fits inside a SETA grant.

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The problem training centres face

PLC training in South Africa has three structural cost drivers that nobody on the procurement side enjoys explaining to the principal.

The first is hardware. A working PLC training rack is not a hobbyist toy. The controller alone is R12 000 to R30 000. Add an HMI, IO modules, sensors, motor contactor, VSD, safety relay, network switch, enclosure, wiring, certification, and the build cost lands between R85 000 and R220 000 per rack depending on platform and depth. Racks have a five-to-seven year practical life before the platform is end-of-life and the vendor stops shipping spares. Amortise that and you have R15 000 to R40 000 per rack per year in capital alone, before electricity, before consumables, before insurance.

The second cost driver is panel-build time. If your curriculum requires each learner to wire a panel from scratch, that is two to three days of supervised lab time per learner per project. A class of twenty learners doing four panel-build exercises a year burns 160 to 240 lab-days. You either run sessions in parallel — needing more racks — or in series, slowing the cohort down. Most centres compromise on three or four learners per rack, which means most learners spend most of their bench time watching somebody else's hands.

The third is the instructor-hour bottleneck. A PLC instructor with eight years of plant experience and TIA Portal fluency is rare and expensive. The local salary is R45 000 to R75 000 per month for a good one, and they are not sitting around waiting for your job posting. A bulk PLC training programme that scales beyond one cohort needs a way to absorb teaching load without burning out your one good instructor.

Lab availability per cohort is the visible symptom of all three. Learners who book lab time at 16:00 on a Tuesday, finish their rung at 16:45, and lose the rest of the slot to somebody else's mistake. A simulator seat per learner removes the queue.

What's in the institutional bundle

Every learner on a Teams licence gets the full Pro feature set, identical to what an individual paying customer receives. There is no stripped-down student edition. The argument we make to admins is simple: a PLC training institution should not give learners less than the open market gives a hobbyist on the same software.

The per-seat features:

• Sandbox. Open canvas, full IEC 61131-3 instruction set, persistent project storage, no installation, runs on a Chromebook or basic laptop. Learners can write a rung at 22:00 on a Sunday from a residence Wi-Fi connection.
• 86-lesson curriculum. Auto-graded exercises from "what is a contact" through PID auto-tune. Each lesson runs the learner's program against twelve test scenarios and reports which ones failed and why. This is the biggest instructor-hour saver in the bundle — automated assessment of routine ladder logic exercises.
• Wiring track. Interactive panel layouts for PNP and NPN sensors, sourcing and sinking inputs, 4-20 mA loops, RTD and thermocouple inputs. Learners build wiring intuition before they touch a real panel.
• Sensor school. A library of twenty-two industrial sensors — inductive, capacitive, photo-electric, ultrasonic, RTDs, thermocouples, pressure transmitters, flow meters, and load cells. Each sensor has a wiring diagram, a typical fault scenario, and a rung pattern.
• Cert packs. ISA CCST Level 1 and Level 2 question banks with scoring and weak-area reporting.
• Portfolio PDF. A 14-page export at the end of the curriculum with completed exercises, fault-find times, and cert pack scores. Useful for learner job applications and for your placement office.

The institutional layer on top of the per-seat features:

• Admin dashboard. Roster management, seat allocation, password reset for learners, suspension and reactivation, bulk CSV import for new cohorts.
• Cohort grouping. Group learners by intake date, programme, or instructor. Run reports per cohort.
• Progress tracking. Live view of where each learner is in the curriculum, time-on-task per lesson, and pass rate per exercise. The instructor opens this on Monday morning and knows who needs help before the lesson starts.
• Exportable progress reports. CSV and PDF export per cohort, for regulatory record-keeping or SETA reporting.

Pricing — Teams tier

$199 per seat per year, billed annually, minimum five seats. No setup fee. No per-instructor licence fee — instructors get an admin login at no charge. At today's exchange rate that is roughly R3 700 per learner per year for a full Pro feature set with admin tooling on top.

For comparison: one classroom-day on a vendor PLC course is R2 800 to R5 000 per seat in Johannesburg or Cape Town. The Teams licence costs less than two days of vendor classroom and runs for a full year of unlimited bench time.

We invoice in USD because the product runs on a global stack. We can issue a ZAR-denominated invoice on request for institutional procurement that needs it. Payment terms are thirty days net for accredited institutions. We do not currently offer a monthly Teams option — annual only — because cohort planning works on annual cycles and we'd rather pass the savings on than chase month-to-month renewals.

