Magic Engineering is the physical layer. We draw the panel, build it, write the PLC code, stand up the HMI, tune the servos, guard the machine and stay on site until the line runs at rate with your operators driving it. Not advice about automation. The automation itself.
Most failed automation projects were not badly specified on the hardware. They were handed to a team that had never run the commissioning, never owned the integration, and had no reason to be there on the Monday after go-live. That is the part we take.
Experience
1,900+ automation projects, and the scar tissue that comes with them. We have already met your processor, your drive family, your undocumented legacy logic and the shutdown window that is shorter than everyone thinks. Experience is mostly knowing where the project goes wrong before it goes wrong.
Fit
We do not resell a platform, so we have no reason to force your line into one. We start from your product, your cycle time, your takt, your changeover and your maintenance crew's skill set, then pick the hardware and architecture that fits. Sometimes the right answer is less automation than you asked for.
Accountability
Complete means the acceptance criteria we agreed on, demonstrated on your floor, with your parts, at your rate, documented and handed over. Not powered up. Not mostly working. Not a punch list emailed to your maintenance manager on the way out the door.
Anyone can claim a process. A certification means somebody outside the building reviewed the project methodology, the financials, the documentation standards and the safety practice — and came back to check again. Here is what we hold, and what the group holds above us.
Magic Engineering
CSIA certification is held in the name of the legal entity, MartinCSI — the practice now branded Magic Engineering. Premier Integrator and Authorized System Integrator status are granted by the platform vendors on the strength of delivered projects and certified staff, not on purchase volume.
Combined group
This is the part most controls shops cannot answer. When your corporate security team asks how a vendor on the plant network handles access, change control and incident response, the answer is a group-level SOC 2 Type II report and ISO 27001 practice — not a promise.
Controls work is a single problem that happens to have five names. The panel design constrains the logic, the logic constrains the HMI, the motion profile constrains the mechanical, and the safety circuit constrains all of it. We keep every discipline on the same team so the constraint gets resolved in a design review instead of on your floor at 11 p.m.
Automation Controls
The logic that decides what the machine does next.
We write, rescue and document control logic across Rockwell ControlLogix and CompactLogix, Siemens, Omron, Mitsubishi and Schneider platforms. That means a real sequence of operations before anyone opens the programming software, structured and readable code instead of one 4,000-rung routine, named tags, interlock logic that fails safe, and an as-built program you can hand to the next engineer. We do greenfield machines, line integration, and the unglamorous work of taking over code somebody else abandoned.
You need this when
Automation Controls
The screen your operators actually trust at 2 a.m.
We build supervisory and operator interfaces in Ignition — we are an Inductive Automation Premier Integrator — as well as AVEVA, FactoryTalk and vendor-native HMI platforms. The engineering that matters is underneath the graphics: a tag architecture that scales past the first line, alarms rationalized so the important one is not buried in 400 nuisance events, historian configuration that captures what you will want to analyze later, redundancy so a server reboot does not stop production, and screens designed for the person running the machine rather than the person approving the project.
You need this when
Automation Controls
Coordinated axes, registration and the physics of fast.
Servo and motion work is where automation projects quietly fail, because the mechanical and electrical answers are coupled. We size servos and gearboxes against real inertia and duty cycles, build cam profiles and electronic gearing, coordinate multi-axis moves, and handle registration and print control on moving web and film. Platforms include Rockwell Kinetix, Yaskawa, Omron, Siemens and Mitsubishi. When mechanical cams and line shafts are replaced with servo axes, changeover becomes a recipe instead of a two-hour mechanical adjustment.
You need this when
Automation Controls
Designed, drawn and built in our shop. UL 508A.
We design panels in AutoCAD Electrical, build them to UL 508A, and ship them with drawings that match what is physically inside. In practice that means correct short-circuit current rating and arc flash labeling, thermal calculations rather than a fan added at the end, consistent wire numbering and terminal layout your electricians can follow, spare I/O and spare breaker space for the change that is coming, and point-to-point testing before the panel leaves the building. Field installation, power-up and wire-out are part of the scope when you want them to be.
You need this when
Automation Controls
Keep the iron. Replace the brain. Including press control systems.
The machine is usually fine. The controls are obsolete, unsupported, or one failure away from a long outage with no spare on the shelf. We migrate legacy platforms — PLC-5, SLC 500, obsolete drives and dead HMI hardware — onto current, supportable architecture, converting the logic rather than guessing at it, and we plan the cutover around a real shutdown window with a tested rollback. This includes press control systems, where the controls upgrade carries safety obligations: safety-rated dual-check circuits, correct stop-time measurement, and conformance to the applicable OSHA and ANSI B11 requirements.
You need this when
These four come up on almost every serious automation project, and they are the four most often subcontracted out to somebody the manufacturer never meets. We keep them in house, which means one team owns the cycle time, the inspection result, the safety validation and the data that comes out the other end.
Data collection that holds up when someone acts on it.
Getting numbers off a machine is the easy half. The hard half is making them mean the same thing tomorrow: consistent tag naming across lines, timestamps you can align, downtime reasons captured at the machine instead of reconstructed from memory, and a store-and-forward path so a network blip does not create a hole in the shift report. We build that layer on the controls we already own, which is why it tends to be accurate. From there, predictive maintenance stops being a slide: vibration, current draw, temperature and cycle counts trend against a real baseline, and a bearing with a six-month lead time gets ordered before it takes the line down.
Image-based automatic inspection and analysis.
