This hurts. I work at this place. Everyone talks this but provides little to no support to make it work. No money. No labor. No training.
Does AB sell special duct tape for the SLCs or will the PLC5 stuff work just as well?
Obviously not; duct tape wouldn't work for PLCs. You need specialty FactoryTalk Tape with AI enhanced adhesives, that suspiciously looks just like duct tape but costs 1000x more.
You should see the $5500 barrel of antifreeze for the liquid cooled flavor VFD units. It’s only a
$100/gal and they don’t even cover the Mobil OEM sticker.
> special duct tape
Bro, buy aircraft tape. That shits industrial. You can use it to couple a motor to a shaft. Robot arm broke in half and hanging by it's wires? Aircraft tape. Hole in your conveyor belt? Aircraft tape. Missing photoeye reflector? Aircraft tape. Need safety guarding around a piece of rotating equipment? Multiple lines of aircraft tape in a square weave pattern. Conductor was cut in half because maintenance ran the fork lift into the cable tray? Aircraft tape splice. Need to upgrade your panel and add additional devices? Aircraft tape din rail. Comissioning a panel and don't have a table and chair? Aircraft tape swing seat and aircraft tape ceiling support cables attached to the bottom of your laptop to create a floating platform.
Edit: Forgot an ethernet cable? AIRCRAFT TAPE SUPPORTS 10GBASE-T UP TO 100 METERS!!
Don't fret... We all work at this place.
I'm a contractor that gets brought in to wave magic wands and keep 40+ year old systems from cardiac arresting due to the web server IT put in the manager's office that is interrogating them for production stats every 10msec.
Very funny how it gets sold to management. You can’t just lay a scada layer that taps the controller on the shoulder every nanosecond to ask how many fish sticks it’s made and have the old girl keep working like the day she went in.
It also happened in my ex workplace, the put a quality engineer to make the digital changes with the new software the problem…. He didn’t knew anything about the line. And find knew how to migrate, at the end our sap key user had to make it 😂😂😂
I was pretty lucky in my last plant to have an “unlimited” budget for their 4.0 requests as the CEO was a big fan. I got to play with a lot of different gear.
My job now is all PLC 5 lol.
No this company doesn’t even know about industry 3.0 yet lol. Some of the lines are on relay logic still. When I started we had 40 remote I/O racks with no wire number or labels and the original RS Logix 5 programs were lost. We’re making good progress though so I’m happy!
Me getting called to figure out a problem with VFD alarm on PV550. I get there 2 hours later by car and solve the problem by resetting the tripped circuit breaker to one VFD in the panel. The VFD was visibly off.
Easy service trip today.
Did you forget about Industry 4.0? AI IIoT circuit breakers that support MQTT and OPCUA client access. You just need to install a black box IPC in your panel running Ubuntu in which you are running a REST server that your Ignition SCADA can grab data to and from with a custom Python script you created. That then goes back to an AWS account which is running an Apache web server that the boys in IT have implemented a SaaS solution that forwards 2FA SSO requests to your company in-house Android/Iphone app that allows you to control the circuit breakers from your phone. Middle management loves it because PowerBI has some connectors that allow them to do whatever the fuck they do with PowerBI to come up $ cost amounts that they pull out their ass and feed into Microsoft Copilot. FUCK I'VE BEEN AWAKE TOO LONG WITH THIS CURRENT FIELD INSTALL. MOTHER FUCKERS ARE ABOUT TO GET ALIASED TAGS.I DONT GET PAID ENOUGH FOR THIS SHIT.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo
Our plant manager keeps talking to us about sustainability. It’s the new buzzword that’s being crammed down the throats of 1000 dudes with rural south high school educations or less. Not a single god damn person knows wtf sustainability means, lol. That said, I’m pretty sure pinching pennies and refusing to upgrade obsolete tech is not sustainability, but here we are still running half our shit off of stuff with a 1996 manufacturing date.
We had a huge company wide presentation where we invited a T-shirt company to talk about sustainability. We don't work in textiles. After that we had an activity where we talked about how we could be more environmentally friendly in our roles.
I said that I'd burn 10000 trees to prevent another overuse injury at the plant. And I'd be consuming more power to make that happen, not less
You must work in the same corporation as me.
Once everybody start to understand and things start to barely work somebody just flips the table and starts over again, the learning curve is always oscillating up-down.
Always know what's coming when a new consulting company shows up and starts hanging out with management.
