The work that used to leave Zambia
A rectifier module fails at a tower site. For years that meant one of two things: pack it up, ship it abroad for repair and wait, or throw it away and buy a new one in dollars. The same was true of the radio units on the tower, the control cards in a water utility's pump panels and the drives on a factory line. The electronics that keep Zambia running were bought abroad, and when they broke, the repair went abroad too.
HERO Control Systems exists to keep that work here. Since 2019 we have built, step by step, the ability to diagnose, repair, redesign, design and teach the electronics Zambian industry depends on. This is what that looks like in practice.
We find the fault, not just the failed box
Most repair starts with a guess and a replacement part. Ours starts with measurement. Our Travis Labs bench in Lusaka has digital oscilloscopes, a thermal imaging camera, a power quality meter, an insulation resistance tester and load testing for repaired units. That lets us work at component level: which part failed, why it failed, and what would make it fail again. Every unit leaves with a written report.
The thermal camera also goes out to sites. A thermal imaging inspection finds the loose connection or the overheating component in a live panel before it turns into a shutdown.
We repair what others replace
For telecom operators we repair rectifier modules, site monitoring units and radio units at component level. MTN Zambia is a contracted client on a framework repair agreement, and Zamtel, IHS Towers and Infratel are at proof of concept. Broadcast RF power amplifiers from MultiChoice transmitter stations have come to our bench for evaluation repair.
For industry we repair variable frequency drives, soft starters, UPS systems and PLCs, and program the automation around them. That work has included PLC programming and filler calibration at a government fruit-juice plant, reverse-osmosis plant automation, drives and pumps serviced at a Bayer facility, and weekly repair work for National Milling and Crown Millers. More on telecom repair and industrial repair.
When the part no longer exists, we design it
Some failures cannot be fixed with spare parts, because the manufacturer has stopped making the board. Lusaka Water met exactly that: soft-starter control cards that kept burning out and had been discontinued worldwide. We traced the circuit, designed a new board with our own firmware, built it in Lusaka and commissioned it on site. It has run since February 2026 with zero failures. Read how we did it.
That is our position in one sentence: when the OEM says "discontinued", we design the replacement.
We design electronics, and export them
Repair taught us how industrial electronics are built; designing our own is the next step. Our engineers design printed circuit boards, write embedded firmware and develop products. The control boards we design in Lusaka for WaterHandler, a smart water shut-off system, ship every month to a client in Texas, USA. It is our first export product, and proof that electronics designed in Zambia can sell in the United States.
The same design work produces our battery management electronics, our replacement boards for discontinued equipment and our research, published in Springer Nature's Discover Electronics, the Journal of Software Engineering and Applications and the Zambia ICT Journal. More on electronics design and PCB.
We train the people who will do this next
A capability that lives in one workshop is fragile. Our training division has trained more than 300 engineers and technicians in PLC programming and automation, electronics and PCB design, thermal imaging and energy storage, on real hardware. It grew out of ZStudy, which designed and manufactured the first Zambian STEM kit, put it into 57 schools and won the 2022 Genius Zambia award for the most innovative STEM solution. See the courses.
We build the software that runs the business
Zambian companies also run on software, and much of it was built for other countries. O'Sense is ours: seven apps under one login, from payroll to sales operations, built for Zambian SMEs. It runs in the browser, works offline, follows Zambian statutory rules and talks to your team on WhatsApp. It is live at osense.io.
Learn · Build · Scale
Our motto is the order we work in. We learn equipment by repairing it, we build by designing our own, and we scale by training others and taking the work further. Our stated ambition for 2050 is to lead electrical and electronics manufacturing in SADC: controllers, power electronics and devices designed and made in Southern Africa, by Southern African engineers. Every repair that stays in Zambia, and every board designed here, is a step towards it.
Next time something fails, before it goes into a box for another country, send us a photo of the unit and its nameplate on WhatsApp at +260 974 546 632, or email sales@hcsys.co. Standard turnaround is 5 to 7 business days, and every repair carries a 6-month workmanship warranty.
