The Bureau of Engraving and Printing has paid Deloitte $110.1 million since May 2021 for “Manufacturing Execution System (MES) support services” at its two currency plants. The Oracle licences the system runs on cost $4.64 million this year. Five dollars of consulting for every dollar of software, on a firm-fixed-price order that drew one offer, coded to the federal product code for labor, not software. On Monday BEP posted a notice for an MES Industry Day on December 11 to find the next contractor. Every MES buyer gets what BEP got: a small licence, a large services contract, and a support agreement that outlives both. This piece pulls 44 public MES and SCADA awards from USAspending, SAM.gov and city records, shows why the licence is the smallest line, prices the hours, lays out the phases and acceptance tests for the statement of work, and compares the same plant on a low-code or spreadsheet interim; behind the wall, the SOW template and the three integrator pricing structures that go wrong.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from USAspending.gov, SAM.gov, and city council and utility board records; as of October 2025)
Oracle renewals at BEP ran $3.64 million in FY2021, $3.79 million, $4.09 million, $4.44 million and $4.64 million in FY2025, a 6% a year escalator; the Deloitte order took $14.9 million, $21.7 million, $23.9 million, $23.1 million and $25.9 million over the same five fiscal years, $110.1 million against a $130.7 million ceiling. The program has now run ten times longer than the 171-day capex lead time ISM reports for the equipment it tracks, and the Industry Day notice says the next contractor will integrate 33 new presses into it.
44 Public Awards, Four Kinds of Line
MES awards are rare in the public record because most plants that buy one are private. We found six federal buyers with MES by name: BEP, NIH’s Center for Cellular Engineering (Körber PAS-X, $884,492 base year, sole source, “install and configure within 12 months”), the Defense Microelectronics Activity (Eyelit, $58,200 a year through 2027), NASA Marshall (iBASEt Solumina, $41,509 for the FY2025 support subscription, up from $29,253 in FY2022), West Point’s Cadet Uniform Factory (one shop-floor licence, $67,451), and the Army Corps at Bonneville Dam (three Ignition packages with support, $95,930). To get a usable sample we widened to the system public buyers own in quantity: SCADA and historian platforms at water and electric utilities, bought from the same integrators on the same licence-plus-hours structure, with the staff report attached. The method is the Public Bid-Tab Price Book method we launched in September for transformers and switchgear, applied to software: USAspending API v2 keyword and PSC sweeps (DA01, DA10, 7A20, 7A21), SAM.gov notices for the solicitation documents, and the Legistar API across 150 city and utility boards for matters with SCADA, Ignition, Wonderware or MES in the title. The 44 rows carry buyer, vendor, integrator, licence and services dollars, term and the URL of the record. No market report we have seen prints one of them; the $2,850 reports price MES in ranges and cite no award.
Four kinds of line recur: a licence or renewal, competed among resellers; a services order to an integrator or consultancy, usually the largest number in the file; a support agreement priced as a percentage of the licences at the site; and hardware, hosting and contingency, often bought through a separate vehicle. In every award where the buyer itemized, software was 1% to 14% of the program and services were 60% to 95%. The ratio holds from a $452,000 control-room upgrade to a $144 million federal program.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book; Symestic
In the five stacks, software is 14.3% at BEP (Oracle renewals against Deloitte plus Oracle managed cloud hosting), 1.0% in Riverside’s water SCADA program, 5.2% at the Western Area Power Administration (a $610,646 licence-fee order against $11.0 million of implementation orders), 4.3% in Santa Clara’s itemized HSQ quote, and 30.6% only in Symestic’s own published on-premise price stack, where the vendor is the one drawing the picture.