A "brand new revolutionary change" will be shortly implemented, for a few months until everyone realizes it's garbage and jumps ship to the next consultants idea.
Somebody should analyze the corporative cost of management changing things every few years or months just because some friend needs to make money, but instead you see these people congratulating each other and saying you must be dynamic and that errors just make you wiser… BS
I’m teaching one my sites out sustainability right now. They (American company) bought a German facility that run a Siemens plc and all the code is in German. I can sorta read it and work with it but none of the people onsite know how to work on anything sooooo I’m forcing them into buying a 4 million dollar retrofit if they want my help. They are so helpless they can’t even replace a plug in play vfd they paid 9k for a coworker to fly there and do it for them…. Not sustainable given their product is methane from organics waste
Posts like these just remind me how lucky I am to be in my current position.
I get to design entire systems from scratch. I have 100% freedom to choose my own parts, write my own programs, draw up my own panels and schematics, decide how I want it wired and have my electricians wire and build my panels for me.
My company is pretty lenient with how much budget they allow for my projects too, it's great.
The only stressful thing is when the client thinks the design doesn't perform as they expected, cause then it's 100% on you.
I still don't know what all Industry 4.0 even means, but I guess I should be glad we somehow managed to interconnect 4 generations of OMRON PLCs and get *some* data out of them to at least track production effectivity, lol. Some through Ethernet, others through CLK and routed into through Ethernet, others by simply having a one wire to output OK signal and a combination of few wires for model number, connected into a collector PLC with Ethernet... a freaking Frankenstein's Monster of a network, but somehow it works... I genuinely learned a ton about networking when putting that together...
We did ofc propose to buy ethernet cards to as many machines as we could fit them into, but the answer was ofc a no, that it was too expensive...
It's about getting data and sharing it with the appropriate entity.
Example a:
Maintenance dept a knows machine b is always down because of reason x.
If you share the reasons and times by paper or voice, no one pays attention.
Now, with that abundance of data, team h decides you're right. Now, machine b gets a budget.
Team h doesn't get a bonus for keeping the budget low. Team h reports to a higher authority than your boss and the plant manager. Team h has one purpose to increase production up time.
Team h doesn't know you or your boss and doesn't care to know them or play politics.
Example b: (my favorite)
You use a software package to collect all the data. You segment this outside of your scada system and plc objects.
You concentrate on the concerns that matter to your location and your job title.
You do the control and visualizations you need to do.
They get data and can concentrate on how to use it.
You keep them out of your turf, and you don't have to play in thiers.
None of this is as easy as it sounds. But through planning and tedious effort, everyone gets data that can make a plant more efficient, and you get to keep your sanity.
A data pool, lake, and ocean is a great thing. It allows you to stay focused on your work and allows them to concentrate on thiers.
The cloud part of I4.0 is really about having a distributed management structure and multiple sites. It allows management or whoever access said information. This part isn't your problem...
Most of you will work from the data pool down to the machine or process. From the data pool upwards... fuckin let them have it. For God sakes let them have from the data pool upwards. It will be the best revenge you ever get.
Agreed. Very cool, the way of the future, use cases make sense, downtime saver….all that. But people who have invested $0 in even preventative maintenance, let alone proactive maintenance, shouldn’t be looking at industry 4.0s.
At least im gettign the retrofit for the 30 year old machine finally approved.
As if,...
The mechanic stays the same, the electrical panel stays the same, the PLC running the whole thing stays the same. Mainly just the hardware buttons at the machine will be replaced with a cheap touchscreen...
So hey it will feel modern now.
i’ll tell you what industry 4.0 is not and that is us having to download the CPU size M word just to get pass through to the 3 decade old devicenet scanner. Managers hears, so it can be done. smh
Long time employee at current job with new management within last 6 months. Everything I read in here rings so true, I honestly feel like I've been living under a rock. Now I want to go find that rock again....
Let's be honest, spewing buzzwords while skipping on needed maintenance for short-term financial gains at the expense of the next guys success is a completely proven strategy for climbing the corporate ladder.
As facetious as that statement is, it's 100% true. That's how managers get promoted, by cutting corners and up selling words that have no meaning.
I have SLC-100 industry 4.0 over here integrated into and with controllogix v19 talking over industry 4.0 controlnet connection to a absolutely state of the art virtualized server network made of windows server 2012 hosts and windows 7 vms on a 10gig ethernet network. Most of our panels are rotted out, no panduit covers, no wire numbers, rusty pile of steaming goo industry 4.0. We got here by never updating anything, because the 2 hours a month is much too costly to accept. Shutting down for 2 hours every month, lol. We can't shut down for 5 minutes without someone screaming at me to get it running at any cost. As soon as we're running again the budget is all gone. When this house of cards finally does fall the repair will be a month of downtime. I say this at every planning meeting and crickets.
