Very good post.
What do you do about a run off when their automation is build for your machine? We has a conveying and boxing system that cycled at their place, but did not show all the flaws until set up at our plant.
Cold parts hand feed into the system worked fine, but parts, literally " hot off the press" failed.
They ended up walking away from the final payment and we had to redesign inhouse at our expence. We had to put a servo drive on the conveyer to control part movement.
Sounds like a job we did several years ago
Seriously - a big part of how we grow our business is cleaning up after the "low ball" bidder.
I fault the buyer in many cases when a machine fails to perform.
We added 3-axes of servo drives to a packaging machine in Wisconsin after the OEM (Superior Cartoners) went bankrupt trying to make the production line work. It was a fairly significant redesign, eliminating portions of a line shaft and then coming up with a servo drive system that would smoothly introduce product into open boxes and then glue the flaps and send them on. We have done smart conveyors for singulating product at speeds of 300 units per minute . . . sounds easy, but with uneven inflow . . . and varying amounts of back pressure on the infeed conveyor - not a walk in the park.
I agree with the comments above by Tony - the buyer should have standards for what they expect in the plant. AND - they should have standards for selecting the machine builder that include a variety of elements not mentioned here. Engineering / Experience should be given high weight in the decision, a proven track record of supporting machines of similar duty cycle in their region, proven experience with the technology that the plant has standardized on (typically Rockwell, Siemens, GE, Mitsubishi, Koyo, whatever . . .), agreed upon milestones in the design that are tied to payment terms, a well documented change order process, there are many other things that should be brought to mind when selecting an integrator / machine builder who you are not familiar with.
We typically have our final payment tied to a performance test that measures actual throughput of the machine while logging all sources of downtime over a 48 hour production period. No more than 3% of downtime can be attributed to machine events during that time - if/when this performance test fails - we must evaluate what the root cause of the downtime is and take corrective action. We have never failed a performance test except in one case listed below. We have built over $50million in control systems / retrofits and machines over the last 15 years.
About 5 years ago we were bidding a contract well in excess of $1million to retrofit a large converting line in Savannah Georgia. The customer specified a specific technology and the vendor had recently released this technology to the market place. We had done roughly 2 dozen machines like this with an alternate technology with excellent results and I was skeptical as to whether this newly released product was ready for show time. Both the customer and the vendor insisted that this would be fine - in my opinion, neither of them had the engineering experience or understanding of the process to make that judgment - I argued against it and ultimately was told that if I didn't have the confidence that it could be done that they would go with another vendor. They went with that vendor (a large well known automation vendor with an in-house integration group) . . . the machine ran, but it ran well below pre-retrofit performance levels. We recently were asked to provide a bid to rip and replace that system.
18 months ago - I was in the same position with the same two players - (my largest customer with a corporate sponsored project) . . . this time we went with the vendor's technology which we had gained considerable experience with and oddly enough had just gone through another major revision that brought a lot of nice features related to safety which were a big part of the justification for the retrofit.
Long story short - compared to every single retrofit we had ever done before - it was a miserable arduous effort to get it to work. Our start up ramp for this class of machine is typically two weeks - this one took 4 months. We have had nearly 30 firmware revisions - 1 of which was a complete rewrite. We worked with the technology vendor at every single junction to outline the problems, assist with the testing, driving toward a robust solution. We are today - almost there with the first machine and I have been sitting on over $500k of product turned into a complete machine center on my floor for a year that the customer does not want until the first machine is done. We have not yet satisfied the performance guarantee and we have identified one additional mechanical change that will be needed before we are confident that it will run at the peak performance levels required by the contract. This mechanical component was supplied by the machine OEM - but we are taking responsibility for it because it is being controlled by our servo / gearbox / software.
This is a situation where the customer set a specification that was unrealistic - heavily influenced by the efforts of a corporate sales team fielded by the vendor - decisions made at the purchasing level that don't allow for evaluation of risk or appropriateness of technology to the task.
The customer lost millions in opportunity cost - we lost hundreds of thousands on this job. The vendor has worked hard to fix all of the problems and also has gone a long way toward helping us with credits toward future purchases. In the end - I believe we will be roughly $200k in the hole on this project even after significant credits awarded to us by the technology vendor.
Who is at fault here? I think there is shared responsibility all around . . .
In retrospect - we should have walked away from this as the new products from the vendor specified by the contract were not ready and they have a history of launching products that need a year or two of shaking all the bugs out. That would have been tough to do - 18 months ago we were very slow and it would be tough to give the news to my sales guy and employees that we were not going to accept this order when the shop was on 4 day work weeks with a 20% cut in pay.
The customer at this plant and at the corporate level should not have insisted so stridently that they get the latest / greatest technology without acknowledging that there was significant risk that they were willing to accommodate in the name of "development". We don't shy away from using a product just because we don't like the color . . . we shy away from stuff that hasn't been proven to work well.
The vendor took way too long to take us seriously - that is partially because we won this contract in competition with their integration group. They don't have as strong of engineering team as they would like to think they have and it took several months for them to begin to investigate the specific portions of their firmware / hardware that we had identified as being problematic.
We build a lot of custom machinery - about 90% of our machines work in 24x7x365 applications in the Glass container and Paper industries along with quite a bit of machinery in the veneer / engineered wood products industry. Down time is in the thousands of dollars an hour - if we sense that the customer is looking for the lowest bid and they see our cautionary statements as "a lack of confidence" . . . while seeing the competing machine builders "high level of confidence" when they say "piece of cake" . . . well, we typically decline to bid those machines.
In this case - we are out of the ditch now, but it took a lot of effort and expense to get out of the ditch. We fulfill our commitments and would never consider walking away from a job - even if it cost us a lot of money. . . and in this case - our customer recognizes now the big picture and we collaborate on a much higher level on development work to ensure that all the stake holders understand the risk / reward merits.
Custom machine building is a tough gig - you often don't get several machines to amortize your engineering effort over - I have never known a one-off machine to ever be profitable for the machine builder unless you have a lot of very smart people involved who resist the urge to be penny wise and pound foolish.