*Industry news | November 2, 2026* Siemens has moved four SIMATIC S7-1500 and ET 200MP system power supplies into phase-out, and the milestone ladder is now published. The announcement is support entry 110005831 on Siemens Industry Online Support. It sets the P.M400 announcement milestone at 1 October 2026 for the following article numbers: 6ES7505-0KA00-0AB0, 6ES7505-0RA00-0AB0, 6ES7505-0RB00-0AB0, 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0 and the 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0-ZC77 variant. Orders for all of them can be placed until 30 September 2027. The latest possible delivery date is 1 December 2027. I read the notice the way I read any notice that lands on my desk: not as a technology story, but as a line item that has to be funded before a date, by somebody, in a year when the maintenance budget has already been argued over twice. Four power supply part numbers does not sound like much until you count how many cabinets on your site contain one of them and how many of your colleagues could name the part without opening the door. The successor part numbers are already named, and this is where the notice gets interesting. Only one of them is available today. The other three are planned for the first half of next year. What Siemens actually announced The affected products are system power supplies, not load power supplies, and the difference matters when you go looking for them in a cabinet because the two families sit next to each other and look similar from a meter away. A system power supply feeds the internal electronics of the S7-1500 and ET 200MP modules through the backplane bus. The CPU carries an integrated system power supply of its own, and depending on the configuration up to two additional system power supply modules can be added alongside it. That is the Siemens description in the S7-1500/ET 200MP manual collection, and it is the reason a system power supply that browns out does not take down one module. It takes down the logic of everything on the rail behind it. The four affected part numbers, as listed in the phase-out entry: 6ES7505-0KA00-0AB0, system power supply PS 25 W 24 V DC, replaced by 6ES7505-0KA01-0AB0. 6ES7505-0RA00-0AB0, system power supply PS 60 W 24/48/60 V DC, replaced by 6ES7505-0RA01-0AB0. 6ES7505-0RB00-0AB0, system power supply PS 60 W 24/48/60 V DC HF, replaced by 6ES7505-0RB01-0AB0. 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0, system power supply PS 60 W 120/230 V AC/DC, replaced by 6ES7507-0RA01-0AB0. The -ZC77 certificate variant moves to 6ES7507-0RA01-0AB0-ZC77. Two things are worth reading twice. The first is that Siemens states the products are being revised and replaced by function-compatible successor products. Revised, not retired into the void. The second is that only the 25 W unit's successor is available now. The 120/230 V AC/DC replacement is planned for the first quarter of 2027, and both 60 W DC units are planned for the second quarter of 2027. Those planned availability dates are stated in the notice itself, so they are not rumours, but they are also plans rather than committed delivery schedules. For anyone who buys power supplies by the part number rather than by the family name, the practical read is this: the old part number stays orderable as a new part until 30 September 2027, while three of the four replacement part numbers do not start appearing until 2027. Between now and then, if one of these units fails, the old number is still the new-part route. After 1 October 2027 the route changes to the spare parts process, and inside the European Union it changes to repair component only. The milestone ladder, and what P.M400 really commits Siemens to Siemens uses a four-step lifecycle ladder, and the same October 2026 wave includes a second notice that spells the definitions out. The ET 200SP interface module announcement, support entry 110006152, states plainly what each milestone means, so there is no need to guess at the abbreviations. P.M400, announcement of product phase-out, means components up to and including that milestone are still available without restriction as new parts. In other words, the announcement date is not the date your supply dries up. It is the date the clock becomes visible. P.M410, type cancellation, is the step where a component is only available as a spare part, and where delivery restrictions can attach. That is the 1 October 2027 date in the power supply notice. From that date, the affected power supplies can only be ordered through the spare parts process and, in the EU, only as repair components. P.M490, discontinuation, is the last step, where nothing can be ordered except for warranty cases. The power supply notice gives a latest possible delivery date of 1 December 2027 rather than a P.M490 date, which is a subtle difference worth noticing. A last delivery date tells you when the factory will stop shipping. It does not tell you when the last unit has already been sold to somebody else. I have watched three of these cycles now on this site, and the failure mode is always the same. The announcement is read, filed, and considered handled because the order book is still open. Then the failure happens in the last quarter of the final order year, when the secondary market has already noticed the deadline, and the replacement gets bought at a number that would have been refused outright eighteen months earlier. The successor dates do not line up with the phase-out dates Here is the part of the notice that I would push up to my own purchasing team this week. The gap between "the old part is still orderable" and "the new part is available" is not a gap at all in one direction and it is a real one in the other. The PS 25 W 24 V DC replacement, 6ES7505-0KA01-0AB0, is already available according to the notice. That is the easy one. Any cabinet that was specified with the 0KA00 unit has a clean upgrade path with no availability window to worry about. The PS 60 W 120/230 V AC/DC replacement is planned for the first quarter of 2027. Until that date, a new build or a repair that needs a 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0 has exactly one new-part route, and it is the part number being phased out. If you are commissioning a machine in the first quarter of 2027 and the drawing calls for this supply, the drawing is still valid, and it will still be valid in September of that year. It simply inherits a deadline it did not have before. The two 60 W DC units are the awkward ones. Both successors are planned for the second quarter of 2027, which means the better part of two quarters in which the old number is the only new part available and the new number is a plan. That is not a warning about scarcity. It is a warning about quotations, because a distributor who quotes a part number with a planned availability date is quoting an intention, and procurement systems are not built to carry that distinction. There is also the question of what the replacement parts actually are. The notice calls them function-compatible successors, which in Siemens language means the function is carried over. It does not promise that a cabinet drawing, a spare parts list, an ERP item record, a maintenance procedure or a skills matrix stays untouched. Every one of those artifacts carries the old number, and somebody has to change them. The 25 W unit moving from 0KA00 to 0KA01 is the sort of change that gets made silently in a bill of materials and then discovered two years later when a technician orders the old number from a stale document. Why a power supply failure looks like a CPU failure The reason I care about this particular notice more than its size suggests is that system power supply faults are routinely misdiagnosed, and the misdiagnosis is expensive in exactly the wrong direction. A system power supply that is degrading does not usually announce itself. The module electronics on the backplane stop behaving consistently. You get intermittent communication faults that move from module to module depending on which slot is drawing at the moment. You get a CPU that restarts under load and leaves an entry in the diagnostic buffer that points at the last module to complain rather than at the supply feeding it. You get I/O that drops out for one scan and comes back, which the operator reports as "the machine hiccuped" and which the maintenance log records as an unexplained stop. The technician arrives, reads the diagnostics, finds a module with a poor signal, and swaps it. The symptom moves. Eventually somebody swaps the CPU, because that is the expensive part everyone suspects. The fault disappears for a while, because the new CPU's integrated system power supply is now carrying a load it was not carrying before, and then it comes back. What I want on the wall of every maintenance office is a single sentence: if the fault follows the rail rather than the slot, check the supply before you check the modules. It costs twenty minutes with a meter and it saves a CPU. The other reason this matters for the phase-out is that power supplies are the least documented asset in most plants. Nobody photographs the label on a system power supply when they photograph the nameplate of a CPU. When the notice arrives, the question "how many of these do we have" cannot be answered from memory, and often cannot be answered from the asset register either, because the power supply was never treated as an asset. It came with the cabinet. It is part of the panel, not part of the inventory. That is precisely how a phased-out part number survives in fifty cabinets and appears in no spare parts list. The HF variant deserves one more line, because it is the one I would most like to have on the