dbh6
Lifetime Supporting Member
Hey everyone,
Please share stories that you may have of operators, not knowing how to do their job, my most recent one was on a service call where a plc lost its program, so once i downloaded the backup copy of the program that the customer had, line is back in operation, or so i think. The operators did their basic checks to see if the line is functioning properly, but wait, the operator tells me the line is not starting the start push button was not starting the system and it was definitely a problem with the program. So i decided to check the program, but to my demise the program is uncommented and had indirect addressing with shift registers all over the place. instead of trying to debug the program which will definitely take hours i decided to see where the start pb was wired to into the plc because the plc was a micrologix 1500 which had embedded IO, so i traced it through the program and it seemed that only two permissive where not met, so i ask them are they forgetting to press something, and bingo, the operator forgot to hit a acknowledge button on the HMI, so now the machine starts, but their is still a problem. The machine is a labeler that rejects bottles if they don't have a label based on a vision system, so the machine was currently rejecting early, so now they bombard me and tell me it is a plc program issue, i tried to tell them that the program has not changed, and that it was not an issue with the plc. Then roughly 2 hours later of trying to troubleshoot the program which was a nightmare, an experienced operator comes and sets the delay time on the reject, problem solved. The other operators look at me with a little embarrassment. Please share your stories im curious to know what some of you have faced over the years
Please share stories that you may have of operators, not knowing how to do their job, my most recent one was on a service call where a plc lost its program, so once i downloaded the backup copy of the program that the customer had, line is back in operation, or so i think. The operators did their basic checks to see if the line is functioning properly, but wait, the operator tells me the line is not starting the start push button was not starting the system and it was definitely a problem with the program. So i decided to check the program, but to my demise the program is uncommented and had indirect addressing with shift registers all over the place. instead of trying to debug the program which will definitely take hours i decided to see where the start pb was wired to into the plc because the plc was a micrologix 1500 which had embedded IO, so i traced it through the program and it seemed that only two permissive where not met, so i ask them are they forgetting to press something, and bingo, the operator forgot to hit a acknowledge button on the HMI, so now the machine starts, but their is still a problem. The machine is a labeler that rejects bottles if they don't have a label based on a vision system, so the machine was currently rejecting early, so now they bombard me and tell me it is a plc program issue, i tried to tell them that the program has not changed, and that it was not an issue with the plc. Then roughly 2 hours later of trying to troubleshoot the program which was a nightmare, an experienced operator comes and sets the delay time on the reject, problem solved. The other operators look at me with a little embarrassment. Please share your stories im curious to know what some of you have faced over the years