What Happens When the Remote Control Breaks?

Sometimes, when I talk with clients about the skill levels of their operating and maintenance personnel, they will mention specific training that they are planning, frequently vendor-supplied (and noteworthy for the client’s facial expressions when talking about the cost) and targeted at upper-level control skills, such as working with PLCs.  While I am of the general opinion that almost any training has some value, when presented with this scenario, I usually ask if they are also providing training to assure that their employees understand the underlying principles.  The response is no, almost exclusively, explaining that they are making the reasonable, informed choice with limited training dollars.

While I applaud any organization’s effort to train its employees, especially during difficult financial times, I think this particular rationale is basically backwards.

Let me give you a more mundane example.  Let’s say you have at home a TV, a DVD player, a VHS player, a cable box (or satellite receiver, if that is your flavor) and maybe a game console all tied together.  Let’s assume that each has its own remote control which allows, for each respective device, full and unfettered access to all menu layers and options, and that the closest thing you have to a master remote – most likely the cable or satellite remote – provides general, upper level functionality over most of the devices.  Your young daughter’s friend over after school tries to get Arthur on HD PBS and keeps trying different buttons on any remote she can find before she says, plaintively, “I can’t find Arthur!”  No doubt, as you gaze at the grey flickering screen on the TV with a pile of remotes in front of you, it’s as if the remote control has broken, and there is no way to untwist the pretzel your various electronic devices have been tied into.  Usually, in each household, there is one person (the wizard!) who is called when the snarl is the worst, who understands inputs versus outputs and when to turn the power off and when to leave it on, who performs the short magical sequence of button-pushing to return the status quo to normal.  Without that knowledge, troubleshooting is reduced to random sequences of button-pushing with the hope and prayers of success through luck.

Returning to the industrial venue, PLCs are industrial computers that are the control systems for many (if not most, in one form or another) industrial processes.  They provide automated instructions to the processes in keep them within operating parameters, and also provide automated error codes when the processes stray outside.  Most operators and maintenance people are to some extent trained on how to appropriately respond to those automated instructions and error codes – many of which are really quite self-explanatory and helpful (“High temperature alarm limit reached – power relay 12A7 opened” or “fire – better leave now”).  Assuming that operating and maintenance personnel understand what to do in response, these instructions and error codes address most of the routine downtime and operational issues.  We’ll leave alone, for the moment, what happens when those folks don’t understand what they are supposed to do, and instead look at what happens when circumstances arise which are not adequately addressed by the automated instructions and error codes.

What?  There shouldn’t be any?  Let’s be realistic: there are a finite number of situations that the instructions and error codes directly and intelligently cover (based upon a finite amount of time spent on anticipating operating and maintenance issues).  Past that, they become road signs pointing in the general direction (“something over there, somewhere, is not doing something right”) to the extent that multiple instructions or error codes are presented, forcing the operator or maintenance person to get their own road map (PLC I/O schematic, for example) to begin to figure things out on their own.  If they understand how to read the schematic, that is.

Then, of course, there are the operational and maintenance issues that only develop due to time and change that were never considered when the instructions and error codes were created.  Those might not even result in any automated system warning or response.  What does the operator or maintenance person do then?  The process is not working properly and there are no road signs, no clues.

Well, there are always clues if you understand how things fundamentally work.  It’s called troubleshooting, and it’s what you do when the remote control breaks.  Talk to us – we can help you add a few more wizards to your staff.