shelf. The PS 60 W 24/48/60 V DC HF carries energy buffering for data backup in the CPU, up to 20 MB of retentive data according to the manual collection. That function is the difference between a controlled shutdown and a lost recipe after a mains dip. It is also the least understood of the four units, which makes it the hardest to substitute in a hurry. The same October wave hit the ET 200SP interface module The power supplies are not traveling alone. The ET 200SP announcement in the same wave covers the IM 155-6 PN ST interface module in three order numbers: 6ES7155-6AU02-0BN0, the 6ES7155-6AA02-0BN0 bundle, and the 6ES7155-6AW02-0BN0 version for the BaseCarrier. The dates follow the same shape. P.M400 on 1 October 2026. P.M410 on 1 October 2027, with orders accepted until 30 September 2027 and a latest delivery date of 1 December 2027. From 1 October 2027 the spare parts process applies, and in the EU, repair component only. Where this notice differs is the long tail and the successor timing. The planned P.M490 for the interface module itself, 6ES7155-6AU02-0BN0, is 1 October 2036, a full ten years after the announcement, which is the pattern Siemens used for the S7-1200 first generation as well. The bundle and BaseCarrier versions show a planned P.M490 of 1 October 2027, meaning the assembled bundle disappears from new-part ordering a decade before the bare module does. If your spares strategy assumes the bundle part number will be around as long as the module, the notice says otherwise. The successor is the IM 155-6 ST, with a planned start of delivery in April 2027. Siemens describes it as functionally compatible with limitations: the ET connection has limitations, the 6AW02 version also has limitations with the BusAdapter and the Server Module, and the 6AU02 module has limitations with the ET connection and the BusAdapter. "Functionally compatible with limitations" is the phrase to carry into your engineering review, because a limitation on the BusAdapter is a limitation on how the station connects, and a limitation with the Server Module is a limitation on how you service a station without pulling it apart. For reference, the bundle that is being phased out is described in the Siemens Industry Mall as the PROFINET interface module with hot swap support, up to 32 I/O modules and 16 ET 200AL modules, optional PROFINET strain relief, PN security class 1, supplied as interface module plus server module 6ES7193-6PA00-0AA0 and BusAdapter BA 2xRJ45 6ES7193-6AR00-0AA0. A successor that is compatible with limitations against that feature list is not the same article, and the difference will be found by whoever has to fit it into a running line at two in the morning. What the EU repair-component rule changes Both notices carry the same sentence about the European Union, and it is longer than it looks. From P.M410, in the EU, the product may be used exclusively as a spare part to replace an identical component in the event of repair or maintenance. It may not be used to manufacture new products, to expand existing systems, or to construct new systems or parts of them. Distributors are required to pass those conditions down the distribution chain. For a maintenance department, that is a rule about what the part is allowed to be used for, not about whether you can buy it. Replacing a failed 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0 with an identical unit in the same panel is a repair. Building a new panel, adding a second rack to an existing machine, or shipping a new machine into the EU with one of these inside after 1 October 2027 is where the compliance question starts. I have seen this handled badly once, and the cost was not the part. It was the documentation exercise afterwards, when a machine builder had to demonstrate what was fitted to a delivered line. The rule is simple enough to respect: if the cabinet has not been built yet, use the successor. If the cabinet is installed and a supply has failed, you are inside the intended use. There is a further wrinkle for anyone who thinks that a phase-out announcement is a good moment to buy a lifetime of stock. The order window closes 30 September 2027, the last delivery date is 1 December 2027, and after that the spare parts process governs. Whatever you buy in that window is what you own, because there is no route to buy more later except the secondary market and the repair loop. That is a stocking decision, and it should be made with a failure history rather than with a feeling. The audit I would run before the year ends Here is what I would put in front of my own team this quarter. It is not complicated, and it does not need a consultant. Walk every S7-1500 and ET 200MP cabinet and photograph the label on each system power supply in it. Read the article number off the label, not off the drawing, and not off a distributor's database entry. Match what you photographed against the five affected article numbers. Include the 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0-ZC77 certificate variant, because the certificate variant is easy to miss and it carries its own successor number. Count the cabinets behind each part number, not the part numbers themselves. Two units of a power supply type spread across forty cabinets is not the same risk as two units in one cabinet that everybody shares. For each affected part number, decide one of three things: keep buying the old number until the order window closes, move the design to the successor now, or accept the risk and buy nothing. Writing down which of the three you chose is the part that makes the decision survive a change of staff. Check whether your asset register knows these power supplies exist at all. If it does not, the phase-out notice has just told you something about your register as well as about the product. Update the spare parts list, the ERP item record and the maintenance procedure for the successor part numbers. An order deadline is a purchasing date. A record that still names the retired number is a future wrong order. For the ET 200SP stations in your plant, list every 6ES7155-6AU02-0BN0, 6ES7155-6AA02-0BN0 and 6ES7155-6AW02-0BN0 you own, and record which BusAdapter and Server Module combination is fitted to each. That detail is the difference between a clean swap to the IM 155-6 ST and a surprise. None of that requires a budget. It requires somebody with a torch and an afternoon, and it produces a document that will still be useful when the next wave of notices arrives, which it will. What I would not do I would not buy a pallet of system power supplies because a notice crossed my desk. A phased-out part is not automatically a scarce part, and the announcement milestone is followed by a year of unrestricted new-part ordering and, for one of these modules, a spare parts tail that runs to 2036. Stocking is a decision about failure rate, criticality and lead time, not about a date on a notice. I would also not treat the successor as a like-for-like substitution without reading the compatibility notes. Siemens says function-compatible. The engineering change is small on paper and the shelf-level change is not: drawing, bill of materials, firmware compatibility check in the project, and whatever the panel builder's documentation says. And I would not let the ET 200SP bundle detail pass unnoticed, because that is the item with a 2027 discontinuation date sitting next to a module that lives until 2036. Anyone who reads the module's ten-year tail and assumes the bundle shares it is going to be surprised in the wrong year. Questions buyers are asking this quarter *Are these power supplies discontinued now?* No. Siemens has announced phase-out with effect from 1 October 2026, and they remain orderable as new parts until 30 September 2027 according to the notice, with a latest possible delivery date of 1 December 2027. *Can I still order 6ES7505-0RA00-0AB0 as a new part?* Yes, inside that order window. Its successor, 6ES7505-0RA01-0AB0, is planned for the second quarter of 2027, so the old number is the new-part route until then, subject to your distributor's own allocation. *Is the -ZC77 variant a different part?* It is a certificate variant of the 6ES7507-0RA00-0AB0, and it has its own successor, 6ES7507-0RA01-0AB0-ZC77, with the same planned first-quarter 2027 timing. Read the suffix off the label before you order anything. *What changes for EU customers after 1 October 2027?* The part can be ordered through the spare parts process and used only as a repair component, replacing an identical component during repair or maintenance. It cannot be used to build new products, expand systems or build new systems, and distributors must pass those conditions along. *Does the ET 200SP IM 155-6 PN ST disappear in 2027?* The bundle and BaseCarrier versions show a planned P.M490 of 1 October 2027, while the 6ES7155-6AU02-0BN0 module shows 1 October 2036. The successor IM 155-6 ST has a planned start of delivery in April 2027, and Siemens describes compatibility as functional with limitations. *Is the CPU affected?* These notices cover system power supplies and the ET 200SP interface module. The CPUs themselves are a separate lifecycle question and should be checked against their own product lifecycle entry before anyone assumes anything either way. For plants running SIMATIC hardware and sourcing spares against notices like this one, Siemens PLC and automation parts is the starting point, PLC hardware covers the wider controller and I/O range, and the plant-level view of installed systems is at industrial automation. Whatever you order, read the article number and the suffix off the unit itself first. The notice was written against Siemens' numbers, not against your drawing.

