There was a time in the history of aviation when “flying by the seat of your pants” had real meaning given the relative lack of gages in an early airplane’s cockpit. Yet, in many ways we still operate our plants this way. We instrument what we consider to be critical measurements based on historical operation, but we don’t necessarily perform a detailed analysis of the process to determine if there are other things that might be just as important to the operation in terms of throughput or quality or, possibly even more importantly, to uptime and equipment longevity. Even those organ... Continue Reading

Is your control system exceeding expectations by performing in an environment for which it is not rated, operating beyond its rated temperature, powering loads beyond the documented capacity, or is it destined for failure? So which is it, or is it more than one? In most cases where an issue is present, the answer is yes to more than one, including the last one: the equipment is functioning beyond rated capacity and destined for failure, yet the owner is unaware. Over the years I have seen too many instances of control equipment being used beyond its documented limitations and expiring prematurely. Of course, when the equipment does fail it will li... Continue Reading

These days everyone has a continuous improvement program of some kind. Six Sigma is used quite extensively as is Lean Manufacturing. Some companies stick to one approach while others tailor their own programs using the best ideas from a wide variety of different sources. Regardless of whichever particular flavor of continuous improvement program you use, it seems there’s always more to do. There are always more problems to tackle. Once you solved one problem, another problem seems t... Continue Reading

Too many companies have lost their capacity to train inexperienced engineers. How can we hope to replace the practical knowledge lost to retirement?

A call came in the other day from a customer asking about replacing some legacy operator workstations and a primary domain controller server. He wanted to know if it would be possible to use Microsoft Windows 8 Professional or Server 2012 as the operating systems with the new workstations and primary domain controller, so he can get the most out of the longevity of the new software. After further research, I could find no reason not to leverage Server 2012 on the new primary domain controller. I checked with the primary control vendor supporting this particular customer, and they saw no reason not to use Server 2012 on the primary domain controller. I went a step further and checked with colleagues on their experiences with the differences between Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012. Since there were no issues identified, I recommended the customer move forward with purchasing and installi... Continue Reading