APACS+ -> PCS7 Migration: Plant Hierachy

Hello,

Background:
At my work we are migrating the old plant architecture from APACS+ to PCS7. This process has been ongoing for several years, as we do one subsystem while we are in our yearly shutdown.

We had a different integrator do the most recent piece (we contract Siemens directly and they pair us with a "solutions partner").

Current problem:
This migration is the first sub system of a different server. When the program was "migrated" it looks/feels a bit different than our last migration. It appears the tags were completely recreated in PCS7 as opposed to moved. Now the Plant Hierarchies are different in DBA and Simatic Manager. From the last migration it seemed like the integrator ported all tags and some how synchronized the plant hierarchies between PCS7 and APACS. A change to one was reflected in the other.

I'm new to this company and to Siemens. If anyone has advice/resources/etc. on a migration like this I'd appreciate it. I have searched and read a lot, but I don't seem to have the right key words to find anything helpful.

Thanks everyone, hope to hear from you!

Since Siemens was your contracted provider, have you contacted them about your concerns? (If you PM me, I can give you Siemens contact information.)
Why did you change integrators mid-stream? Were there issues with them?

Prior to the migration were you using WinCC as your HMI or Wonderware?

Ken Moore said:

Since Siemens was your contracted provider, have you contacted them about your concerns? (If you PM me, I can give you Siemens contact information.)
Why did you change integrators mid-stream? Were there issues with them?

Prior to the migration were you using WinCC as your HMI or Wonderware?

Click to expand...

Hi Ken,
So yes, we have contacted our Siemens lead. The responses haven't been wonderfully helpful. It seems our "team" no longer has the resources they used to leverage for DBA. I'm attempting to reach out to additional resources at Siemens but they are very slow to respond.

Our Siemens technical lead did tell us that he thinks it's the least risk. He did not elaborate on what the risk is... He did mention if we were to compile with Picture Tree from Simatic manager it would break all our old APACS screens for that side of the facility. Which wasn't a risk we had to manage previously. It just isn't sitting right with me. When I have tried to express that to him, he becomes rather combative.

We are using WinCC both on old APACS and new PCS7.

Do you know of a way to synchronize plant hierarchies between the APACS and PCS7 sides? Is there a way to migrate as opposed to re-create everything and have two copies (one old and detached and one active)?