November 02,2026

Rockwell Automation announced the CompactLogix 5390 controller in a press release dated October 13, 2026, issued from Milwaukee through PR Newswire. The document introduces the CompactLogix 5390 as the latest advancement in the company's Integrated Architecture controller family and states its purpose in one line: help machine builders and manufacturers optimize performance, security, safety, data and flexibility. It also makes one number public. The new controller has a footprint 43 percent smaller than previous CompactLogix 5380 controllers. That is the whole of the quantitative disclosure. Everything else in the release is capability language, a list of products the controller works with, and a quote from a product manager. For a buyer with budget authority, the useful work starts where the release stops. This analysis separates three things: what Rockwell stated, what those statements imply for a panel layout or a purchase order, and what nobody has published yet. The gaps are not a criticism of the announcement. They are the normal condition of a launch release, and they define the questions a distributor should be able to answer before anyone signs. What Rockwell announced on October 13 The release describes the 5390 as bringing together built-in cybersecurity, integrated safety and enhanced performance in a single control platform. Read that sentence the way a panel builder reads a bill of materials. Three functions that historically arrived as separate boxes are now offered inside one controller envelope, at least according to the marketing. Security gets a standard attached to it. Rockwell says the controller's capabilities are aligned to IEC 62443-4-2 and describes the product as ready for the EU Cyber Resilience Act. I/O gets a family name: support for local PointMax I/O, which the release says enables more modular architectures. The physical claim is the one that will end up in a quotation spreadsheet. Rockwell states the 5390 is 43 percent smaller than previous CompactLogix 5380 controllers and connects that reduction to two commercial outcomes, less panel space and more standardized designs across machine families. Compatibility is spelled out as a list rather than a diagram. The controller works inside the Rockwell Integrated Architecture ecosystem and integrates with PointMax I/O (5034), Kinetix motion, PowerFlex drives, Stratix networking, FactoryTalk Design Studio software and other visualization solutions. One quote carries the customer rationale. Siva Iyyamperumal, senior product manager at Rockwell Automation, said customers are being asked to do more than deliver performance and also have to address cybersecurity and safety requirements. The sentence is short and does a lot of framing work. It presents security and safety as buyer requirements that arrived from outside the machine, not as features Rockwell decided to add for their own sake. Table 1: What the October 13, 2026 Rockwell release states Item What the release says How to read the statement Product CompactLogix 5390 controller Named product, new launch Family Latest advancement in the Integrated Architecture controller family Positioning, no generation label Stated purpose Help machine builders and manufacturers optimize performance, security, safety, data and flexibility Positioning Core capability Built-in cybersecurity, integrated safety and enhanced performance in one platform Capability claim, no benchmarks Security standard Capabilities aligned to IEC 62443-4-2 Alignment, not a certificate number Regulation Described as ready for the EU Cyber Resilience Act Readiness claim, no declaration cited I/O Support for local PointMax I/O Capability claim, no module list Footprint 43 percent smaller than previous CompactLogix 5380 controllers The only numeric claim in the document Ecosystem PointMax I/O (5034), Kinetix motion, PowerFlex drives, Stratix networking, FactoryTalk Design Studio, visualization solutions Compatibility list without part numbers Commercial terms Not stated Absent from the release The date deserves a note of its own. October 13, 2026 is the manufacturer's own press release date, not a date assigned by a magazine, a distributor or a trade show. When this article refers to the announcement, it means the document Rockwell published that day and nothing later. The three claims that matter to a panel builder Most of the release is context. Three claims change decisions, and each one changes a different decision. The first is the footprint reduction. Panel space is the constraint that shows up last in a project and costs the most to fix. A controller that occupies 43 percent less footprint than the previous generation gives a designer room for terminal blocks, disconnects or a larger drive without changing the enclosure. Rockwell frames the benefit as standardization across machine families, which is the more valuable version of the claim. A single controller envelope that covers a range of machines means one panel layout, one set of drawings and one spare part held on a shelf. The second is security carried inside the controller rather than added beside it. For years, a machine that needed network security bought it as a separate appliance, an industrial firewall or a managed switch with filtering. Each of those devices needs its own panel space, its own power, its own firmware process and its own place in a support contract. A controller with security built in changes the architecture discussion, even if the release does not say what the built-in functions actually do. The third is the combination of safety and standard control on one platform. A machine with safety functions has usually needed either a dedicated safety controller or a safety-rated variant, and the split shows up in programming, wiring and validation. Rockwell's claim that integrated safety sits in the same platform as the control logic points toward a single project and a single tag database. It does not, on its own, tell an integrator what safety integrity level the product reaches. That figure is absent. Table 2: Claims in the release against evidence published so far Claim Release wording Verifiable today Still missing Smaller footprint 43 percent smaller than previous CompactLogix 5380 controllers The percentage itself, as a manufacturer claim Dimensions, mounting depth, weight Built-in cybersecurity Capabilities aligned to IEC 62443-4-2 The standard named, the alignment stated Certificate, assessed scope, security functions list CRA readiness Described as ready for the EU Cyber Resilience Act The claim exists in writing Declaration of conformity, timeline, covered products Integrated safety Integrated safety in a single control platform The phrase in the release Safety ratings, SIL or PL level, certified function set Enhanced performance Enhanced performance, no metric Nothing numeric Scan times, memory, task capacity, axis count Modular architecture Local PointMax I/O support The I/O family named Module list, channel counts, density, pricing Ecosystem fit Named integration with motion, drives, network, software The product families named Firmware version matrix, software release requirements Read the two columns together and the shape of the announcement becomes clear. Rockwell published the direction of travel with enough specificity to be quoted, and held back every figure an engineer would use to size a system. That is a deliberate sequencing choice, and it is common at launch. It also means the trade press, this article included, cannot yet write the sentence that buyers want most: what the thing costs and when it ships. Forty-three percent smaller: what it changes in a cabinet A footprint figure is an area figure. It describes the panel face the controller occupies, not the volume behind it, and the difference matters when a designer starts moving parts around. Consider how a typical compact control panel is organized. Wire duct runs horizontally across the back plate and eats usable area before any device is mounted. DIN rail sits between duct runs. Terminal blocks, breakers, relays and a power supply take the lower third. The controller occupies a slot near the top, and the space around it is reserved for cable bend radius and for the clearance a technician needs to land a screwdriver on a terminal. Reducing the controller's face area by 43 percent does not return 43 percent of the panel to the designer, because the clearance zones do not shrink at the same rate. What it does return is rail length and layout freedom. A narrower controller lets a designer keep a single horizontal rail for the control group instead of breaking the rail and adding a second tier. On a machine where the panel is already at its size limit, that can be the difference between keeping the enclosure and moving up a size, which changes the cutout in the machine frame, the door hardware, the cooling calculation and the shipping weight. Depth is the other half of the story, and the release says nothing about it. A controller that is smaller on the face but deeper behind the plate can collide with duct or with the back of a door-mounted HMI. Until dimension drawings appear, treat the percentage as a face-area claim and verify depth before committing a layout. Standardization is the commercial argument, and it is stronger than the space argument. A machine builder who runs four models on one panel architecture spends real money maintaining four sets of drawings, four spare-part lists and four sets of assembly instructions. If one controller covers the range, the bill of materials collapses toward a common core. The 43 percent figure makes that consolidation easier to justify internally, because the smaller envelope fits the smallest machine in the family without forcing a redesign of the largest. Field note: Do not resize an enclosure on the strength of a press release percentage. Panel thermal performance is driven by total watts dissipated inside the enclosure, not by the footprint of one component. A smaller controller with the same power loss puts the same heat into a smaller box, and the enclosure temperature rise can get worse. Confirm the watt figure and rerun the thermal calculation before you change the enclosure size or the filter arrangement. The claim that will decide most projects is not in the release at all. Buyers will want to know whether the 5390 fits an existing panel cutout pattern, whether the terminal arrangement is compatible with wiring already documented, and whether a machine built last year can take the new controller without redrawing the layout. None of those answers are published. PointMax I/O and the architecture around the controller Local PointMax I/O support is the least glamorous line in the release and possibly the most consequential for machine design. Local I/O means the slices sit on the controller's own backplane or rail rather than across a network, and that changes where the cabinet boundary falls. A distributed layout puts a network node in each zone of the machine. That is the right answer for a long line with stations spread over twenty meters, because it shortens home-run cable and lets a station be tested on its own. It is the wrong answer for a compact machine with a single enclosure, where every remote node adds a power supply, a network drop and a device that can fail. Local PointMax I/O points the design back toward the compact case. Slices stack next to the controller, wiring lands on the same rail, and the whole control group stays inside one enclosure. Rockwell's phrase for this is more modular architectures, which reads as an invitation to build a machine from a small set of repeated I/O blocks rather than a fixed channel count. The ecosystem list in the release is worth mapping before a project kickoff, because it describes the four interfaces a compact machine actually uses. Control layer CompactLogix 5390 controller (announced 2026-10-13) Local I/O PointMax I/O, 5034 family Motion Kinetix Drives PowerFlex Network Stratix Engineering FactoryTalk Design Studio Visualization Rockwell and third-party HMI options Not published Catalog numbers, memory, axis count, scan time, price A scope sequence that keeps a project honest, in the order the decisions actually get made: Fix the machine's I/O count and the number of motion axes on paper, before any part is selected. Decide