Riverside is the cleanest case. The city selected its water SCADA software first, through RFP 2031, then required every design-build bidder to use Inductive Automation’s Ignition. The program the council approved in December 2022 is $11,989,775: $9,318,000 to Tesco Controls for design-build (78%), $1,303,286 to Eramosa International as owner’s representative (11%), $1,062,129 of contingency, $186,360 of the utility’s own operations time, and $120,000 for four years of Ignition software maintenance, 1% of the total. The losing design-build bid from Leed Electric was $7,257,987, $2.06 million lower, and lost on the technical score. The Public Bid-Tab Price Book holds both bids.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book
The 14 awards on the chart span $40,300 (one year of Solumina support at NASA Marshall) to $110.15 million (BEP), with the municipal implementations clustered between $1.05 million (Fresno, 300 groundwater wells) and $4.57 million (Columbus’s Dublin Road water plant, 730 calendar days, 20% contingency included), and the program that separated software from build, Riverside, at $11.99 million.
Why the Licence Is the Smallest Line
Three kinds of work sit between a licence key and a running plant, and none is in the box. Integration hours: Riverside’s water system, Fresno’s 300-plus wells, Corona’s “over 100 programmable logic controllers” across seven control centers, each tag mapped by a person billing by the hour. Data-model work: the order, routing, part, lot and equipment structures that have to agree between the ERP and the floor before a single screen means anything; BEP’s Oracle renewal covers “MES, FlowSys, and other in-house developed systems,” and the Bureau pays Koenig & Bauer a separate $3,173,750 for “100% of the development and operations and maintenance support” of FlowSys, the system “that pulls raw machine data from the production presses.” Change management: BEP’s Industry Day notice asks vendors to run SAFe Agile, “sprint-based delivery with 2-week cycles,” and “User Acceptance Testing (UAT) prior to production release,” while integrating “33 new presses.” None of that is licence.
The vendors’ own accounts say the same. When Rockwell Automation bought Plex Systems in August 2021, its 10-K allocated the $2,205.5 million purchase price as $1,730.0 million of goodwill, $276.4 million of customer relationships, $232.8 million of technology and $22.2 million of trade names. The code was 10.6% of what Rockwell paid for an MES company; the customer relationships were worth more than the software. Emerson paid $1.6 billion for Open Systems International in October 2020, a business with “annual sales of approximately $170 million,” 9.4 times revenue for the SCADA vendor that Riverside, WAPA and the Navy could not leave. Rockwell’s FY2024 10-K reports total annual recurring revenue up 16% in a year when its sales fell 9%, the pattern the Book-to-Bill League Table shows for every automation OEM that has moved revenue into software; the OEM Disclosure Scorecard tracks which of them publish a price at all.
The lock-in is documented in the buyers’ files. Riverside’s cyber-security consultant, AESI, reviewed the $2,166,116 OSI Monarch renewal and wrote that “comparable products exist in the market from several vendors with similar pricing for the software itself, however, a transition from one vendor to another would incur significant additional migration costs.” The city waived competition under a purchasing rule for “renewal of maintenance, license(s), support, or a similar need for existing technology systems.” Fresno’s groundwater SCADA upgrade drew one proposal, $1,045,914, from Enterprise Automation, the firm that “implemented the original SCADA platform nearly 12 years ago.” Columbus’s Division of Power bought its PRISM historian add-on sole source for $106,045 from Minsait ACS, “the only vendor equipped with the proprietary tools, source code access, and technical know-how,” on top of $27,369 of annual licensing in 2024 and $42,502 in 2023.
Support is where the small line grows. OSI’s five-year support for Riverside runs $147,184, $149,392, $151,143, $348,671 and $155,216, $951,606 in all, with a system upgrade pre-sold into year four; the annual fee is 12.6% of the $1,169,510 upgrade price. AVEVA’s distributor E&M quotes Riverside’s wastewater plant $57,000 a year of “Customer FIRST Premium” support and states the rule on the quote: “Support is calculated based on the list price of all licenses at the site.” Silicon Valley Power let its Wonderware support lapse and paid a 10% reinstatement fee of $3,688 to get back on. Inductive Automation and Sepasoft publish the same structure openly: support at 16%, 20% or 24% of retail a year, and a major-version upgrade without support at 65% of the current retail price. Vendors price the licence low because the annuity is priced on it. The Equipment Price Benchmark will carry support rates as a percent of licence once the cell-size rules are met.