Vision earns its place when the inspection is repetitive, fast, or something a person cannot reliably do for eight hours. We design and deploy image-based inspection for presence and absence, measurement and gauging, surface and defect detection, code reading and label verification, and vision-guided robot picking. As an Omron Vision Lab we have a place to prove the application before you buy it, and we work in Cognex as well. Most vision projects live or die on lighting and optics rather than software, so we settle those first, with your actual parts and your actual worst case.
Design through integration, not just the arm.
A robot is a small part of a robotic cell. The work is the end effector, the fixturing, the part presentation, the guarding, the cycle-time budget and the logic that handles the case where the part arrives wrong. We take robotic projects from concept and simulation through tooling design, installation, programming and commissioning, with accuracy, repeatability and speed treated as specified numbers we have to demonstrate rather than adjectives in a proposal. We are a FANUC Authorized System Integrator and work with ABB and Yaskawa as the application calls for it.
TÜV-certified machinery risk assessment.
Our TÜV Rheinland certified safety engineers assess machinery the way an investigator would: identify each hazard, rate severity, frequency and avoidability, and document the required performance level before anyone specifies a relay or a light curtain. Then we design, install and validate the circuit, verify stop-time performance, and leave you with the risk assessment, the validation record and the training your team needs when a regulator, an insurer or an incident review asks. Safety done this way is also faster in production, because guarding designed around how the job is actually performed does not get defeated.
A quote written against a vague scope is a guess with a decimal point. Both sides know it. The integrator pads it or prices it thin and recovers through change orders, and you find out which one it was somewhere around month four. Neither outcome is good for you.
So we sell project definition and scoping as its own service, before there is a quote to defend. We spend time on your floor with the people who run the equipment, write the specification, count the I/O, settle the open questions and put numbers on the risks. The output is a package detailed enough to be built and priced by anyone — us, your incumbent integrator, or three bidders in an RFP. That is the point. If the scoping work only had value when we won the build, it would not be honest work.
Manufacturers who do this get a schedule that holds and a number that holds, because the expensive surprises were found while they were still cheap — in a conference room, not in a commissioning window with a line down and a crew on overtime.
What you get
A sequence of operations in writing
What the machine does, step by step, including the abnormal cases: part arrives wrong, operator aborts mid-cycle, upstream starves, power comes back. Most change orders live in exactly those cases.
A real I/O and equipment list
Counted, not estimated. Every device, every point, every network drop, with long-lead items flagged early enough to matter to your schedule.
Acceptance criteria you can hold us to
Rate, uptime, scrap, cycle time and inspection accuracy, measured on your product. Signed before the work starts, so complete is a fact rather than an argument.
A risk register with owners
The things that could move the date or the number, who owns each one, and what we do if it happens. Including the risks that belong to you.
Ask a single-line shop what platform your project needs and you already know the answer. We hold deep credentials across several ecosystems — Premier Integrator with Inductive Automation, Authorized System Integrator with FANUC, an Omron Vision Lab — and we still start every architecture conversation with your constraints: what your maintenance team can already support, what your other plants standardized on, what spare parts you stock, and what the licensing looks like in year five.
The practical version
If your plant runs Rockwell and your crew knows Rockwell, we are not going to hand you something they cannot troubleshoot on a Saturday. If you are standing up a new line and want an architecture that scales across plants without per-client licensing math, we will say that too. The recommendation changes because the situation changes — that is what being multi-vendor is actually for.
A servo loop behaves the same everywhere. What changes is the washdown spec, the validation burden, the traceability requirement and what happens on your floor when a batch goes out of specification. These are the verticals where we already know those answers.
Tier 1 and Tier 2 lines where takt time, traceability and audit requirements are all non-negotiable at once.
Batch sequencing, recipe control and process interlocks in environments where a wrong step is not a scrap part.
Washdown-rated controls, sanitary design, allergen changeover and the documentation an auditor expects to see.
High-temperature processes, extrusion and forming lines where tight thermal and motion control decides yield.
Machine builders who need a controls partner behind their brand, with repeatable designs and shipped-on-time panels.
Registration, labeling, date coding, verification and the fast changeover a short-run SKU strategy demands.
Mixing, extrusion, filling and packaging lines with the traceability consumers and retailers now ask for.
Validated environments where the documentation, change control and audit trail are part of the engineering, not an afterthought.
1,900+
automation projects delivered
30+
years of controls engineering
2002
CSIA-certified since
15,000+
professionals (combined group)
Magic Engineering, Magic Consulting and Magic Integration are divisions of Magic Software Americas under one P&L. Not partners, not resellers, not a subcontractor chain you discover halfway through the project. When a job needs strategy, floor work and enterprise integration, it is one team, one plan and one place the accountability lands.
Advise
When you are not yet sure automation is the right answer. They find the constraint that actually limits your output, then target it — which sometimes means we build less and you gain more.
See Magic ConsultingConnect
When the data we collect on the floor has to reach ERP, MES, WMS, finance and the historian. Enterprise integration, application development and AI engineering on top of what we wire.
See Magic IntegrationThe outcome
Numbers that come from what the machines did, not from what someone typed in. Engineering supplies the physical layer — the sensors, the controls and the signal at the source that makes the rest of it true.
Read the visibility pillarA controls engineer reads this, not a sales development rep. Describe the line, the problem or the upgrade you have been deferring, and we'll come back with a straight answer about scope, sequence and where the risk sits — including when the honest answer is that you do not need us yet.