which I/O must be local to the controller and which can sit on a remote drop, based on cable runs and test access. Confirm the drive and motion families the machine already uses, and check that the controller supports them in the software release you own. Confirm the network topology, including whether the machine needs managed switching for segmentation rather than an unmanaged block. Confirm the engineering software version required, and price the license and training impact if it is newer than what the shop runs. Only then ask for a quotation, with the I/O count and axis count attached so the distributor quotes a configured system rather than a headline part. Step three is where most compact machine projects lose time. A controller announcement describes a family, and a family supports a range of drives, but the specific pairing is governed by firmware and software versions that the release does not list. Rule of thumb: If a new controller requires a software version your maintenance team has not installed, budget the training and the first-project learning curve as part of the controller cost. On a single-machine order, engineering time usually exceeds the hardware delta. Cybersecurity wording: IEC 62443-4-2 and CRA readiness Two phrases in the release will be quoted more than any other, and both need parsing. IEC 62443-4-2 is the part of the IEC 62443 series that sets technical security requirements for industrial automation and control system components. It is written for the product, not for the plant. A vendor that meets it has documented and implemented a set of component-level requirements covering things like account management, integrity protection, confidentiality and event logging. Rockwell's wording is that the controller's capabilities are aligned to that standard. Aligned is not certified. A certificate naming the product and the assessed scope is a different document from a release sentence, and only the certificate tells a buyer which requirements were assessed and which were excluded. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is a horizontal regulation covering products with digital elements sold in the EU, and its main obligations phase in from December 2027. Readiness for that regulation is a forward-looking position, not a compliance finding. No product can hold a CRA declaration of conformity before the regime's obligations apply, which is why manufacturers are using the word ready rather than compliant. For a machine builder shipping into Europe, the practical question is not whether the controller is aligned. It is what evidence the builder can put in a technical file, and what obligations fall on the machine builder rather than the component supplier. Those obligations are split, and the split is exactly what a distributor should be able to explain. Warning: Treat aligned, ready and certified as three different words with three different meanings. If a quotation, a proposal or a customer specification requires a certified component, ask for the certificate and check that the product name and the assessed scope on it match what you are buying. A press release sentence is not a substitute, and a compliance officer will not accept one. The security claim also has a design consequence that the release does not spell out. Built-in security only helps if the machine's network architecture uses it. A controller with hardened functions behind an unmanaged switch on a flat network has the same exposure as before. Segmentation, account control and update policy are still engineering work, and they still belong in the project scope. What Rockwell did not publish This section exists because the absence of information is itself information, and because a buyer who assumes the missing details will be available at quotation time usually loses a week. The release contains no order or catalog numbers. It names product families, not purchasable items. A distributor cannot quote from the announcement, and a maintenance planner cannot add the controller to a spares list using the announcement. The release contains no memory figures, no axis counts, no scan times and no performance benchmarks of any kind. Enhanced performance is stated without a metric, a comparison or a test condition. Any article that prints a scan time for this controller at this point is guessing. The release contains no price. It contains no ship date and no availability window. It says nothing about distributor stock, first-allocation quantities or regional launch sequence. Buyers in the Middle East and Europe have no published indication of when the product reaches their channel. The release contains no end-of-sale date for the CompactLogix 5380. It does not describe the 5390 as a replacement, and it does not put a date on any transition. Anyone who tells you the 5380 stops being orderable on a particular date is repeating something Rockwell has not said. The release also omits the safety detail that a validation engineer needs: no safety integrity level, no performance level, no certified function list, no statement about which safety I/O families pair with the controller. None of this is unusual. A launch release is a positioning document written for a trade audience, and Rockwell published the parts that generate coverage. The technical publication, the firmware release notes and the price book come later, on their own schedule. Questions to ask a distributor before committing budget The release gives a distributor very little to work with, which makes the quality of the answers a useful test of the channel. Bring the I/O count and the axis count with you and ask the following. Table 3: Buyer questions for a distributor, and why each one matters Question Why it matters A useful answer looks like What is the order number for the configuration I need? The release has no catalog numbers, so the item cannot be quoted from the announcement A specific number from a current price book or configurator What is the ship date or availability window? No date was published, and a project schedule cannot absorb an open one A dated allocation or a written statement that none exists yet What is the price, including required software? Controller price alone understates the project if a software upgrade is needed Line-item pricing with license and support separated Which software version is required, and do I need to upgrade? Unpublished, and it drives training and validation cost A version number and a migration note What safety ratings apply, and which safety I/O pairs with it? The release states integrated safety without a rating Certified ratings and a compatible I/O list Is there a certificate for IEC 62443-4-2, and what scope does it cover? Aligned is not certified A certificate reference and the assessed product scope What is the firmware update and security advisory process? CRA readiness is a lifecycle position, not a one-time feature A published advisory channel and update policy What is the status of the 5380, in writing? No end-of-sale date was announced, and planning needs certainty A written statement of current lifecycle status Can I get dimensions and a thermal figure now? The 43 percent claim is a face-area figure A dimension drawing and a watt figure A checklist to take into the meeting: ☐  I/O count and axis count written down before the call ☐  Existing engineering software version confirmed ☐  Existing drive and motion families listed ☐  Enclosure dimensions and current thermal margin on hand ☐  Written confirmation of availability, price and software requirement ☐  Lifecycle status of the 5380 requested in writing, not verbally ☐  Safety rating and I/O pairing confirmed against a published document If a distributor cannot answer the first three items, the conversation is about a future product rather than a purchase. That is a legitimate conversation, but it belongs in a design review, not in a purchase order. Where the 5390 sits next to the 5380 in a live project Background first, because it explains why the comparison keeps coming up. The CompactLogix 5380, in the 5069 family, is the compact controller line that many panel builders specify today for machines in the mid range. Rockwell's Integrated Architecture includes Studio 5000 as the engineering environment that programs across the family. Neither of those statements is a specification, and this article does not offer one for either product. The 5390 arrives beside that installed base, not on top of it. The release says nothing about a replacement, a migration path or a date, and the 5380 remains the line that existing drawings, spare-part lists and maintenance procedures reference. For a new machine design, the 5390 is worth evaluating on the footprint and security claims alone, provided the missing figures arrive before the layout is frozen. For an existing machine that is already validated and shipping, changing the controller is a project with a validation cost that a smaller footprint rarely repays. For a builder running several machine models on one panel architecture, the standardization argument is the one that can justify the engineering hours. Spares strategy needs its own decision. A shop that holds one controller per machine family is exposed if a new family enters the mix before the old one leaves. Holding both is a cost, and the cost is smaller when the two share I/O and software, which is a question for the compatibility matrix rather than the release. Engineering labor is the line item buyers underestimate. A new controller in a plant means a software version decision, a programming standards review, a validation pass on safety functions and a training session for the people who will troubleshoot it at two in the morning. None of those costs appear on a quotation, and all of them land on the project. Bottom line: The CompactLogix 5390 is a credible direction with a thin public record. The footprint claim is specific enough to plan around once dimensions arrive. The security and safety claims are specific enough to start a compliance conversation, not to close one. No price, no ship date and no 5380 transition date have been published, so any budget built this month rests on assumptions that should be written down and dated. Dated timeline: what is confirmed and what is not A news analysis is only as useful as its separation of confirmed fact from expectation. The public record after the announcement is short enough to set out in full. 2026-10-13 CONFIRMED Press release issued from Milwaukee via PR Newswire 2026-10-13 CONFIRMED Product named: CompactLogix 5390 controller 2026-10-13 CONFIRMED Claim: 43 percent smaller footprint than the 5380 2026-10-13 CONFIRMED Claim: IEC 62443-4-2 alignment, CRA readiness wording 2026-10-13 CONFIRMED Claim: local PointMax I/O support Not stated UNKNOWN Order and catalog numbers Not stated UNKNOWN Memory, axis count, scan time, task performance Not stated UNKNOWN Price, currency and regional pricing Not stated UNKNOWN Ship date or availability window Not stated UNKNOWN Distributor stock and first allocation Not stated UNKNOWN End-of-sale or transition date for the 5380 The confirmed column is short, and it is still enough to act on. Designers can start a layout study. Compliance teams can open a question about certificates. Procurement can ask for a written availability position. Maintenance planners can note that a new family exists and resist the urge to standardize on it before the price book confirms it is orderable. The unknown column is where the risk sits, and it is not a small risk. A machine project that assumes an availability window and a price will either slip or absorb a change order. A panel layout that assumes a depth will be redrawn. A compliance file that cites a press release will be rejected. What the announcement does establish is direction. Rockwell is putting security and safety into the compact controller rather than selling them as adjacent products, and it is using panel space as the commercial argument for consolidation. Both moves point toward fewer boxes in a cabinet and a shorter bill of materials. Whether that direction reaches a given machine this year depends on documents Rockwell has not published. Until they appear, the correct posture is interest with a written list of open questions, and a quotation that names exactly which assumptions it rests on.  

