Both broken: Machine and Solutions

By Bob Tenney for ERS Automation

​An operator—not a maintenance technician—attempted to perform a maintenance function of cleaning a filter, which required un-wiring two motors, which he did…without first turning off the power. Not good.

Flash. Bang. Smoke. Thankfully, nobody got hurt. (Personal injury attorney can move along. Nothing more to see here….) But the machine wasn’t so lucky; it was very hurt, and stopped all production.

• Solution #1: Call the Distributor. Company called the machine’s distributor only to find that Vendor had long ago dropped this line of equipment.
• Solution #2: Call the Manufacturer. Company called the manufacturer of the controls. Days later, their technician replaced the damaged board assembly, but did not know anything about its main relay. The tech did what he could and left. 
• Solution #3: Call ERS Automation. Now almost a week after the incident and losing several thousands of dollars in lost productivity, Company called ERS Automation. ERS discovered a not-so-funny comedy of errors in which (a) the machine’s original manufacturer had mislabeled two cables; (b) the Company’s  controller technician then used the labels to re-connect the cables after he replaced the defective parts; and then (c) the PLC system detected the configuration error and stopped the startup sequence. ERS swapped the cables to the correct ports, reconnected the power, and profitability resume. We are not sure what happened to the operator.

Today, this company skips “solutions” 1 and 2; ERS Automation is now their go-to solution source.

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