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You had WHO try to repair this??

I have a couple of companies I love to hear on the phone. Not because I enjoy talking to them, but because they have company-wide agreements to let a large automation vendor repair all of their automation and servo parts. For the equipment we carry, this is a lot like taking a Mercedes to a Chevy dealer and then wondering why it doesn’t work afterwards (actually, I think most Chevrolet dealers would just turn you around, unlike this major automation vendor).

So why do I like these companies so much? Because they have 4 drives that have been “repaired” on the shelf. They have a drive fail, and none of the 4 “repaired” drives work. They then call us for emergency exchange units, that are typically flown out on charters (I have piloted a couple of these deliveries myself) for the highest prices we charge. We then will have the discussion about how the “Large automation vendor” can’t actually get the parts to repair these units, as the OEM doesn’t sell to ANYONE, and how it would be much better if they would go for factory repairs. They agree they will start sending out stuff to us for repair. However, then the company-wide repair agreement comes into play and they can’t send the stuff out.

So, in a month’s time, we do it again. and again. and again.

I may buy a new airplane….

Why exactly don’t you have a manual again?

I get a disturbing number of calls from customers who are trying to troubleshoot a very expensive piece of equipment that can be easily damaged by doing the wrong thing, without the manuals for the equipment. Coming from an engineering and aviation background, I find this astounding. For an aircraft mechanic, it is actually against the law (you can and will be fined, or worse if audited), to work on an aircraft without having a complete set of manuals on the premises. That is even true for painting an aircraft (mine was in hock at the paint shop for a couple of weeks because they didn’t have the manuals). I actually had to carry my personal set down to them so they could show them to the FAA before they would let them proceed on work.

So when I get a call from someone who is trying to troubleshoot, or even better, trying to get an entire plant going as people are being sent home without pay because of downtime, and they don’t have the manual that lists the error codes, I am amazed and upset. Manuals are easy to get. Our company websites have buttons to press to get to forms that are sent in to have manuals emailed to people. The corporate websites have downloadable manuals (admittedly, in a labyrinthine setup that makes you appreciate the Dewey Decimal System), and if you do a search on the web, you can typically find a PDF that shows up in the first few lines of Google or Bing.  So, manuals, the single most important thing you can have when troubleshooting a drive, are literally just a few keystrokes away. Anyone who doesn’t have one should reconsider their priorities.  Anyone supervising someone who doesn’t have one should perhaps consider it part of their job performance…or lack thereof.

 

 

Those durn meetings…

When someone asks me what I miss least about the corporate world, I can answer without a missed beat.

MEETINGS

While I can safely say that Mrs ThinkingEngineer had many more at her last job than I did, I can say that they were the bane of my existence. The worst was the “Morning Staff Meeting”,  a meeting of department heads to see what the problems and issues of the day were. There were, however, more than a few problems with this concept.

1) At 9am, most of the day’s problems and issues hadn’t sprung up yet. So, the meeting became a “What happened last night that we missed meeting”.

2) The time of the meeting dropped it right into the period that you had figured out what had broken, and were formulating and implementing plans to fix them. This brought things to a screeching halt, while you listened to other Dept heads talking about personnel issues and such.

3) There are Dept heads that actually think their meeting performance (read talking time) actually is their job performance. Unless you have had a catastrophe, you should be able to summarize in under 5 minutes.

I did, however, find a solution. A thinking engineer solution. As Engineering Manager I had many of the machine and building controls accessible from my computer, including environmental controls. When the tired A/C in the conference room went out, I had a new more efficient and LARGER system put in, with very modern controls.

And every day as I walked into the morning meeting those modern controls did their duty, and turned the conference room temp down to 40 degrees.

Problem Solved.

The importance of getting the right professional for the job.

So a short time back, I almost died.

Since living is important to me, and since I made some mistakes during this incident, along with some good choices, I thought I would offer them for your consideration.

The problem started off simply enough. I went to my dentist for a cleaning. I have a very good dentist, and trust him and his staff implicitly. The cleaning went well, and besides some jaw pain from being in the chair with my mouth wide open for an hour, there were no complications. I had a client with an emergency in MS, and the weather wasn’t such that I could fly down, nor did I have a charter service that could get the power supply to the customer, so I drove it. After a 12 hour round trip, the jaw seemed worse, but I had another trip, this time to Dallas on the books. I grabbed a night’s sleep and headed to Dallas. In Dallas the next day I noticed some swelling and the pain was worse so I headed to an urgent care and had things looked at.  Leaving with pain meds and antibiotics, I finished out the rest of the day, and hit the bed. The next morning, things were much worse, with my jawline fading under the swelling. Now I was convinced I was in trouble, and headed for the ER. Since I didn’t know Dallas hospitals that well (although I travel to Dallas often), I called the urgent care for a recommendation.

A little research goes a long way.

I should have saved my dime and gone to the web instead. The urgent care referred me to a local hospital (which I found out later was owned by the same company), that was fairly far down most of the lists of quality for Dallas. The ER was quick and competent though, and I was admitted to the hospital with IV antibiotics flowing and feeling fairly good about getting on things so quickly. A CT had shown nothing of note, and so the idea appeared to be to hit the infection hard (white count up) and see if it fell over. The next morning however, things were even worse, with the swelling going under the chin and up the cheek.

