customer is someone who:
- loves you, admires your work and keeps on calling you in odd hours.
- wants your opinion for every detail, then disregard it completely.
- although don't know anothing about it, they are certain that your work
is better than everyone else's. this is exactly why they come to you - to tell you how to do it.
- makes you wear those safety glasses and hat when you are alone in a plant on
sunday afternoon working with your laptop.
- gives you spec of things they want in machine (including which parts to use).
then they call you in the middle of night asking if you happen to have one
of those parts in stock because they run out of spares or never had any.
like 12 or 18mm shielded pnp proxy... (must be brand XYZ of course)
- tells you how to write program (alarms, seguencer, outputs, user interface etc.)
and what has to be submitted in documentation package. they review it for a while,
ask you to make some adjustments so it adhers to their standard, and - ask you to
train their maintenance so they understand how each of concepts should work.
- after long long long delay (your job is almost done), gives you sample of plc and
hmi program. it's just that those samples violate every single thing they told you
before and they really really want it his way.
- gives you detailed spec of ratios of specific paints to be mixed to paint panel
a week before machine is shipped. later they complain that panel doesn't look quite
as good as with original paint or they are surprised that paint need to dry.
- questions why plc they selected can process some 20-30 floating point values,
have them displayed on HMI screen etc. but cannot log them all for a month, .... or a year.
(btw. machine cycle is 2.45 seconds and it operates 24/7). oh, and no fancy stuff like
FIFO, indirect addressing or any instructions that can address whole register. only allowed
function block should be timer.
- shows you existing machine, that is to be replaced. it's fixed design, running
only one type of parts, 38sec. cycle and only does small part of a job, keeps on jamming,
braking down etc. new design should be flexible, all parameters adjustable from HMI, run
variety of parts, do model change in seconds, must do complete job and in under 30sec
(25sec. would be nice...). when you do all they ask and proudly show them machine that
is radically different from old design, it is smaller, cheaper, low maintenance, requires only
one operator instead of four, uses less power and does everything in only 10sec.,
they wrinkle their nose and say 'why 10sec? you couldn't do it in 7...?'.