October 28,2026

*Industry news | October 12, 2026* Rockwell Automation has set October 31, 2026 as the discontinuation date for the FLEX I/O ControlNet adapter, and there is no successor product named. The affected part numbers are 1794-ACN15, the standard ControlNet adapter, and 1794-ACNR15, the redundant-media version. That gives a plant roughly three weeks from today to place a last-time buy. After that, the adapter comes off the shelf in Rockwell's catalog, and the only route to a replacement is whatever distributors and independent suppliers still hold in stock. A stopped line does not care how clever the migration plan is. It cares that the adapter on the shelf fits. So the October 31 date is not an engineering footnote, it is a purchase order deadline, and it arrives in three weeks. Read the rest of the picture before you decide how much stock to buy. The ControlNet adapter is one part in a wider FLEX I/O retirement cycle, and the lead times on what remains tell you how much slack you actually have.   The date that matters is October 31 October 31 is the last day the 1794-ACN15 and 1794-ACNR15 can be ordered from Rockwell. The product page carries lifecycle status End of Life with that discontinuation date, and the wording is direct enough to leave no room for interpretation: "Rockwell Automation announces that as of October 31, 2026, the Flex ControlNet Adapter will be discontinued and no longer available for sale. Customers are encouraged to remove references to the affected product(s)." That last sentence is the one worth reading twice. Rockwell is telling you to scrub the part number from your drawings, your bills of material and your maintenance procedures. It is not telling you what to put in its place. The replacement category on the product page is "Engineering Replacement." That is a specific and unhelpful phrase for anyone who owns this hardware. A functional replacement drops in and does the same job. An engineering replacement means the job can still be done, but the design changes, and the people who do the design work are not the ones holding the maintenance budget. No successor part number is listed. That is the detail that should drive your purchasing decision this month. When a vendor names a replacement, you can plan around it. You read the data sheet, you check the dimensions, you order one for the bench and you find out what breaks. When the replacement field is blank, you are the one writing the migration plan, and you are doing it without a vendor telling you which way to go. For a plant that keeps legacy ControlNet running because it works and because the capital was approved in a different decade, this is the moment where the platform question lands on the desk. Either you buy shelf stock to extend the life of what you have, or you accept that the ControlNet footprint is now on a countdown that you have not defined. The countdown is real either way. Rockwell has stopped selling. Every adapter in the field is now one failure away from being a problem you cannot buy your way out of at the usual channel. What is going out of production, and what is not The retirement does not touch every FLEX I/O adapter at once, and the gaps between the dates matter more than the dates themselves. Here is the model list, with what each one means for the shelf. 1794-ACN15, the FLEX I/O ControlNet adapter, non-redundant media. Lifecycle status: End of Life. Discontinued October 31, 2026. Replacement category: Engineering Replacement. No successor named. 1794-ACNR15, the FLEX I/O ControlNet adapter with redundant media. Lifecycle status: End of Life. Discontinued October 31, 2026. Replacement category: Engineering Replacement. No successor named. 1794-ACNR15XT, the Flex XT ControlNet adapter for extended temperature environments. Lifecycle status: End of Life. Discontinued December 31, 2027. Replacement product named: 5094-AENTRXT. 1794-AENT, the FLEX EtherNet/IP adapter with 10BaseT. Lifecycle status: End of Life. Discontinued September 30, 2028. Replacement category: Functional Replacement. Replacement product named: 1794-AENTR. 1794-AENTR, the FLEX I/O dual port EtherNet/IP adapter. Lifecycle status: Active Mature, which means it is still current. Rockwell lists an estimated lead time of 5 days. The two ControlNet adapters go first, and they go together. The XT variant, the one built for hot, cold and dirty conditions, gets an extra fourteen months and a named destination. The EtherNet/IP adapter gets almost two more years and a clean functional replacement. That pattern is not random. The platform is not being killed in one stroke. It is being retired from one network protocol at a time, and ControlNet is at the front of the queue. If you keep both a standard ControlNet adapter and an XT unit in the same plant, which is common on sites with a mix of climate-controlled panels and outdoor or washdown enclosures, the two are not on the same clock. Do not let one date blur into the other during a budget conversation. The XT users have a named successor and more time. The standard ControlNet users have neither. The EtherNet/IP side is the part of the answer that is still comfortable. The 1794-AENTR is Active Mature and Rockwell posts a 5 day lead time. That is not a part that is about to strand you. It is a part you can order through normal channels and get in the same week. The reason that matters here is that the EtherNet/IP adapter is the natural landing spot if the plant moves off ControlNet. It exists, it ships fast and it is not on a discontinuation list. That combination gives you an option, and the option costs less sleep than the blank field next to the ControlNet part. Start with what a FLEX I/O adapter actually does. One adapter connects up to eight FLEX I/O modules to the network. On the ControlNet side, that traffic runs on ControlNet V1.5. The adapter is the single point where a rack of I/O either talks to the controller or goes dark. One adapter, up to eight modules, one network connection. When that adapter fails, you do not lose one input point. You lose the whole rack. That is the number to hold onto when you are deciding how many to buy. The exposure per adapter is not the cost of the adapter. It is everything wired through it. Why a 73-day lead time makes this worse than it looks The 1794-ACN15 product page lists an estimated lead time of 73 days. Seven hundred and thirty hours of waiting, and that is Rockwell's own estimate on a part that is being discontinued in three weeks. Sit with that for a moment. The last date to order is roughly three weeks away. The lead time to receive is roughly ten and a half weeks. Those two numbers do not line up, and that mismatch is the whole story. An order placed on the last day of October does not arrive in October. It arrives somewhere in the first half of January, if the estimate holds. That is the trap in a last-time buy. People hear "last order date" and picture a firm deadline they can work backward from. In practice, a last-time buy is a commitment to wait, and you place it before you know what the next twelve months of failures will look like. For a maintenance planner, this changes the shape of the decision. You are not choosing between buying now and buying later at the same price and the same availability. You are choosing between securing stock at a known lead time and gambling that nothing in the rack fails while the channel is closing behind you. A 73 day lead time is also a signal about the supply chain behind the part. Long lead times on end-of-life hardware usually mean the part is built to order, or drawn from shrinking inventory, or subject to allocation. None of those conditions improve after the discontinuation date. They get worse, then they get scarce, then the only stock left is what is already sitting on shelves. The EtherNet/IP adapter's 5 day lead time sits right next to that 73 day figure on the same catalog, and the contrast is the point. One is a part you can order this afternoon. The other is a part you commit to months in advance to receive it at all. The practical reading is straightforward. Availability after October 31 is not a question of price. It is a question of whether anyone still holds the part. Distributor stock and independent suppliers are the channel, and that channel thins every month. If you have a critical rack, the lead time is the argument for acting this month rather than in the first week of November. The difference between ordering on October 24 and ordering on November 3 is not three percent of a purchase order. It is the difference between Rockwell's supply chain and whatever is left in the secondary market. If you need help locating what is still available, discontinued Allen-Bradley parts is a reasonable place to start a search, and it is worth doing it before the last sale date passes rather than after. The two realistic paths: keep the platform, or move to EtherNet/IP Once the adapter is gone from the catalog, the plant has two honest options. Everything else is a variation on one of them. The first path is to keep the platform. You buy enough adapters to carry the ControlNet racks through the horizon you are willing to plan for, you store them properly, and you keep running. This path does not require a capital project, a controller change or a shutdown window. It requires a purchase order and a shelf. The cost of this path is the shelf itself. Adapters that sit for years draw no power and cost nothing to hold, but they tie up working capital, they have to be stored somewhere dry and stable, and someone has to keep track of them. The benefit is that a failure on a Tuesday afternoon becomes a fifteen minute swap instead of a production event. The second path is to move to EtherNet/IP. This is where the plant stops treating ControlNet as a permanent fixture and starts treating it as a project. The 1794-AENTR exists, it is Active Mature, it ships in about 5 days, and it is the adapter the FLEX I/O platform is heading toward. Moving means more than changing the adapter. The controller side has to speak the same protocol, the network layout changes, the addressing changes, and the people who maintain the system have to learn a different set of tools. That is why this path is a project and not a purchase order. It is worth being clear about the size of the gap. ControlNet V1.5 and EtherNet/IP are different networks with