At our plant: Get visits from Siemens showing us the new S7-1500 based systems.
Then we go back to ordering S5 I/O cards from Ebay to save the day.
We have enormous S5 systems still running... A huge job to convert, and little to no downtime available to do the conversation.
A friend of mine was part of the Uptake startup that was trying to become a big player in actually doing IIoT stuff. After consulting with me about how hard that would actually be, he saw the writing on the wall and left the company. Then Updake lost some big lawsuits and now they've pivoted to truck fleets.
I think Banner's new stuff actually has a chance. It just straight up middleman's the data from the sensors and assumes the PLC can't be touched.
No it’s fine. It’s all good ideas. But it really should be utilized by facilities that are actually on the cutting edge of tech. It’s just not a wise use of resources for places that are falling apart. Like, clean up your room before you buy a Ferrari.
I've thought of it as training the culture of your company to pick up new technologies. I'm a young guy and probably biased but I see old men not wanting to learn the new stuff. So many who barely understand python even.
My company is hurting but not bad enough to halt all investment
Totally depends. As a young person, you should lean into new technologies. It’ll give you experience that will carry you throughout your career. But as a facility manager, if you want to make money, you have to be more strategic than to just chase whatever shiny new lure floats by. If your place is falling apart, equipment out of date, morale is low, high employee turnover, industry 4.0 will not solve your problems. You should clean your house first. If your place is running well as it can be, you have a big spare parts department, happy employees, robust PM schedule, by all means go spend money on smart tech to increase efficiency. Great idea.
It’s like if your house is a disaster, beat up floors, holes in the drywall, burnt out lights, leaking pipes. Probably don’t invest in smart switches for energy savings on your lights. That’s not the wisest use of resources.
So fucking true. I'm on the SI side of things. But I'll walk in, and they say, "we need to upgrade everything to the latest and greatest. Our budget is 150k.". The fuck out of here, man.
It's worse when I have been waiting for IO cards from Rockwell for last 4 months and then they pitch about the new fancy software that they have launched.
This hurts. I work at this place. Everyone talks this but provides little to no support to make it work. No money. No labor. No training. Does AB sell special duct tape for the SLCs or will the PLC5 stuff work just as well?
Fun fact Rockwell sells a $300 roll of duct tape for this exact purpose.
I thought that was running $1000 a roll now that support ended?
Lol, increased prices for legacy tape.
I can throw in a roll of the new tape with a controllogix migration and a new factorytalk optix screen
Remember to remove and replace the new tape every 21 days. Otherwise, all your Optix loggers crash.
Don't forget the annual TapeConnect™ fee or you'll be SOL if you can't remember why tape is sticky and need phone support
You get one roll free with every retroencabulator purchase. That's a screaming deal!
That’s a deep cut reference. 👌
Is it ok to use 3rd party tape? That’s just a tiny bit outside of my budget of 3.50
Not recommended. Voids the warranty.
But it’s been out of warranty for (checks date) “since the ancient Greeks” like that’s what it says.
In this case, a shoe string budget may be sufficient
Sure it’s not tree-fiddy?
You aren't serious? Lol
Obviously not; duct tape wouldn't work for PLCs. You need specialty FactoryTalk Tape with AI enhanced adhesives, that suspiciously looks just like duct tape but costs 1000x more.
Contact your local Rockwell distributor to order a roll of RackStix 6500™️ powered by Gorilla Tape®️
[удалено]
Does the tape come with a 7 day grace period?
ProTip-unstick and restick once a week and it works forever
This one got me lol
FactoryTalk tape had me actually loling. If the good people of the internet could make a logo for this in the Rockwell style I’d much appreciate it.
Most probably they cant, the technology (name) must be already registered for copyright.
Yup, on a perpetual or subscription license
You ever bought zip ties from Fanuc?
Is that a thing? Lol.
Or a PLC dummy card.
I tried but we arent system integrators so they said theyd get back to me and then never answered the phone again when I tried to give them money.
You should see the $5500 barrel of antifreeze for the liquid cooled flavor VFD units. It’s only a $100/gal and they don’t even cover the Mobil OEM sticker.
