August 2004
The key to building great automated systems is respect for other
disciplines and great communication skills. For example, we have seen many
projects fail because the mechanical engineer did not care about what the
electrical engineer said. Likewise, electrical engineers may not
listen to mechanical engineers. Later they both usually find out that it will now cost them
much more to make the system "right".
Another trick you need to know is when to recommend solutions and when to not recommend solutions -- only communicate the requirements. For example, our background is control, monitoring, and information systems. If we are talking to a mechanical designer, we have to be extremely careful to only state requirements of the system and not tell the designer how to design something. Hopefully, the mechanical designer is much better at designing mechanical system than we ever will be. Tell them what the design needs to accomplish but not how to do the design.
Likewise, if a mechanical designer comes to us needing control, monitoring, and information system then they need to just give us the requirements and not tell us how to do it. In some cases it does not matter and we will ask their preference.
For example, a mechanical guy needs to control a motor. If the mechanical guy comes to us and says he needs an A-B PLC-5 to run this motor, we might think okay, but that will cost a lot more than if we just put a drive out there. But he told us he needed an expensive PLC-5 that will basically do nothing.
So be careful about what you say and know what NOT to say.
Most of the time, we can walk up to a piece of equipment and tell what kind of people were involved. Rarely do you get a machine with good people involved all the way around.
We can go through a machine and tell the level of mechanical, electrical, controls, and panel building expertise. Based on that information, we can then predict many of the problems that the machine has and suggest corrections.
For important machines, the smart vendors usually buy their mechanical work from a machine vendor and then have a qualified controls company do all the controls work.
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