Ever quoted for a job, not got it then you did?

[Ronnie Sullivan]

I quoted for a job and was massively undercut by a competitor.
I really couldn't see how they could do it for that amount.

It was basically a control panel and field devices for a conveyor system to deliver the product into 4 wrapping machines.
The 'I suppose' clever bit was to keep all 4 wrapping machines busy.

After 6 months and many many visits by the competitor, they could not get it to flow correctly. (plus a lot of other problems)

The product was always sent to the far wrapper and then filled up down the line eventually feeding wrapper 3, sometimes if it was full, feeding wrapper 2 but it never got to wrapper 1.

You can imagine that the customer was pretty fed up. He'd spent a lot of money on the wrappers and only one was working at capacity - not to mention the constant backlog and workers idle because the conveyors were log jammed.
The operators were actually carrying the heavy product to the spare wrappers.

I was asked to come look at the program to see if I could alter it to make work properly.
On the first few lines of code, I saw double coils, not a good start.

I told them it was a complete re-write or nothing. I'm on with it now.

Ever happened to you?

 

[Saffa]

Sometimes a customer needs to get burnt to learn that cheapest isn't always best.

When I've been on the other side, asking for tenders... I've often turned down the cheapest if they have been way under my own engineers estimate. Especially if the company only sends an estimator, instead of the guys who will be doing the job.

I've had to fix up others projects after they've walked away. It's never fun, but it does earn you respect. I once ended up with a water treatment plant that wouldn't run for more than an hour, after the integrator that was meant to do the project said "sorry, we are on Christmas break now". I spent 3 days there between Christmas and New Years. Got it working, but never got a thank you.

You also need to sometimes let a really ****** customer suffer for a bit. That's something I struggle with, because it normally hurts the operators before it hurts management.

 

[parky]

Yes had a number of those, one was a project to upgrade a latex dipping system, my boss went to site & then supplied the customer with the price, however, his manner is a bit strait up, the original machine was a rats nest of wiring & he considered it dangerous, naturally we did not get the job, however, about a month later, he received a phone call, the company explained that they had an operator electrocuted & die so the HSE shut them down, the company wanted the machine completely re-furbishing electrically and running in 2-3 weeks, my boss told him the new price due to the work involved, they agreed & we completed it within the 3 weeks. I spent about 18 hours a day on-site 7 days a week with a couple of others, we completely re-wired it, the panel was built over a weekend & I wrote the program while sitting in my hotel room. The project profits paid for our new CAD system & a nice bonus for all the lads, we also got the job to re-furbish two other different machines, above one had an I/O count of 1600 I/O, plus zone 1 areas due to the latex type. Another one was where a company beat us on price for a major system, the customer had employed one of our competitors engineers to project manage it, he admitted to me that they were desperate for the work so under cut us, bit naughty but there you go. We had an almost permanent contract on the site due to many other works going on, when the competitor had finished, they did not include all the data capture from the line, this was circa £25,000 worth of work, the small print in their contract had excluded it, that is how they managed to under cut us by 26k, we completed the work at a cost of 35k due to having extra work to do interfacing with their system, so in this instance it cost the customer a bit more than if they had selected us in the first place.

 

[bob1371]

however, about a month later, he received a phone call, the company explained that they had an operator electrocuted & die so the HSE shut them down, the company wanted the machine completely re-furbishing electrically and running in 2-3 weeks

It's a shame that someone had to die for a company to do the right thing.

 

[I_Automation]

Ever happened to you?

Only about 50% of the time.


The one I get constantly is the customer not knowing what they want & demanding changes constantly, sometimes after commissioning & acceptance. Then they figure out how they really wanted to do it.


Engineering changes are expensive and are noted in the proposals and quotes.

 

[cardosocea]

I'm usually on the side of getting quotes and awarding the contracts and have on occasion completely disregarded companies that may come cheaper but with a very chilled attitude to things or that after being given a specification of what we want conveniently ommit things in their proposal. One I found lately is not providing drawings in CAD format despite written black and white on our requirements.

On the other hand I now have to deal with a packing machine that was clearly bought with a similar process you describe. The fact that they built a machine that didn't fit in the space available and half of it (automatic bag feeding) never worked is quite telling. I still can't understand how things weren't caught on FAT, design approval, etc... I can definitely understand why they went with the cowboys after getting a quote from a reputable company (of which the company owns several systems in other sites), although that decision now sits in the millions of pounds lost which would have easily paid for at least 6 proper machines.

 

[thingstodo]

I quoted for a job and was massively undercut by a competitor.


...


After 6 months and many many visits by the competitor, they could not get it to flow correctly. (plus a lot of other problems)

...


