spending money(not mine either)

The engineer at our place was asking which would be better: upgrade three or four machines (rather large programs) to elminate SQOs and SQIs etc or train five electricians to understand them better. I voted for the training.

training!

Return On Investment(ROI) should determine.

This is not a simple this or that question for people to JUST vote on.

If options both have a positive ROI then I would do both. If I could afford to do only one, I would choose the option with the highest ROI and then use part of the pay back to pay for the second the second option. If neither option has a positive ROI then do neither.

NO OTHER DECISION MAKES SENSE!

A meeting should be held where a proponent of each side makes a case for the ROI of their favorite option. The other side gets to challenge any assumptions made.

This is a management problem, but the input must come from the people that support each option.

Sometimes the management must take into account other intangibles like keeping the troops happy. We do that a lot here. It is not as profitable in the near term, but it keeps the turn over low and this is EXTERMELY important to us.

I think differently. This question asked if they should upgrade and remove working software from machines that have been in service, I assume for a long time, or train personnel to work with the existing machinery/programming.

Being an hourly wage earner and KNOWING what is needed or expected on the plant floor I emphatically believe maintenance or technical personnel should be given all the training they can pertaining to the equipment used. Training a few people (especially those that desire it) will ALWAYS offer a return at a lower cost. EVEN if machines/systems are upgraded the technology used will or should require training of people to adapt to the system.

It is not APPLES and ORANGES..ie its hard to say what should be done per application. If the people that NEED to know about the machinery can not understand a machine using certain instructions then to me it would be more productive to offer training even if an upgrade is done at some time...doing an upgrade doesnt mean using other instructions will be better understood.

Counter Point

Ron, you assume the electrians can be trained to understand and improve the machine. We don't know that to be true. In most of the machines I have known, the people on the plant floor only change parameters through an HMI. The system integrator does not expect his/their program to be modified and will void any warrantee if you do.

For the most part I believe in lifting up the people rather than dumbing down the technology. We have be over this before. However, there are some machines, algorithms, etc that are beyond the scope of mill technicians and there is NO WAY they can be taught in just a week or two week course. We don't know this to be true or false in thanda's case. I/we don't know what thanda's machines do. I am just saying that rashly saying training will solve the problem is not a decision we can make until we know the facts. The people at thunda's plant know the facts and they should make the decision based on the ROI criteria I layed out above. I don't believe we can make an intelligent decision and thanda's poll and is therefore invalid until we have all the facts which are unlikely to be provided.

Well, The machines are rotary table milling centres, but I realized the training could also apply to some automatic metal ladling systems. so right there there are 5 rotary tables (each with @12 milling stations), and 5 ladling machines. Yes, there are two electricians out of five who would not be able to apply any of the knowledge gained in training, one because he's intimidated by computers and the other because he's lazy.
There was one machine down for most of the weekend because I didn't feel like coming in and working on it. (true company guy) If you figure of the three other guys that were there two of them would of learned something in the training, and got the machine running. That would be about 40 hours lost time prevented on one machine. But how do you convince management that spending money now would save them down time in the future?? Actually that question would make a good topic.

Unfortunately managment never wants to hear anything about spending money, unless it is thier idea!
The end result is that they usually learn the hard way (ie 40+ hours downtime)
When I started my current job about 2 years ago they had one guy who done everything relating to PLC programming and troubleshooting. I was there over a year and watched many hours go by as a machine sat idle waiting for him to come in. The hard part was I knew I could fix it, but they only trusted him with the programs.
One week he was on vacation and we had a micrologix 1000 get a cpu error. Knowing I could clear it with a laptop I finally convinced them (after 2 days downtime) to give me a shot. They broke into his desk and got the laptop and were running withing 30 minutes.
Now we have at least one guy on each shift with this access and downtime from Plc related problems have decreased considerably.
Good luck with convincing your managment or just let them learn the hard way.