Curious Survey

[Clay B.]

After reading the Post on "Help With One Shots" http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=24967 It got me thinking. Most of my career I have been given vague instructions on what was needed. Thru luck (good or bad) most of the jobs I have worked on delt with existing equipment that needed to upgraded or retrofitted for a new job. To myself the instructions have been vague due to the person who gave them being ignorant of what is actually required for the job.Generally I try and get to know who is giving the instructions and guage where their skill set is at and what they are likely to miss or overlooked so I can make sure those items are covered on my end.

My question is this, how many of the professionals in here have had similar experences and how did you handle it.

 

[TimWilborne]

I still build most of my control systems but if I am specifying a machine, system or something like it I don't nail down every specific point. I specify what we are starting with and what we want the end product to be.

If I was to nail down every detail I would, and actually I do, go ahead order the parts and build the thing myself.

The vagueness can be a good thing. I know what I want and I know what raw material we are going to feed the thing. Much can be developed in that gray area of how we do it.

Also customers may leave that gray area for you to fill in to see your capablities. To give an example though I did not do it intentionally, we will use a linear transducer I am trying to get right now. I want it to be built into a cylinder if possible. The only reason for that is additional protection. But anyway my only specifications on this were that it have a 6.5 inch stroke, the way it is to be mounted, and that it have a SSI interface. I could care less about anything of the other specs such as bore, port size, etc.

After some thinking and a PM from a gentleman on this forum about it, I realized that the fact that the vendor I was working work on this couldn't manage to fill in the blanks was a sure sign that I need to find another vendor

 

[gas]

I recently did a small project for a company that has been building a standard machine for years using relays. They wanted to change to PLC control. When I got there they had an operators panel full of switches. They also selected a panelview 1000 to control 2 timers in a Micro 1200 because the sales guy told him they would need a bright panel for use in a dark place. Every time someone would describe the sequence they would use different names for what I found out later to be the same thing. I wrote a partial program expecting to jog the machine around and see for myself what it did.
One day I showed up and they had hired a student to reprogram the machine because (my program was not any good).
I often run across this but this was the worst one.