I was asked to come look at the program to see if I could alter it to make work properly.
On the first few lines of code, I saw double coils, not a good start.

...


Ever happened to you?

I'd say most of the time, but that would be giving in to a very human bias for over-estimating problems.


Short answer - yes. This - subjectively - is becoming a bigger problem.



I see auditors running many of the large companies .. Purchasing must take the lowest quote even if you KNOW that they can't get the job done. It will take longer to implement, miss the maintenance shutdown it is supposed to be installed in, cause production problems ... the production losses totalling many times the cost of the entire project .. but no one wants to hear that. Even 2X the initial cost is a fraction of the cost of what delays and production losses will be. But the capital budget is THIS much. And if they take the lowest bid then they can get another project purchased. FIXING the problem after it is installed comes out of the PRODUCTION budget. It's sad.



The low-ballers get the contract, do a bad job, get some or most of their money, get thrown off site ... and the second or third company in to fix it struggles to fix it in zero time with no budget.


With what is learned by operations and maintenance while trying to get the bad system running, the scope has also changed. So the hardware that was installed does not match the new scope. So you are also likely researching how to get it to work the way that they NOW want it to work.


It's really tough to stick to a scope, do your change notices, and get the system running when you are on site while doing the programming and testing. You always want to make it better, add stuff that makes it easier for operations and maintenance. BUT .. no change of scope takes less than half a day to do. And scope changes stack exponentially. 1 takes 4 hours. 2 takes 8 hours, 3 takes 16 hours, 4 takes 32 hours ... side effects of changes are REAL, and you have to find them and solve them.


Good luck on your system. Hopefully you can implement most of your initial quote without BIG changes in scope!

 

[parky]

One of the most awkward things is you quote for a job, loose it to a competitor, then get called in to help them sort it out, this has happened 3 times to me, on one job, I had to go to the suppliers premises & sit in their offices writing the code, the end user had also called in another of their usual suppliers, we both felt rather awkward, there was quite a bit of animosity by the original supplier, can't blame them having it forced on them and probably having to pay the extra costs, turned out that when we went to site, this other guy & myself were the last to leave, something like 5 weeks after all the original supplier had drifted away, the went into liquidation a few months later, it was obvious that the supplier had grossly under estimated the time for coding the software, this also happened twice more, one where I had to go to Germany & work with the supplier, same problem but at least their guys were more accommodating.

 

[Ronnie Sullivan]

In my case, there were no drawings at all but to be fair, the panel was well laid out.
In fact they have done a lovely job of the installation, just the programmer has let them down.
I spent a day working out the I/O with the company engineer going around waving his hand in front of sensors.
It was like a sudoko puzzle, filling in the blanks. The pneumatic valves were tricky, I had to force what I though would be a valve only to see something else happen. All this while the product was passing through.
I filled 10 pages of A4 with my notes.

To be fair, it's our job isn't it and it was enjoyable.
Now tomorrow morning it's a cup of tea, a slice of toast and best head on.

 

[James Mcquade]

we had a similar situation, visited the place twice.
first they said we were to high, then cancelled the project, then back on again and we told then we needed a po asap. 20 minutes later we got a rush order po for 750k from a good customer. two hours later, we got their po for the weekend work and we had to decline the 60K job, all hands were tied up. they were mad, the boss explained to them we got the po for the rush job and they didn't care, they wanted it done the next week.
james

 

[TurpoUrpo]

I'm usually on the side of getting quotes and awarding the contracts and have on occasion completely disregarded companies that may come cheaper but with a very chilled attitude to things or that after being given a specification of what we want conveniently ommit things in their proposal. One I found lately is not providing drawings in CAD format despite written black and white on our requirements.

On the other hand I now have to deal with a packing machine that was clearly bought with a similar process you describe. The fact that they built a machine that didn't fit in the space available and half of it (automatic bag feeding) never worked is quite telling. I still can't understand how things weren't caught on FAT, design approval, etc... I can definitely understand why they went with the cowboys after getting a quote from a reputable company (of which the company owns several systems in other sites), although that decision now sits in the millions of pounds lost which would have easily paid for at least 6 proper machines.

I don't understand why machines are so rarely sent back when they don't fulfill the specs.

When I was doing contracts, we always had clause that if the sat is not passed, we can send it back with suppliers cost and use it still until replacement was arranged (with few months max time).

 

[ianingram]

I got involved once with a job that was on a conveyor system - about 14 conveyors working in a accumulation system. We didn't quote/were not asked to quote on the original job.

The programmer who did the initial work had it working about 90% OK, I just had to come in to finish off some final aspects..
The original programmer had basically walked away from the job, saying that the PLC couldn't do the functionality that the OEM wanted.