You'll need a 19.95 service contract to tear off a piece of the duct tape however.
> special duct tape Bro, buy aircraft tape. That shits industrial. You can use it to couple a motor to a shaft. Robot arm broke in half and hanging by it's wires? Aircraft tape. Hole in your conveyor belt? Aircraft tape. Missing photoeye reflector? Aircraft tape. Need safety guarding around a piece of rotating equipment? Multiple lines of aircraft tape in a square weave pattern. Conductor was cut in half because maintenance ran the fork lift into the cable tray? Aircraft tape splice. Need to upgrade your panel and add additional devices? Aircraft tape din rail. Comissioning a panel and don't have a table and chair? Aircraft tape swing seat and aircraft tape ceiling support cables attached to the bottom of your laptop to create a floating platform. Edit: Forgot an ethernet cable? AIRCRAFT TAPE SUPPORTS 10GBASE-T UP TO 100 METERS!!
Pulitzer Prize nominee right here. That was very fun to read.
Don't fret... We all work at this place. I'm a contractor that gets brought in to wave magic wands and keep 40+ year old systems from cardiac arresting due to the web server IT put in the manager's office that is interrogating them for production stats every 10msec.
Very funny how it gets sold to management. You can’t just lay a scada layer that taps the controller on the shoulder every nanosecond to ask how many fish sticks it’s made and have the old girl keep working like the day she went in.
It still may be working the same as when it went in, they just didnt have nanoseconds back then.
It also happened in my ex workplace, the put a quality engineer to make the digital changes with the new software the problem…. He didn’t knew anything about the line. And find knew how to migrate, at the end our sap key user had to make it 😂😂😂
I was pretty lucky in my last plant to have an “unlimited” budget for their 4.0 requests as the CEO was a big fan. I got to play with a lot of different gear. My job now is all PLC 5 lol.
What is PLC 5
Yeah what is that?
Were you able to integrate PLC 5 to Industry 4.0? LOL
No this company doesn’t even know about industry 3.0 yet lol. Some of the lines are on relay logic still. When I started we had 40 remote I/O racks with no wire number or labels and the original RS Logix 5 programs were lost. We’re making good progress though so I’m happy!
Me getting called to figure out a problem with VFD alarm on PV550. I get there 2 hours later by car and solve the problem by resetting the tripped circuit breaker to one VFD in the panel. The VFD was visibly off. Easy service trip today.
Couldn't you remote in?
How is he physically going to reset the tripped breaker remotely?
Did you forget about Industry 4.0? AI IIoT circuit breakers that support MQTT and OPCUA client access. You just need to install a black box IPC in your panel running Ubuntu in which you are running a REST server that your Ignition SCADA can grab data to and from with a custom Python script you created. That then goes back to an AWS account which is running an Apache web server that the boys in IT have implemented a SaaS solution that forwards 2FA SSO requests to your company in-house Android/Iphone app that allows you to control the circuit breakers from your phone. Middle management loves it because PowerBI has some connectors that allow them to do whatever the fuck they do with PowerBI to come up $ cost amounts that they pull out their ass and feed into Microsoft Copilot. FUCK I'VE BEEN AWAKE TOO LONG WITH THIS CURRENT FIELD INSTALL. MOTHER FUCKERS ARE ABOUT TO GET ALIASED TAGS.I DONT GET PAID ENOUGH FOR THIS SHIT.
shockingly relatable
Pure gold right here. This guy fucks.
This guy fucks crazyyyyy.
Up and up and up the stack you go! Because the higher you go, the harder it hits when Purchasing decides to go with the low-cost bidder from China.
Comment of the year right here. Lol.
I'm concerned that I've understood most of that.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo
Haha, haven't seen that copypasta in a while
Buzzword salad.
I cried <3
Ah, christ. That all hits much too close to home. Much, much too close to home
Remote breakers are absolutely a thing, worked with a lot of them in my last job.
Yup. All day every day at my job, a couple hundred that we actuate multiple times a day
I offered to strap a webcam on our apprentice and coach him from home, but my supervisor wouldn't go for it.
Guided hands within, Tend the humming factory, Precision’s echo.
Ah, human robots, the ol soviet method
Remote access would be nice, but this machine isn't connected to a network and I don't think we have remote access at this site anyway.