A note on growth. If you start at ten seats and need fifteen mid-year, the additional five are pro-rated to the renewal date and added to the same contract. You do not need to wait until the next intake. Conversely, you can drop seats at renewal without penalty.

Curriculum mapping — what our modules cover

PLC training for training centres usually means slotting our material into an existing syllabus, not replacing it. Here is the honest mapping of what our curriculum covers against the standard PLC topics in South African TVET and private-college programmes.

Ladder logic foundations. Contacts, coils, latches, seal-in rungs, edge detection, one-shots. Covered in lessons 1-18 of our curriculum. Maps to the introductory ladder logic units in most NATED N4-N6 instrumentation programmes.

Timers and counters. TON, TOF, RTO, CTU, CTD, with deliberate exercises on what happens to accumulators when the rung goes false. Lessons 19-32.

Motor control circuits. Start-stop, jog, forward-reverse, two-speed, soft-start interlocks, electrical safety circuit logic. Lessons 33-46. Pairs well with classroom contactor-and-overload practical work — your learners do the wiring on real contactors and the logic in our simulator.

Sequencer state machines. SFC and Siemens GRAPH-style sequential logic, including parallel branches, alternative branches, and a worked bottling-line example. Lessons 47-58. This is the topic most local programmes under-teach and where our automation matters most.

Sensor types. Inductive, capacitive, photo-electric, ultrasonic, magnetic reed, RTD, thermocouple, pressure transmitter, flow meter, load cell, encoder. Sensor school covers all twenty-two with wiring and rung patterns.

Basic SCADA. Tag mapping, faceplate logic, alarm bit handling at the PLC layer. We do not teach the SCADA platform side of the screen — that is a separate skill set covered on our SCADA hub page — but we do teach the PLC layer that sits underneath it.

IEC 61131-3 language coverage. Ladder (LD) is primary. Function block diagram (FBD) and structured text (ST) appear from lesson 60 onwards. Sequential function chart (SFC) is in the sequencer module. Instruction list (IL) is excluded — it is deprecated in IEC 61131-3 third edition and not worth your learners' time. The standard itself is at www.iec.ch/standards/iec-61131-3 if your QA office needs the reference.

What we do not cover, deliberately: panel wiring on real hardware, terminal torque practice, single-line diagram drawing, and tender specification writing. Those need a real workshop and a real instructor. Our work is the screen-side PLC fluency that makes the workshop time more productive.

Admin dashboard and progress tracking

The admin dashboard is the part most institutional buyers want to see before they sign. We built it after the third pilot centre asked for the same export.

A roster page lists every learner on your contract with status, current lesson, last login, and time-on-task this week. Filter by cohort, by programme, or by instructor. Bulk-action a row to reset a password or suspend a seat without contacting our support.

A progress page renders a heatmap of curriculum completion across the cohort. Each row is a learner, each column is a lesson, the cell colour shows pass, fail, or not-started. The instructor can see at a glance which lessons are bottlenecks for the cohort and which learners are stuck.

An exports page produces CSV files per cohort, suitable for upload into a college MIS, and a PDF cohort report with charts and per-learner summaries. The PDF is built for a SETA monitoring visit — clean enough to drop in front of an auditor without further formatting.

Single sign-on via SAML or OIDC is available on contracts of twenty seats and above at no additional cost. For smaller centres we use email plus password with admin-controlled reset.

Onboarding — week by week

We have learnt the hard way that training-centre rollouts go better when somebody on our side owns the first six weeks. The default onboarding plan:

Week 0 — kickoff call. Forty-five minutes with you, your lead instructor, and our customer engineer. We map your existing syllabus to our lesson list, agree which lessons your cohort skips, and set up your dashboard.

Week 1 — admin setup. Roster import, cohort creation, instructor accounts, branding (your logo on learner dashboards if you want it), SSO if applicable. Output is a working admin environment.

Week 2 — instructor walkthrough. Two hours, recorded, for your instructors. Covers grading, progress reports, common learner failure modes, and how to override an auto-grade when the learner has done something clever the auto-grader didn't expect.

Week 3 — learner launch. Cohort gets login credentials. We monitor first-week login rates and flag learners who haven't logged in by day five.

Weeks 4-6 — first-cohort support. Daily Slack or email channel between your instructor and our support. Learner-blocking issues triaged within four working hours. Instructor questions answered same-day.

Week 7 onwards — steady state. Standard support response times apply. Quarterly check-in call to review progress data and curriculum fit.