What an Hour Costs on the Record
Hours are the argument in every services line; public agreements print the rate. HSQ Technology’s 2022 agreement with Santa Clara bills project management at $300, senior engineers at $250 and engineers at $200 an hour for work outside the $1,390,300 lump sum. Systems Integrated’s rate card for Fullerton runs from $80 for shop labor to $250 for a senior project manager, emergency work at 1.25 times, materials at cost plus 25%. South Coast Automation Systems bills Corona $184, $164 and $138 an hour for senior, project and associate engineers, no after-hours premium, 15% on materials.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book; Craftsman Book Company
The five rate cards put integrator engineering at $138 to $300 an hour, against $109 an hour billed by an electrical contractor on a Riverside change order and the $46.59 an hour labor basis Craftsman’s 2025 National Electrical Estimator uses for an electrician.
The rate is public; the hours are the variable, and only one buyer in our set made the integrator write them down before the award. Fullerton’s RFP asked for a master plan priced by task, and Systems Integrated answered with 592.6 estimated hours at an average $150, $88,890: 16 hours per workshop, 2 hours of drawings per site across 61 sites, 24 hours of cybersecurity exposure analysis, 160 hours to write the plan. That table is the whole discipline of scoping in one page: quantity times hours per element, with the elements named. Corona’s $700,000 a year through FY2025 and Fort Worth’s up to $1,000,000 a year with two renewals for SCADA integration on-call are the opposite form: a rate card and a cap, no hours. BEP’s Deloitte order is fixed price and still carried ten “surge” funding modifications and a June 2025 descope that “captures savings” of $755,763. Use the Quote Check hours-per-element sheet before you sign either form; it prices a task from the Bid-Tab Price Book rate cards.
Scoping the SOW: Phases, KPIs, Fixed or T&M
The public agreements agree on the skeleton even when they get the proportions wrong. HSQ’s Santa Clara contract pays 30% at the city’s approval of design, 30% at completion of manufacturing and factory test, 30% at installation and start-up, 10% at site acceptance, with “no obligation to pay unless Contractor has successfully completed, and City has approved, the milestone.” Naperville’s Survalent award runs four phases: 1A base SCADA with training, 1B the GIS model, 2 the outage system, 3 the DERMS, then five years of support, with hardware carved out to a separate purchase and a 3% contingency on implementation only. Carving out the hardware is right; server, RTU and switchgear deliveries sit on the Lead-Time Monitor, not on the integrator’s schedule. NIH gave Körber 12 months to a configured MES. BEP tests every release against users before it ships. Riverside chose the software before it chose the builder.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book (compiled from Riverside, Santa Clara, Fullerton, Naperville council records and BEP and NIH notices on SAM.gov; as of October 2025)
The model schedule pays 10% at the signed integration inventory, 20% each at approved design, passed FAT, pilot sign-off and rollout, and 10% at final acceptance, so 50% of the price is still unpaid when the first line goes live, against HSQ’s 40%.
Acceptance by KPI is the part no public agreement in our set wrote down, and it decides whether the services line ends. Define three numbers before the design phase, and put them in the RFP the way Riverside put the software choice ahead of the $9.3 million build: the OEE formula per line, first-pass yield per routing step, and WIP age per order, each computed by hand from the paper logs for 30 production days. The acceptance test is that the system’s number matches the manual number within 2% for 30 consecutive days on the pilot line, and then on each line at rollout. If the integrator’s data model cannot reproduce the plant’s own count, the phase is not done, and the payment waits. This is the FAT-as-payment-trigger logic from capital equipment, applied to software; the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule treats the MES go-live as one more gated milestone on the plant schedule.