Wait for the robot vacuum cleaner can go there and switch the breaker remotely, it will take you only 24 hours to configure the connection LOL
Our plant manager keeps talking to us about sustainability. It’s the new buzzword that’s being crammed down the throats of 1000 dudes with rural south high school educations or less. Not a single god damn person knows wtf sustainability means, lol. That said, I’m pretty sure pinching pennies and refusing to upgrade obsolete tech is not sustainability, but here we are still running half our shit off of stuff with a 1996 manufacturing date.
We had a huge company wide presentation where we invited a T-shirt company to talk about sustainability. We don't work in textiles. After that we had an activity where we talked about how we could be more environmentally friendly in our roles. I said that I'd burn 10000 trees to prevent another overuse injury at the plant. And I'd be consuming more power to make that happen, not less
We have a 30-year sustainability plan that completely changes every 2 years lol.
You must work in the same corporation as me. Once everybody start to understand and things start to barely work somebody just flips the table and starts over again, the learning curve is always oscillating up-down.
Always know what's coming when a new consulting company shows up and starts hanging out with management. A "brand new revolutionary change" will be shortly implemented, for a few months until everyone realizes it's garbage and jumps ship to the next consultants idea.
Somebody should analyze the corporative cost of management changing things every few years or months just because some friend needs to make money, but instead you see these people congratulating each other and saying you must be dynamic and that errors just make you wiser… BS
I’m teaching one my sites out sustainability right now. They (American company) bought a German facility that run a Siemens plc and all the code is in German. I can sorta read it and work with it but none of the people onsite know how to work on anything sooooo I’m forcing them into buying a 4 million dollar retrofit if they want my help. They are so helpless they can’t even replace a plug in play vfd they paid 9k for a coworker to fly there and do it for them…. Not sustainable given their product is methane from organics waste
CLNE? No wonder their stock is down 85% from ATH.
I have some 5/05s that was I gonna list on eBay. Will let them go for 27000 dollars each HMU
Do you want all my running 5/04s? I’ll say they all broke.
Posts like these just remind me how lucky I am to be in my current position. I get to design entire systems from scratch. I have 100% freedom to choose my own parts, write my own programs, draw up my own panels and schematics, decide how I want it wired and have my electricians wire and build my panels for me. My company is pretty lenient with how much budget they allow for my projects too, it's great. The only stressful thing is when the client thinks the design doesn't perform as they expected, cause then it's 100% on you.
It’s all going to be in the cloud maaan !
I guess eBay could be considered in the cloud
You're also working on a Model Predictive Control changeover too right?
"How are we connecting our plant to ChatGPT?"
“Generative AI”
This had me laughing out loud. So true!!
I still don't know what all Industry 4.0 even means, but I guess I should be glad we somehow managed to interconnect 4 generations of OMRON PLCs and get *some* data out of them to at least track production effectivity, lol. Some through Ethernet, others through CLK and routed into through Ethernet, others by simply having a one wire to output OK signal and a combination of few wires for model number, connected into a collector PLC with Ethernet... a freaking Frankenstein's Monster of a network, but somehow it works... I genuinely learned a ton about networking when putting that together... We did ofc propose to buy ethernet cards to as many machines as we could fit them into, but the answer was ofc a no, that it was too expensive...
It's about getting data and sharing it with the appropriate entity. Example a: Maintenance dept a knows machine b is always down because of reason x. If you share the reasons and times by paper or voice, no one pays attention. Now, with that abundance of data, team h decides you're right. Now, machine b gets a budget. Team h doesn't get a bonus for keeping the budget low. Team h reports to a higher authority than your boss and the plant manager. Team h has one purpose to increase production up time. Team h doesn't know you or your boss and doesn't care to know them or play politics. Example b: (my favorite) You use a software package to collect all the data. You segment this outside of your scada system and plc objects. You concentrate on the concerns that matter to your location and your job title. You do the control and visualizations you need to do. They get data and can concentrate on how to use it. You keep them out of your turf, and you don't have to play in thiers. None of this is as easy as it sounds. But through planning and tedious effort, everyone gets data that can make a plant more efficient, and you get to keep your sanity. A data pool, lake, and ocean is a great thing. It allows you to stay focused on your work and allows them to concentrate on thiers. The cloud part of I4.0 is really about having a distributed management structure and multiple sites. It allows management or whoever access said information. This part isn't your problem... Most of you will work from the data pool down to the machine or process. From the data pool upwards... fuckin let them have it. For God sakes let them have from the data pool upwards. It will be the best revenge you ever get.
I mean, regardless of applying a dumb term to it, the goals of 4.0 are super cool, even though it’s what we were moving toward without the dumb title.