What we don't replace — be honest about accreditation

Reading this page from the procurement chair, the question that matters is what a Teams licence does and does not do for your accreditation status.

The honest answer. Our simulator, curriculum, and certificate of completion are not SAQA-listed, not MerSETA-aligned, not QCTO-recognised. We are not a registered training provider. The portfolio PDF the system generates has no regulatory standing in South Africa. Our completion certificate is internal and does not substitute for any nationally issued qualification.

What we are is a curriculum supplement and a tooling layer. If your existing programme is a registered NATED N4-N6, an occupational qualification under QCTO, or a SETA learnership, our Teams licence sits inside that programme as a practice and assessment tool. It does not change the regulatory status of your programme, and it does not create a new accreditation path on its own.

If a procurement officer or QA manager pushes back on this, the correct framing is: this is a software tool that augments your accredited programme, in the same way a textbook publisher's online practice platform does. Treat the licence cost as you would treat a textbook subscription — a recurring teaching resource cost — not as a programme accreditation cost.

For centres considering moving toward QCTO or SETA accreditation, our Teams licence may help you demonstrate sufficient practice infrastructure during the application, but the accreditation work itself is yours and your consultant's. We are happy to provide letters confirming feature scope and deployment status if that helps your application.

How we integrate with TVET and NATED programmes

Most of our institutional customers run a NATED N4-N6 instrumentation or industrial electronics programme, or a QCTO occupational qualification in industrial automation. The integration patterns we have seen work:

Replace the simulator slot in the existing syllabus. Most NATED programmes already contain a simulated-PLC unit, often using ageing software shipped with a textbook. Swap that unit for our curriculum and free up classroom time previously spent on tooling problems.

Use our curriculum as homework, classroom for wiring and panels. The most successful pattern. Learners do ladder logic and structured text exercises at home or in self-study slots. Classroom time is reserved for hardware they cannot do at home — wiring, contactor work, real-panel fault-finding. This roughly doubles the effective contact hours of your programme without adding instructor cost.

Bridge from theory class to plant attachment. Some centres run our cert packs and portfolio PDF as the final block before learners go to a host employer. The portfolio PDF is concrete evidence at the placement interview. Our experience is that placement interviews go materially better when the learner can show a 14-page export with auto-graded exercise scores.

Run a TVET PLC training cohort entirely on simulator with one wiring intensive. A few smaller private centres without their own panel infrastructure use our simulator for the full theoretical content and book a one-week wiring intensive at a partner workshop. This is the lowest-capital model and we can introduce you to two of those workshops if you want to follow it.

Common questions

Instructor training. We do not run formal train-the-trainer programmes — your instructors are senior to ours on the pedagogy side, and they don't need it. The week-2 walkthrough covers the platform mechanics and that is enough for an experienced PLC instructor. If you have a junior instructor we offer a paid one-day session at $400 covering grading, common learner failure patterns, and dashboard interpretation. Most centres skip this.

Hardware integration. Our simulator does not currently connect to physical PLC hardware. Learners cannot push a sandbox program onto a real S7-1200 from our platform. Vendor toolchains are still required for the hardware side. We see this as a feature not a bug — the simulator is bench time at a fraction of hardware cost, and the vendor tools handle the actual deployment.

Network requirements. Each learner needs a browser and a stable internet connection. Bandwidth requirement is light — under 200 kbps per active session. The simulator runs primarily client-side, so a brief connection drop does not lose work. We have customers in Limpopo running over LTE with no platform-side complaints.

Support response times. Email and Slack support, four-hour response target during SA business hours, twelve-hour outside. Critical incidents — platform unavailable for the cohort — are escalated to our on-call engineer with a one-hour target. Average actual response time over the last quarter is 47 minutes.

Contract terms. Annual term, 30-day cancellation notice for non-renewal, no auto-escalation. Price is locked for the contract year and the next renewal year. Termination for cause is 30 days written notice with pro-rated refund. We do not require a multi-year commitment to access Teams pricing.

Talk to us — and try it yourself first

If you want to evaluate the platform before committing a cohort, the trial signup is open and free. Spend a weekend on the first six lessons yourself, see whether the format suits the learners you teach, and then decide. The institutional buyer who has personally finished a few lessons is a much sharper buyer than the one working from a brochure.

For pricing, contract terms, custom integrations, or anything that needs a human conversation, the lead form below is the right path. We respond within one working day, and the first call is forty-five minutes — enough to understand your programme, your cohort sizes, and your accreditation context, and to give you a real answer rather than a generic quote.

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