Just Plain Sneaky, If Not Underhanded

[Jeev]

Would you do that to your customers?

No, but there are definitely reasons it was done this way. I have had all sorts of requests from customers over the years to stop various people at different levels of the organisation from playing with the PLC code or settings. This just looks like another way of an OEM making something easy for them and hard for others'.

 

[parky]

Athough not related to hiding things on HMI's, we had a problem where operators were aborting vacuum cooling vessels before the process was complete, all this was logged to a Scada DB, their excuse was I pressed the worng button by mistake, I moved the Abort button away from the other buttons but it still happened on a regular basis, the answer was to put a delay timer on the Abort button this was 5 seconds, the reason was although the process was essentially complete there were a few other things that needed to happen, even though an abort was a tweo stage process i.e. it would hold, ask the operator if he wished to abort or resume. we were losing data logged to the DB as the transfer to tugs was then a manual process after abort. the reason for the operators was to speed up the process, this caused some minor problems slight loss of product by not allowing the vessel to drain completely & loss of data regarding batch quantities etc. After that we had very few "Accidental" aborts as they knew that it would be a poor excuse for an operator to accidently hold the abort key down for 5 seconds.

 

[robertmee]

Not to play devil's advocate, but I've dealt with a great many machines where incorrectly settings things causes a huge amount of damage to the machine or destroys product/process. I don't personally like it, but I at least understand that this method forces the end-user to engage the OEM when making changes. The OEM now inherently has 3 important bits of information.

1) What was changed.
2) When it was changed.
3) Who changed it.

I understand that thought, but from an OEM's perspective, much easier to either password the file, or have a signed agreement with customer that any changes absolves the OEM from any liability. Much easier to maintain, and from an OEM's standpoint, if they damage it, then more revenue for them fixing it, and if someone gets hurt (God forbid), then they are absolved when they show the program they left is not the program as it is now.

I always leave a facility with the program locked (but no password), and the version as I left it stored in my repository. Knock on wood, no issues in 30 years.

 

[hardaysknight]

I actually have a pretty nice list of companies I have blacklisted, and yes - this one made the list. Plus the list does have a note as to what they did to get on the list.

I'd be curious to see your list if the other companies did similar things lol

 

[sparkie]

We have things that are very particular like that. We have a message on the HMI that says "hey, these things are screwy, you need to get ahold of maintenance to get them fixed. There is no other way." or some such, then maintenance calls us, and we log into the PLC to do it.

 

[I_Automation]

We have things that are very particular like that. We have a message on the HMI that says "hey, these things are screwy, you need to get ahold of maintenance to get them fixed. There is no other way." or some such, then maintenance calls us, and we log into the PLC to do it.

Similar to the alarms I put in that says

YOU CAN'T DO THAT
or
YOU BETTER CALL YOUR SUPERVISOR BEFORE YOU TRY THAT AGAIN

 

[robertmee]

Had a tech that would put alarms like "Your Supervisor said you're a Dummy, so here's a reminder alarm to do your job. Don't forget to xyz, Dummy"