different cable plants, different topology rules and different diagnostics. A rack does not migrate by swapping one card. The rack has to be rehosted on a network that the rest of the control system may or may not already speak. For some plants, that work is already underway. Any site that has been modernizing its control layer for the past decade probably has an EtherNet/IP backbone somewhere, and the FLEX racks are the last ControlNet island still connected. For those sites, the discontinuation is a schedule nudge, not a crisis. For other plants, the FLEX I/O ControlNet racks are the backbone. They were installed as the smart, flexible option at the time, and the rest of the plant grew up around them. For those sites, the second path is a genuine capital conversation, and the first path is the one that keeps the lights on while that conversation happens. The practical answer for most operations is a blend. Buy shelf stock for the adapters that carry the racks you cannot afford to stop, and start the engineering work on moving the racks that are either less critical or already near a planned outage. The one thing the blend is not, is free. Every month you spend deciding is a month the last-time-buy window is shorter, and the price and availability of whatever is left in the secondhand channel is a moving target. If you are weighing both paths, Rockwell Automation spares is a useful reference point for what is still being sourced and supplied in the aftermarket, so you can price the stock side of the decision against the project side. What an unplanned adapter failure actually costs the operation This is where people want a number, and this is where a responsible article refuses to give one. Downtime cost depends entirely on the plant, and any single figure quoted here would be invented, wrong for your site and useless as a budgeting input. Here is how to build your own number instead. Start with your line rate or your product throughput, whatever unit you already track output in. Multiply by the value of that output. That gives you the cost of an idle hour. Now add the labor that stands around while the line is down. Add the restart cost, which for some processes is real scrap and for others is hours of warm-up and re-qualification. Add overtime if you recover the lost volume with extra shifts. The result is your cost per stopped hour. That is the number that belongs in the decision, and it is a number only you can calculate. Then do the arithmetic that matters. If the adapter is on the shelf, the failure costs you a swap: call the electrician, power down the rack, change the card, power up, verify. A couple of hours on the wide end, often less. If the adapter is not on the shelf, the clock keeps running. You call your suppliers, you find out nobody has immediate stock, you wait. Now add the freight cost of an expedited shipment, and the premium that any scarce part commands when the seller knows you need it today. That gap between a swap and a wait is the entire justification for holding spares. It is also the number that makes a shelf of adapters look cheap. The 73 day lead time on the 1794-ACN15 turns a normal supply order into a production event. A part that is normally a next-week purchase becomes, after October 31, a part that might not be purchasable at all at the price or speed you are used to. There is a second cost that is easy to forget. A rack that has lost its adapter takes its up to eight I/O modules offline with it. If those modules feed a safety interlock, a batch recipe or a quality measurement, a "two hour electrical fix" can turn into a batch rejection or a quality hold that outlasts the repair by a wide margin. That is why the spares question is never really about the adapter. It is about the rack, and the rack is about whatever the plant does with the signals. If you have never built a downtime cost figure for your own site, do it now, while the part is still purchasable. It is much easier to justify a stock purchase with a real number on a spreadsheet than with a feeling that spare parts are probably a good idea. For plants keeping older platforms alive, legacy PLC hardware is often the practical source for the parts the original vendor no longer sells, and knowing your source before a failure is part of the same calculation. A spares audit you can run this week This is a walk-the-floor exercise and it does not need a project code. The goal is a single honest number: how many 1794-ACN15 and 1794-ACNR15 adapters your site actually depends on. Start at the panel. List every FLEX I/O rack that has a ControlNet adapter. For each one, write down the panel name, the process it serves, and whether the process is critical or can wait. Do not skip the awkward ones in remote corners of the plant; those are the racks most likely to be forgotten during planning and most painful to reach during a failure. Now count the adapters. Note whether each one is a 1794-ACN15 or a 1794-ACNR15. If your site uses redundant media anywhere, the ACNR15 count is the one to watch, because both versions share the same October 31 discontinuation and neither has a named successor. Next, check your own storeroom before you check anyone else's. Some sites are sitting on adapters they bought years ago and never recorded. A shelf count is free information, and it can change your whole buying plan in an afternoon. Then compare what you need against what you hold. The gap between those two numbers is what you are buying this month. As you go, note the failures. If an adapter has failed in the last couple of years, write down why. An adapter does not fail in isolation. Heat, vibration, dirty power and loose backplane connections all take a toll, and a rack with a history of failures will keep failing after the catalog closes. Racks with clean histories are the better candidates for the longer migration timeline. Two more things go on the audit sheet. First, list the XT racks separately. The 1794-ACNR15XT runs to December 31, 2027 with a named replacement in the 5094-AENTRXT, so it is a different line item with a different urgency. Mixing it into the standard ControlNet count will either overstate or understate your exposure. Second, write down who owns the decision. Every last-time-buy that stalls does so because the maintenance department wants the stock, the finance department wants the justification, and nobody wrote down whose signature is on the purchase order. Fix that before the last week of October. Once the audit sheet is done, the buying decision is arithmetic, not opinion. You know how many racks you carry, how many adapters you hold, and how many months of coverage you want. Multiply the gap by the unit cost, present it against your own downtime cost figure, and the conversation with finance runs itself. Do the audit this week even if the answer is "we already have enough." The audit is cheap. Finding out you were short is expensive. If your audit turns up gaps you need filled fast, industrial automation spares is the kind of source to have on standby before the deadline, not after it. The rest of the FLEX I/O lifecycle picture Zoom out, because the ControlNet adapter is not the only date on the calendar, and a plant that only reacts to this one will be doing the same exercise again in a year. Here is the sequence, in the order it arrives. October 31, 2026: 1794-ACN15 and 1794-ACNR15, the FLEX I/O ControlNet adapters, discontinued. Engineering Replacement, no successor named. December 31, 2027: 1794-ACNR15XT, the Flex XT ControlNet adapter, discontinued. Replacement product 5094-AENTRXT named. September 30, 2028: 1794-AENT, the FLEX EtherNet/IP adapter with 10BaseT, discontinued. Functional Replacement, replacement product 1794-AENTR named. Still current: 1794-AENTR, the FLEX I/O dual port EtherNet/IP adapter, Active Mature, estimated lead time 5 days. No discontinuation date listed. Read that as one continuous retirement of the FLEX I/O adapter family, protocol by protocol. ControlNet first, in two waves, with the standard adapters leading and the XT variant following fourteen months later. Then the oldest EtherNet/IP adapter, the 10BaseT version, with a functional replacement already named and a target two years out. The destination is consistent. Every retired adapter points, directly or eventually, at the EtherNet/IP side of the platform. The 5094-AENTRXT is the named replacement for the XT ControlNet adapter. The 1794-AENTR is the named replacement for the 1794-AENT. The 1794-AENTR itself remains Active Mature, shipping in about 5 days, with no retirement date announced. The pattern tells you what the platform wants to be. FLEX I/O stays. ControlNet goes. EtherNet/IP is where the racks are expected to land. For a maintenance manager, that pattern is more useful than any single part number. It means the migration plan you write today, whether it finishes next year or in five years, has one obvious direction. It also means the 1794-AENTR is the part you should understand now, because it is the adapters' future, and it is the one part in this whole family that is still easy to buy. Be precise about what Rockwell has and has not announced, because imprecision here costs money. What is documented is the sales discontinuation and the dates above. Rockwell has not announced an end of repair, an end of support, or a cut-off for spare parts through its own service channels. Do not let anyone in your next planning meeting claim otherwise. What the discontinuation does mean is concrete enough. The part is no longer sold. Availability becomes a question of existing stock. And the farther you get from October 31, the thinner that stock gets and the more the secondary market sets the price. That is the whole reason to treat the date as a purchase order deadline. It is not the day the part dies. It is the day the part stops being an order and starts being a search. Three weeks is not much runway, but it is enough to run the audit, count the racks, and place the order while the part is still a part number in a catalog rather than an inquiry to a supplier. The plants that will come out of this cleanly are the ones that spend the next week on the floor with a clipboard, not the ones that will spend the first week of November on the phone. The calendar is set. The successor field is blank. The only variable left is how many you decide to put on the shelf.