Fixed versus time-and-materials follows one rule: fixed price for what has an acceptance test, T&M with a per-task ceiling for what does not. Design, build, FAT, pilot and rollout have tests, so they are fixed, per phase, with the integrator’s hours-per-element estimate attached as the basis. Discovery, ERP-side data cleanup, and post-acceptance changes do not have a test yet, so they are T&M at the published rate card with a not-to-exceed per task order and a monthly hours report, the Fullerton form. Corona’s single $700,000 PO and BEP’s surge lines are what happens when the second form is used for the first kind of work.
The Interim: Low-Code or a Spreadsheet
A plant that cannot fund the $375,000 to $1.2 million implementation range that ScienceSoft publishes for midsize and large sites has three interim routes, and all three are priced in public. Tulip lists $100 per interface per month for Essentials and $250 for Professional, billed annually, minimum 10 interfaces, so a 10-station line is $12,000 or $30,000 a year in software before machine monitoring, vision or services add-ons. Sepasoft’s MES modules on Ignition are perpetual: OEE Downtime $22,700, Track and Trace $22,700, SPC $9,100, Batch $35,000, plus Ignition’s $13,500 Application Building suite, so $58,900 buys OEE, traceability and the HMI outright, plus 16% to 24% a year for support. Symestic prices its cloud MES from $900 a month for five machines and puts traditional on-premise MES at a $35,000 to $100,000 licence, $60,000 to $180,000 of consulting and a $250,000 to $500,000 three-year cost.
Source: Open Factory Public Bid-Tab Price Book, Tulip, Inductive Automation, Sepasoft, Symestic, ScienceSoft published prices (as of October 2025)
For one line, 10 stations, 20 machines, the software line runs from $0 (spreadsheet) through $10,800 (Symestic, five machines), $12,000 and $30,000 (Tulip), to $58,900 (Ignition plus Sepasoft), while the services line runs from $28,000 to $37,000 for 200 hours of a controls engineer on the spreadsheet route to $90,000 to $300,000 for 600 to 1,200 integrator hours on the Ignition route.
The spreadsheet is not free; it is 200 hours at $138 to $184 with no machine data and no audit trail. Its value is that it produces the 30 days of manual KPI logs the acceptance test needs, so the interim is phase 1 of the SOW, not a detour. Bonneville Dam took the middle route in June 2025: it bought three Ignition Pro packages with primary and redundant gateways and PriorityCare support for $95,930, specified “the Pro package that Inductive Automation sells has all the modules that we would like,” took 21 quotes, and is doing the conversion from FactoryTalk View with its own staff, citing the incumbent’s “limitations in licensing flexibility.” That is what a licence looks like when the buyer owns the hours: a purchase order, not a program. The Automation Roadmap tracks which platforms publish prices, which is the precondition for buying that way.
What to Do Monday
Pick the software before the integrator, the way Riverside ran RFP 2031 before RFP 2056, and get the licence and support quote in writing for 24 months so the annuity is fixed before the hours start. Send the Quote Check integration inventory to three integrators and require the Fullerton form back: elements, quantities, hours per element, rate per classification, total. Write the 30-day KPI acceptance test into the RFP with the formulas attached, and put 50% of the price behind pilot and rollout acceptance. Price support as a fixed dollar schedule with an escalator capped at the lesser of 3% or CPI, the clause HSQ already accepted in Santa Clara, not as a percentage of list. If the capex is not there this year, run the spreadsheet interim for 90 days and treat it as phase 1: the logs it produces are the test data. Every award in this piece is a row in the Public Bid-Tab Price Book, and the Equipment Price Benchmark contribution form takes MES and SCADA quotes as of today.
Behind the paywall: the eight-section SOW template with model language for each, and the three integrator pricing structures that go wrong on the public record, including the support agreement that pre-sells a $348,671 year-four upgrade and the milestone schedule that pays 60% before anything runs on site. The Bid-Tab Price Book’s MES and SCADA table links every clause to the agreement it came from.