I thought that it couldn't be that hard, its only making conveyors run and change their speed.

The VSD's were all networked together, and this part was working well.. the basic PLC program was easy to follow as well.

Where the problem was, the PLC (without naming its brand), was a cheaper model of PLC, free software, etc, but this then worked out to be harder to program.
If they had spent more money on the PLC hardware, the program may have been easier to write (IMHO), but it also wasn't feasible or cost effective to pull out the supplied hardware to replace it with another brand.

I eventually spent 3 @ 12 hour days one week and then 2 @ 12 hour days the following week to get it acceptable.

 

[cardosocea]

I don't understand why machines are so rarely sent back when they don't fulfill the specs.

When I was doing contracts, we always had clause that if the sat is not passed, we can send it back with suppliers cost and use it still until replacement was arranged (with few months max time).

It's hard seeing your money back when machines don't do what they say they did. Milestone payments are a thing.
In this case, the company "approved" or better yet, let the supplier dictate what they wanted to do and never checked. I mean, the machine didn't fit in the space that was assigned and no one from my company caught it? It's a foot wide square pillar righ in the middle of a conveyor belt. Not hard to catch, is it?

In the UK companies can close over night and open with a slightly different name the day after and you're left hanging.

I worked in a company that did this to get away from a million pound debt with Rockwell (and a lot more debts from other companies with less power to go to court). The funny thing is that they assumed companies in other countries (they dealt mostly with Spanish suppliers) would accept this fact and not tell them to F@@@ off.

It was hilarious seeing the engineering manager trying to convince the guy on the other side that the custom built valve to be delivered to the same place, ordered by the same person, from the same address in London to do the exact same function in a plant they have outstanding debt with wasn't the same company because the name changed.

 

[I_Automation]

In the UK companies can close over night and open with a slightly different name the day after and you're left hanging.

I've been on both sides of this coin here in the USA on this.



A stamping press company in the start of filing bankruptcy was still taking orders for large presses with $1 Million down-payment. Then they officially filed & stopped making them. Even when proved to the bankruptcy court they knowing took the money knowing the press would never be made meant nothing - we were out a million.


The other one I worked for a small machinery builder that owed everyone, and was only making payments to a steel supplier. They folded and opened the next day in a new building under a new name and now can get credit & buy things again.


Not just automation - there is a retail lighting store in north of Detroit that has a Grand Opening, then a bankruptcy sale about 6 months later, then reopens in the same building with the same salespeople selling the same lights under a new name. They did this twice a year for 8 years I lived in the area. Also - if you put a deposit on something at the 'Closed" store it wasn't honored by the "Now Open" store. There was also a bridal salon on the news here that did it with quite a few wedding dresses.

 

[Steve Bailey]

There is a clause in the US bankruptcy code that says the estate of the bankrupt company can recover from the unsecured creditors any payments that were made in the 90 days preceding the bankruptcy declaration. The clause is intended to prevent management of the troubled company, knowing they are facing bankruptcy, from paying bills to their friends before stiffing everyone else when they declare.

Before I became a partner in my company, the founder did some work for a company we'll call B***** and was paid for it. Not long afterward, B***** declared bankruptcy, Chapter 7, which is liquidation of assets. The payment for services rendered happened within the 90-day window. Shortly after the assets of B***** were disposed of, we got a letter from a law firm in the name of the estate of B***** demanding recovery of the payments we received in the 90-days preceding the bankruptcy declaration and citing that paragraph of the US bankruptcy code. The letter offered a 20 percent discount for payment within 30 days and informed us that if we failed to pay they would pursue their claim in a court in Delaware.

Our lawyer advised us to put the money in escrow and he sent a letter in response to the law firm representing the estate saying that in our opinion they were misinterpreting that paragraph of the bankruptcy code, since the paragraph includes exceptions for certain payments in that 90-day window. Among the exceptions are wages and payments made in the "normal" course of business. The original invoice for payment of the services stated payment terms of net 60 days which matched the conditions set forth in the purchase order. Payment was received around day 50, which we claimed constituted "normal" business practice.

We never heard from them again and eventually we were able to take the money out of escrow.

With a little bit of digging we discovered that the people behind the letter had access to the financial records of B***** and sent the same letter to everybody who had been paid within the 90-day window, figuring at least some of the people would panic at the threat of legal action simply pay the demand. I asked our lawyer what the difference was between that letter and Vinnie and Guido showing up at our door with baseball bats and saying, "Nice business you got here. Be a shame if anything should happen to it". The lawyer's answer, B*****'s approach is legal, Vinnie and Guido's method isn't. Other than that, there's no difference