October 13,2026

  On Wednesday, Rockwell Automation stops selling new PowerFlex 70 drives. Not all of them, but the ones most plants actually have bolted into a cabinet. If you have a line running on a PowerFlex 70 and you have not yet decided what happens when the next one fails, that decision has now been forced on you. It is two days out. I have watched three of these transitions in fifteen years. The pattern does not change. The vendor announces, everyone nods, nobody budgets, and eighteen months later a maintenance tech is on a phone at 2 a.m. trying to find a rebuilt unit from a broker who will not answer the provenance question. That is the bill I am trying to keep you from paying. This is not a technical piece. You know what a drive does. This is about what the calendar costs, which parts you can still buy and when, and what you should put on a shelf before the dates arrive.   What exactly ends on September 30, and what does not   Read the announcement carefully, because the headline oversells it and the detail is where your budget lives. Rockwell's own PowerFlex 70 product page states: "Rockwell Automation announces the PowerFlex 70 AC Drive will be discontinued and no longer available for sale as of September 30, 2026. End of life status and discontinuation date only apply to the IP20/NEMA UL Type 1, IP54/NEMA UL Type 12, and Flange versions. The NEMA 4X versions remain in Active Mature status. To support your transition, we recommend modernizing to the PowerFlex 750 family of AC drives." That is the vendor's language, not mine. Two things matter in it. First, the NEMA 4X versions stay in Active Mature. If your washdown or outdoor installations run 4X enclosures, you keep a sales channel for now. Active Mature is not the same as Active, and it is not a promise of forever, but it is not a stop date either. Do not lump your 4X units in with the rest of the fleet when you build the audit. You will overspend on parts you can still order normally. Second, the stop applies to specific enclosure families, and Rockwell points users to its Product Lifecycle Status search tool to check individual catalog numbers. That is not a formality. A plant with forty PowerFlex 70 nameplates on a spreadsheet thinks it has forty problems. In practice the mix of frames, enclosures and option cards means you have maybe six or eight distinct catalog numbers that actually matter, and some of them are in a different lifecycle status than the rest. Pull the numbers. Read them one at a time. Do not trust the family name. The other half of this news cycle is Mitsubishi Electric, and there the deadlines are longer but the details are sharper. Two Sales and Service bulletins, both issued April 2026 and revised in August 2026, both citing difficulty obtaining components, cover the HF-KN series AC servo motors (Bulletin No. 26-07AE) and the MR-JN series AC servo amplifiers (Bulletin No. 26-06AE). The HF-KN has been on the market 17 years, since 2009. That is a long run for a servo motor, and it means the installed base across packaging, food processing and light assembly lines is deep. The bulletin sets a made-to-order transition on March 31, 2027, order acceptance through March 31, 2028, last shipment and production end on March 31, 2029, and repair acceptance and parts supply through March 31, 2036. A third bulletin, No. 26-09AE, covers the MR-EM340GF Simple Motion board and the SW1DND-EMSDK-B MELSOFT EM Software Development Kit. Same dates. More on that one shortly, because the replacement part is the awkward one.   The calendar, in the order it will hit you   Here is the sequence. No table, just the dates in the order they land, because that is how you build a purchase order schedule. · September 30, 2026: new PowerFlex 70 sales end for IP20/NEMA UL Type 1, IP54/NEMA UL Type 12, and Flange versions. Two days from now. If you need a new unit in one of those enclosures, this is the last full business week and it is already ending. · December 2026: the FX3G series PLC reaches its discontinuation date, following a June 2025 Mitsubishi announcement that set a last order date of June 2026 with the FX5UJ as the recommended successor. If you missed that order date, you are already in the secondary market for FX3G hardware. Note this one, because it is the case study for the whole article: the notice came eighteen months ahead, the last order date passed quietly in June, and the discontinuation date arrives in December with nobody's attention on it. · March 31, 2027: HF-KN servo motors, MR-JN servo amplifiers and the MR-EM340GF motion board and its SDK all move to made-to-order. This is the first real pinch point. Made-to-order means lead times stretch and the vendor is building to demand, not to stock. If you have a project commissioning late 2027, that date is on your critical path whether your project manager knows it or not. · April 2027: CE and UKCA marking removal takes effect on orders received on or after that date, for the same three Mitsubishi product groups. This is a different kind of deadline, and I will give it its own section below. · March 31, 2028: order acceptance closes on HF-KN, MR-JN and the MR-EM340GF. After this date you cannot place an order at all. This is the hard buy date. Everything before it is planning. After it, you are buying from someone else's shelf. · March 31, 2029: last shipment, and production ends, for HF-KN, MR-JN and the MR-EM340GF. Whatever was ordered by March 2028 ships by this date and then the factory stops. · March 31, 2036: repair acceptance and parts supply end for the same Mitsubishi product groups. Seven years of repair window after production ends. That is generous compared to what most drive lines get, and it is the single most important line in this article for anyone panicking about a 2029 date. Read that list once more and notice what is missing. Rockwell has published a sales end for the PowerFlex 70. Rockwell has not, on the material I can find, published an end of repair, end of support or spare parts cut-off for the same drive. I am not going to invent one for them, and you should be suspicious of any supplier who tells you a Rockwell repair window that the vendor has not stated. The absence of a date is not a runway. It is an absence of a date. Plan accordingly.   Why April 2027 is not like the other dates   Every other date on that calendar is about volume: can I order it, will it ship, can it be repaired. April 2027 is about paperwork, and paperwork is the deadline that catches European and UK plants off guard. Both the HF-KN and MR-JN bulletins state, in Mitsubishi Electric's own words: "The CE marking will be removed from the [series] because it does not comply with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). In conjunction with the removal of the CE marking, the UKCA marking will also be removed. The orders received by Mitsubishi Electric on or after April 2027 will be supplied without the CE marking and UKCA marking." I am reporting that as the vendor's statement. I am not going to argue the legal reading of it, because that is for your compliance people, not for a spares buyer at 6 a.m. on a Monday. What I will tell you is the practical consequence, and it is a procurement consequence, not a technical one. If your plant is in the EU or the UK and your machinery documentation references CE or UKCA marked components, an order placed in April 2027 arrives with a rating plate that looks different from the one in your existing drawings. That is a conversation with your quality manager, your notified body if you have one, and whatever customer audit sits over your head. It is not a conversation you want to have for the first time the week you need the part. The hazard gets worse, and the bulletins say so plainly: both the former and the new versions may be in distribution at the same time depending on stock status. That means a distributor with old marked stock and a distributor with new unmarked stock can both quote you the same catalog number on the same day, and the marking on the plate may differ. If you need a specific marking, you have to specify it on the purchase order and you have to confirm it at goods-in. Assume nothing from a part number alone. For a plant in the Middle East or the Americas, this matters less directly, though it matters if you export machinery into Europe or if your OEM builds to European documentation. And it matters for resale value on anything you later sell into the EU. Know which of your three audiences applies before you decide how much of the April 2027 date is your problem. The MR-EM340GF has one more wrinkle. Mitsubishi states that the recommended replacements, the motion control software SWM-G or the motion control board MR-EM441G, are not compatible with the MR-EM340GF and differ in specification. That is the vendor's language, and it is about as clear as a vendor gets. There is no drop-in. The replacement SDK is SW1DND-EMMSDK-B, and the bulletin references Mitsubishi document No. 26-21E, titled "Change in Packaging Labels and Rating Plates due to Enforcement of EU Cyber Resilience Act." If you run an MR-EM340GF, the part is not a stock buy. It is a migration project with its own engineering hours, and it belongs in the capital plan, not the consumables budget.   