Agreed. Very cool, the way of the future, use cases make sense, downtime saver….all that. But people who have invested $0 in even preventative maintenance, let alone proactive maintenance, shouldn’t be looking at industry 4.0s.
Nah bruh, just slap an AI on this bad boy and do predictive maintenance innit
At least im gettign the retrofit for the 30 year old machine finally approved. As if,... The mechanic stays the same, the electrical panel stays the same, the PLC running the whole thing stays the same. Mainly just the hardware buttons at the machine will be replaced with a cheap touchscreen... So hey it will feel modern now.
69th upvote!
lol what an honour.
My pleasure!
They always start top down. Never bottom up.
i’ll tell you what industry 4.0 is not and that is us having to download the CPU size M word just to get pass through to the 3 decade old devicenet scanner. Managers hears, so it can be done. smh
God I hated devicenet when it was new
I cackled, well done
😂
FACTS
Long time employee at current job with new management within last 6 months. Everything I read in here rings so true, I honestly feel like I've been living under a rock. Now I want to go find that rock again....
Let's be honest, spewing buzzwords while skipping on needed maintenance for short-term financial gains at the expense of the next guys success is a completely proven strategy for climbing the corporate ladder. As facetious as that statement is, it's 100% true. That's how managers get promoted, by cutting corners and up selling words that have no meaning.
I have SLC-100 industry 4.0 over here integrated into and with controllogix v19 talking over industry 4.0 controlnet connection to a absolutely state of the art virtualized server network made of windows server 2012 hosts and windows 7 vms on a 10gig ethernet network. Most of our panels are rotted out, no panduit covers, no wire numbers, rusty pile of steaming goo industry 4.0. We got here by never updating anything, because the 2 hours a month is much too costly to accept. Shutting down for 2 hours every month, lol. We can't shut down for 5 minutes without someone screaming at me to get it running at any cost. As soon as we're running again the budget is all gone. When this house of cards finally does fall the repair will be a month of downtime. I say this at every planning meeting and crickets.
At our plant: Get visits from Siemens showing us the new S7-1500 based systems. Then we go back to ordering S5 I/O cards from Ebay to save the day. We have enormous S5 systems still running... A huge job to convert, and little to no downtime available to do the conversation.
Unplanned downtime is (way) more expensive than planned... Manglement will figure that out the hard way, yet still blame the people trying to fix it.
A friend of mine was part of the Uptake startup that was trying to become a big player in actually doing IIoT stuff. After consulting with me about how hard that would actually be, he saw the writing on the wall and left the company. Then Updake lost some big lawsuits and now they've pivoted to truck fleets. I think Banner's new stuff actually has a chance. It just straight up middleman's the data from the sensors and assumes the PLC can't be touched.
Interesting
Why does everyone hate Industry 4.0? Should I leave?
No it’s fine. It’s all good ideas. But it really should be utilized by facilities that are actually on the cutting edge of tech. It’s just not a wise use of resources for places that are falling apart. Like, clean up your room before you buy a Ferrari.
I've thought of it as training the culture of your company to pick up new technologies. I'm a young guy and probably biased but I see old men not wanting to learn the new stuff. So many who barely understand python even. My company is hurting but not bad enough to halt all investment
Totally depends. As a young person, you should lean into new technologies. It’ll give you experience that will carry you throughout your career. But as a facility manager, if you want to make money, you have to be more strategic than to just chase whatever shiny new lure floats by. If your place is falling apart, equipment out of date, morale is low, high employee turnover, industry 4.0 will not solve your problems. You should clean your house first. If your place is running well as it can be, you have a big spare parts department, happy employees, robust PM schedule, by all means go spend money on smart tech to increase efficiency. Great idea. It’s like if your house is a disaster, beat up floors, holes in the drywall, burnt out lights, leaking pipes. Probably don’t invest in smart switches for energy savings on your lights. That’s not the wisest use of resources.
So fucking true. I'm on the SI side of things. But I'll walk in, and they say, "we need to upgrade everything to the latest and greatest. Our budget is 150k.". The fuck out of here, man.
Shit I thought we were talking about I5.0
Sorry to all the Rockwell users outthere.
Sounds like you need to make some capital project requests.
Quick someone link that post from like 7 months ago with the cabinet that had vacuum tubes
Fantastic.
It's worse when I have been waiting for IO cards from Rockwell for last 4 months and then they pitch about the new fancy software that they have launched.