It was also at this point that I figured out that this hospital was in way over their head. Nobody had a clue what was going on with me, they had lost the first set of blood cultures they had pulled and had to pull a second set. They had nothing set up for the next morning other than wait and see, and with my condition worsening, that wasn’t good enough for me. I called Mrs Dr Jernigan and asked her to fly down and help me get to someplace worthwhile.

No matter how far down the road you have traveled, if you find yourself on the wrong one, turn around.

The hospital was not happy with me wanting to move, and went into damage control fairly quickly. However, I was firm about leaving, and in their defense, they did start working to transfer me to the hospital I wanted to go to (Baylor Medical Center in downtown Dallas). They also went pretty much limp on my care, which I find unforgivable. When I accused them of this, there were more excuses, but by that point I was ready to walk out the door, and did as soon as my wife arrived. My quick departure probably saved them from the wrath of the Doctor of Chemical Engineering discussing the shortcomings of people who can’t keep their hands on cultures (and make stupid statements about them taking a week to get results).  The hospital couldn’t seem to get the transfer to work in the timeframe I wanted, so we walked out to drive the 8 miles to Baylor ourselves.

Don’t mistake the appearance of action for actual action. If things aren’t happening fast enough, do something yourself instead of relying on people who may have other things going on.

Baylor was very, very good. They compare on many levels to Mayo Clinic (my gold standard for care). The ER quickly established that I was in serious trouble, and got numerous professionals on my case. I got one of the best nurses I have ever had dealing almost exclusively with me (and the gallons of stuff they wanted pumped in) and with a new CT and other x-rays had a couple of the surgeons from the Dept of Oral surgery looking at me. The only problem was, they couldn’t see anything causing the problem.

Good professionals don’t dither, they consult.

The Dr who had looked at my case that night took the films the next morning to the chief radiologist. The second time around, and with a more experienced set of eyes, they found the problem. The back molar had split all the way through the tooth vertically, and had perforated the mandible. The infection had started there, and despite being pumped full of antibiotics, they were not helping because there was a reservoir of infection to repopulate things as the antibiotics killed things off.  The problem now was that the swelling had gone all the way under the jaw to the other side, the swelling on the right was up to the orbit of the eye, I had lost my chin in the swelling and the left side was going up the cheek as well. I couldn’t open my mouth enough for a tooth removal under local, and my airway was becoming compromised.

The right guys have the right resources.

Despite it being Memorial Day weekend, Baylor got an OR team together, and wheeled me into surgery. The less said about that the better, they had to intubate me while still conscious, which I fortunately don’t remember much of.  Good surgeons, good anesthesiologists and good care got me through the surgery, and with the tooth gone and drains in, the infection started abating. Another week would pass before I left the hospital, and several weeks before the swelling went completely away, but the surgery was the turning point.

Hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras. However, don’t discount zebras until you see the color of the coat.

The tooth cleaning was a red herring. It had nothing to do with the problem. The split tooth was the issue and was not even obvious from a CT scan. I was fortunate that Baylor had people who would not let it go and kept looking until they found the answer. They had the right people (College of Oral Surgery) and the right facilities to do the job and they kept going until they had the problem nailed. They were not afraid to ask for help from other resources and they wouldn’t just let things proceed until the problem became obvious (which in my case would have been at the post mortem).

While this is a tale of staying alive, the lessons here transfer quite easily to other situations.

 

Why we’re here…

It’s always a good question to start with. My purpose with this site is to get some of the thoughts I have had over the years of working with clients out into the open. Some of the good things, some of the mistakes and some of the stuff that makes you just stare in amazement. I think as an engineering consultant, I get to see organizations at the high stress point. People who call me are usually in trouble, they are down, may have been down for days (weeks sometimes). This leaves very little room for pretense.

It’s a different world out there from when I started in engineering. Some of the changes are for the better, some of them are astoundingly short sighted at best, and positively penny-wise and pound-foolish at worse. If I can get some people to start thinking about what they are doing, and why they are doing it this way, then I will be happy (or perhaps content, happy might be too strong).  This site is not only for engineers, but for the folks who manage them.

Not all of the post will be about engineering, industry or such. I intend to hit a wide range of subjects, and will hopefully be less boring than it may sound. Comments are welcome, although they may never show up, I will certainly see them.

Off we go!

Cables, Cabinets, and Catfish


We had a call the other day from a guy who had been to Bob’s Bait, BBQ, and Servo Repair Shop. He was having some trouble with his servo and he figured Bob could help him out.

“You’ll have to bring it in here to my workshop,” Bob had told him, wiping down the counter with a rag that seemed to have a bold pattern in BBQ sauce red.

He got back to the factory, where the floor manager was still shouting and stamping his feet, and looked at the servo motor cabinet. Somehow taking the servo motor out and carrying it along to Bob’s didn’t seem like the greatest idea he had ever heard, now that he was looking at it again.

So he called me. “I went to Bob’s ’cause I heard he had some fresh catfish in,” he explained, and he said I should just pull the servo out of the cabinet and carry it in for him to look at.”

I got some numbers from him and asked him a penetrating question.

“Have you checked the cable yet?”

There was silence on the other end of the line. Then footsteps. Then cussing.

“Looks like maybe I need a new cable,” he muttered. We swapped a few numbers and I dropped the cable off, along with a spare. The floor manager stopped yelling.

Then I headed out to Bob’s. Catfish sounded good. A lot better than slowing production down by starting with the most difficult, heaviest, most expensive thing. It makes more sense to check the cables or the batteries, and even keep some extras on hand. If you have bigger fish to fry, you’ll know soon enough.

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