harryting
Lifetime Supporting Member
I came into a company that went to market for a machine that has been fully developed in brand A, but because the site is a "Brand R" site, they went ahead and paid an additional 20% for the control system to be "ported" to Rockwell...
This resulted in a heap of **** with bugs and the supplier isn't quite forthcoming because it's a one of a kind. There are two national scale distributors for Brand A less than an hour's drive away...
I laughed a bit when I read this. I guess our individual experience also influence our view on this. Just so I have almost a perfect counter-example.
We have two almost identical project in tens of millions $ range. There's this machine made by an OEM on them. On the first one of these we paid extra for a conversion to AB SLC, but not on the 2nd one because the PM said we got no $. It's not a very complex machine either but got a lot of limit switches. part of the conversion is the SLC code can't be locked. Now a few years later we paid probably over $100k for "service trips" for the OEM to come out to troubleshoot the 2nd machine because we can't really tell where in the sequence it gets stuck at, even though we can do some basic troubleshooting by reading the LED lights. The first one is one of a kind of the OEM, the 2nd one is one of kind for us.
Now I'm close to the point to rip it out and do a black-box reverse-engineering to a compactlogic on it.
For OEM, the role is a bit different than end-user but for some machine that do require frequent troubleshooting the ability to view the program online is invaluable.