HAL Software understand the challenges relating to Industrial Automation and Control in regulated Industries such as the Biopharmaceutical Industry. Twenty years designing, testing and implementing all the market leading DCS, SCADA and MES solutions prompted the question:"How would an engineer develop an industrial control system from scratch today, if there were no legacy concerns?"The answer is to define the central data model and build out from there, ensuring all systems implement the same communication methods. One way to visualise this is to wireframe out the solution and build a prototype or model.Using existing software design standards helps the engineer to get there faster without re-inventing the wheel. This reduction in complexity can save many hours on large projects. Extend this philosophy to the control system design & testing to increase the savings as well as software quality.Of course, there are always legacy concerns, and there is a reason why Agile design project management is not pervasive in Engineering; there is no way to build a house room by room for example. Similarly space rocket launches cost 100 million each, so there is no second chance to iteratively improve the design. So traditional engineering has always been big requirements up front and waterfall project execution because its conservative with good reason. Here at HAL Software we have cherry picked the best bits of Agile software design that are most relevant to process automation engineering projects.We believe that it is only a matter of time before these new software design approaches become the standard in industrial control as iterative design through modelling and prototyping is quite simply just better than the manual alternative. There are 2 old adage's that come to mind:'Theres never enough time to do it right but always enough time to do it twice'Alternatively..'measure twice, cut once'Which one are you?