What this costs, and what it does not   Let me separate the fear from the bill, because the two are not the same number. The fear is that September 30 means your PowerFlex 70 fleet is orphaned and every failure is a line-down event. That is not what the announcement says. Sales end is not support end. Rockwell stops selling new units in three enclosure families. It has not announced a repair cut-off. Your existing drives keep running, and the installed base is large enough that the third-party repair and remanufacturing market will serve it for years. For legacy drive spares, the practical question is not whether parts exist. It is who has them and what condition they are in. The fear on the Mitsubishi side is the same, and the bill is smaller than you think. The repair window runs to March 31, 2036. That is seven years past production end. Most plants will have migrated off HF-KN and MR-JN long before that, because the replacement lines exist and are documented: HF-KN053(B) to HK-KT053W(B), HF-KN13(B) to HK-KT13W(B), HF-KN23(B) to HK-KT23W(B), HF-KN43(B) to HK-KT43W(B), HF-KN73(B) to HK-KT7M3W(B) on the motor side, and MR-JN-10A to MR-J5-10A, MR-JN-10A1 to MR-J5-10A, MR-JN-20A to MR-J5-20A, MR-JN-20A1 to MR-J5-20A, MR-JN-40A to MR-J5-40A on the amplifier side. If your architecture runs an MR-JN-10A1 or MR-JN-20A1 on a 1-phase 100 V AC input, note that Mitsubishi requires the MR-CM08K1 simple converter in combination. That is a line item people miss when they quote the swap. The Mitsubishi bulletins do add one honest caveat worth reading twice: repairs may not be possible once component inventory is exhausted. So the repair window is a maximum, not a guarantee. Anyone telling you 2036 is a certainty has not read past the date line. That leaves the real variable, and it is not the vendor. It is the secondary market. Once orders close, every part you buy comes off someone's shelf. Condition and provenance become the deciding factors, and those do not appear on a data sheet. A remanufactured MR-JN that has been tested on a load bank with a documented repair record is a different asset than a unit pulled from a decommissioned panel and wiped down. Both can be quoted at the same price. Only one belongs on a critical line. The way you control that is by knowing your supplier's testing procedure before the emergency, by keeping serial numbers on your own units so you can trace what came back from repair, and by deciding in advance which of your lines can tolerate a used unit and which cannot. For a plant, servo drive parts and drive spares bought from the secondary market are a legitimate, budget-saving route, provided the supplier tests, documents and warrants. The moment a supplier cannot describe their incoming inspection, the price stops being the point.   The decisions this forces this quarter   You have a short list and a long list. Do the short list in the next ninety days, before the March 2027 date starts pulling lead times. 1. Run a spares shelf audit against actual installed units. Walk the floor, pull every nameplate, and record catalog number, serial number, enclosure type and date of installation. This is the step everyone skips and it is the step that saves the most money. You will find drives on the shelf that belong to lines you decommissioned in 2019, and you will find lines running hardware that nobody has a spare for. 2. Build a clean catalog number list, one line per distinct number, with quantity installed and quantity on the shelf. On the PowerFlex 70 side, sort the list by enclosure family and check each number against Rockwell's Product Lifecycle Status tool rather than assuming the family status applies. On the Mitsubishi side, separate the three groups: HF-KN, MR-JN, MR-EM340GF. 3. Set a stock buy date tied to the real deadline, not the scary one. For Rockwell that date is now, for the IP20, IP54 and Flange units you still run. For Mitsubishi the hard date is March 31, 2028 for order acceptance, and the made-to-order transition on March 31, 2027 is the date by which lead times start hurting you. Anything you intend to buy new, buy before March 2027 or accept the lead time. 4. Start the migration case for the capital plan, not for the emergency. A migration case is a one-page document: how many units, what the replacement part number is, what changes in the panel, what the engineering hours look like, and what the plant loses if it does not do it. For MR-EM340GF that document is mandatory because the replacement is explicitly not compatible. For PowerFlex 70, Rockwell recommends the PowerFlex 750 family, so the case is a modernization, and modernizations go in next year's budget, not this month's emergency account. 5. Brief your quality or compliance contact on the April 2027 marking change, before it becomes a goods-in problem. It is a fifteen-minute conversation today and a stranded shipment later. That list is small on purpose. You are not going to migrate forty drives this quarter, and you should not try. You are going to know what you have, buy the parts that go away first, and put the rest on a documented track.   Where a spare parts supplier fits   I am not going to pretend a parts supplier solves a lifecycle problem. We do not. What a good supplier does is narrower and more useful: it holds stock on the numbers you are about to lose, it can tell you which units it has tested and how, and it does not disappear during the week you actually need the part. What you should ask any supplier quoting you on discontinued hardware, and ask before you need them: Do they test, and on what? A load test on a drive and a run test on a servo are minimums. Ask for the procedure. Can they trace provenance on a used or remanufactured unit? If they cannot describe where a part came from, treat the unit as unknown condition. Do they hold buffer stock on the numbers you care about, or do they source to order? Sourcing to order means your lead time equals their lead time, which is exactly the problem you were trying to solve. Will they confirm the marking on the rating plate for Mitsubishi parts after April 2027? If you need CE or UKCA, this is the question that separates a supplier who understands the change from one who has not read the bulletin. The honest answer for most plants is a mixed model. Critical lines get new or vendor-repaired units. Non-critical lines and low-frequency spares come from tested secondary stock. Automation spares sourced that way, with documented testing, beat an unplanned line-down every time. Get that mix decided before the calendar decides it for you.   FAQ   Does September 30, 2026 mean my PowerFlex 70 drives stop working or stop being supported?   No. It means Rockwell stops selling new units in the IP20/NEMA UL Type 1, IP54/NEMA UL Type 12 and Flange families. Your installed drives keep running. Rockwell's published material documents the sales end and points users to its Product Lifecycle Status tool for individual catalog numbers. It does not publish a repair or support cut-off for this drive, and you should not accept a supplier's claim that it does.   My plant runs NEMA 4X PowerFlex 70 units. Am I affected?   Not by this date. Rockwell states the NEMA 4X versions remain in Active Mature status. Active Mature is not the same as Active, so keep it on your watch list, but you are not in the September 30 stop.   What is the actual last date I can buy HF-KN motors and MR-JN amplifiers?   Per the Mitsubishi bulletins, order acceptance runs through March 31, 2028, and last shipment and production end is March 31, 2029. The made-to-order transition happens earlier, on March 31, 2027, so treat March 2027 as the date lead times start working against you.   Is the April 2027 CE marking change a reason to stop using these parts?   That is a decision for your compliance function, not for the parts buyer. Mitsubishi Electric states that CE marking will be removed because the series does not comply with the EU Cyber Resilience Act, that UKCA marking will also be removed, and that orders received on or after April 2027 will be supplied without either marking. What it means for your machinery documentation depends on your market and your customer requirements.   Can I buy the replacement part and drop it in?   On the motor and amplifier side, the replacement lines are documented (HF-KN to HK-KT, MR-JN to MR-J5), and there are combination notes, including the MR-CM08K1 simple converter for certain 1-phase 100 V AC configurations. On the MR-EM340GF, Mitsubishi states plainly that the recommended replacements are not compatible and differ in specification. That one is an engineering project, not a part swap.   How long should I plan on the repair route?   Mitsubishi bulletins set repair acceptance and parts supply through March 31, 2036 for HF-KN, MR-JN and the MR-EM340GF, with the caution that repairs may not be possible once component inventory is exhausted. Plan the repair route as a bridge, not as a permanent strategy.   The FX3G situation is already past its last order date. What does that tell me?   It tells you the notices are accurate and the dates are real. Mitsubishi announced the FX3G discontinuation in June 2025, set a December 2026 discontinuation date and a June 2026 last order date, with the FX5UJ as successor. The last order date passed. If you were not watching, you are now buying FX3G hardware from stock. That is exactly the position you do not want to be in with HF-KN and MR-JN in 2028.   Should I buy a lifetime supply of spares now?   Rarely. Shelf stock costs money, ties up capital and can degrade. Buy what your failure history says you consume over the made-to-order window plus a buffer, not a lifetime. The exception is a part with no compatible replacement, like the MR-EM340GF, where the case for holding stock is stronger because the alternative is a redesign. SEO fields - do not paste this block into the website Meta Title PowerFlex 70 Sales End September 30: Legacy Deadlines Meta Description Rockwell PowerFlex 70 sales stop September 30, 2026, and Mitsubishi HF-KN and MR-JN run out in 2029. The deadlines, the CE marking change and what to stock now. URL Slug powerflex-70-sales-end-legacy-automation-deadlines-2026 Category news Publishing steps: 1) paste Meta Title + Meta Description into the Yoast SEO fields, 2) set the URL slug, 3) pick the category, 4) request indexing in Search Console. Site: tztechio.com

September 28,2026

Holiday Notice: Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day 2026 Dear customers, Our office and warehouse in Xiamen will be closed for two public holidays:   Mid-Autumn Festival: September 25 to September 27, 2026 National Day: October 1 to October 7, 2026 We are back at work on Thursday, October 8, 2026. September 28 to 30 are normal working days. Orders. Orders confirmed and paid by September 30 will be dispatched before the National Day closure, subject to stock. Orders received during the closures are processed in the order they arrive, starting October 8. If you need parts in October, send your enquiry before September 30 so we can confirm stock and shipping in time. Support. Email and WhatsApp messages are still received during the holiday, but replies will be slower. For urgent breakdowns, send the part number and fault details to WhatsApp +86 175 5077 6091 and we will come back to you as soon as we reopen.   Thank you for your continued business. We wish you a good week.     Xiamen Zantang Technology Co., Ltd Tel / WhatsApp: +86 175 5077 6091 Email: info@tztechautomation.com tztechio.com    

September 24,2026