I missed three days of blogging due to some very intensive and long travel days. My six-hour drive to Madison, Wisconsin Tuesday was extended to 7-1/2 due to a little heavier than I expected traffic in Chicago plus an hour-long wait just 15 minutes from my destination due to an accident (not involving me). Although I sent a lot of emails from my Treo during the "down time." Got back to Chicago area just in time to meet my daughter for dinner followed by a trip to Starbucks to download email. I stay with Heather when I visit my Chicago office, and she doesn't have broadband. I know, a good father would buy it for her. She's a struggling graduate student. In June, she can officially tell me I'm crazy--she'll have a masters in psychology and a bunch of letters after her name that says she can be a therapist. The rest of you already know I'm out of my mind ;-> Lots of meetings on Wednesday and Thursday.
The trip to Madison was the result of a "teaser" email from Rob Loomis. I think I first met Rob when he was at Omron, but he's been in the industry for a long time (well, maybe not THAT long). He's with SoftSwitching Technologies now as CEO. The blurb he sent sounded too good to be true. If it had come from an ordinary PR person, I'd have probably just trashed it. But I thought I'd give Rob the benefit of the doubt. It turned out to be a very worthwhile trip. I see so much hype as an editor that I can easily be cynical about supposed new things. This is one idea that I think has staying power. Further evidence lies in the fact that the first person I noticed when I got to the conference room was industry guru Dick Morley.
How many times does your controller (PLC, computer, whatever) just go off? The operator looks at a couple of things, finds nothing, cycles power, and you're back in business. How do you log the downtime? Rob says he has seen companies who have been down for an hour and a half just due to a simple power down of the PLC and logged it as "lunch." What if the problem is your incoming power supply? That would change your OEE calculation plus giving you something to check and improve. Right?
SoftSwitching Technologies has studied the entire North American electrical power grid for over three years. In a three year period, it logged over 22,000 "anomolies." A whopping 98% of these were voltage sags of less than two seconds duration. Now when I was in the business, we always protected electronic equipment with transient voltage spike protection and sometimes harmonic distortion protection. No one looked at sags. They have discovered that a sag below 80% for two cycles (at 60 cycles per second, you do the math about how long that is) can cause certain electronic equipment such as many PLCs to turn off. They have empirical studies that relate many of these voltage sag "anomolies" to actual plant downtime events.
Oh, yes, they have a product to protect against that problem. It's like a UPS, but using capicitors, it provides for a two-second override to keep the system at full voltage. I think it's a great idea--mostly I'm persuaded by the empirical data. I see so little of that.
Their problem is getting people to recognize the problem. Since they don't realize it could be caused by such a slight power problem, the downtime is recorded as something else. Then, when someone sees the problem, the next sales problem is finding the person who "owns" the problem.
The next time you're down, before you say "it's that darn (fill in the blank) PLC again" analyze your power source.
8:49:10 AM 
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