Automation Engineering Basel

Northwestern Switzerland is Europe's densest pharma and specialty-chemicals cluster. Within just 40 kilometres between Basel city, Pratteln and Schweizerhalle, global API manufacturers, plant engineering firms and suppliers concentrate more than 30,000 staff in engineering and production. Roche and Novartis dominate the cluster with research centres and API production right on the Rhine, Lonza supplies biopharma APIs from Visp and Basel city, Syngenta and Clariant in Muttenz-Schweizerhalle handle specialty chemicals. SKAN AG in Allschwil is the world market leader for pharma isolators, Bachem in Bubendorf Europe's largest peptide synthesis supplier. On top of that, dozens of mid-sized engineering offices and plant builders operate between Liestal, Reinach and Birsfelden. Engineering requirements are demanding: strict documentation for quality management, lengthy change-management processes, often legacy plants with lost symbol information from the 1990s and 2000s. While in-house engineering teams are tied up validating new plants, I take on modernisation of existing controllers and program recovery as an external partner – flexibly, on-site or remote. Focus areas for Basel customers: migration of S5 and S7-Classic controllers to S7-1500 with TIA Portal V18/V19 in pharma and plant-engineering environments, HMI retrofit to WinCC Unified including audit-trail logging and user-role management, reverse engineering of lost symbols (typical for 20+ year-old API plants where only an online dump remains) and AI-accelerated creation of engineering and validation documents – functional specs, test reports, manuals. The cross-border framework is set up and confirmed in writing before every assignment: SEM notification with the State Secretariat for Migration eight days in advance, A1 certificate via the Centre commun de la sécurité sociale Luxembourg, reverse-charge invoicing in EUR or CHF under the place-of-recipient principle, ATA Carnet via the Chambre de Commerce Luxembourg for mobile engineering devices. Drive time from Mettlach: 4:30 h via A4/A36/A35 or by train via Strasbourg–Basel SBB.