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It's broke, we are the fourth group called, so what do we have here!

8/12/2020

An operator, not a maintenance technician, attempted a maintenance function to clean a filter. That required un-wiring two motors. He did.

Then the flash, bang and the magic smoke came out! (doing so with power on,...not good)

Nobody got hurt so any personal injury attorneys reading this can go away now.

The distributor of the equipment was called. They dropped this line of equipment primarily due to lack of support.

A call was then placed to the manufacturer of the controls. Their technician was called in and was able to replace the damaged board assembly that the operator let the smoke out of. He was not familiar with the machine just his brand of controls.

A main relay was not pulling in. He had done what he could do and left.

Then we got a call. By this point the customer had spent several days and several thousand dollars and still did not have a working machine.

After verifying what had happened initially and what had been done since, our folks started in. What we eventually found was that the original manufacturer of the machine had mislabeled two cables. The controller technician then used the labels to re-connect the cables after he replaced the defective parts.

The system detected the configuration error and stopped the startup sequence.

We swapped the cables to the correct ports.

Production was back and all were relieved. (I am not sure what happened to the operator)

The next time this customer had an equipment problem, we were not the fourth call!

4 Comments

ERS Designated as Essential

30/3/2020

1 Comment

One of our Customers had declared ERS Automation is essential to their continuing operations.

We were not originally sure how we were to be designated.

As we were attempting to determine our status we received the letter.

All that to say that we are open, officially!

1 Comment

March 13th, 2020

13/3/2020

2 Comments

Coronavirus, Manufacturing and ERS

Our understanding as of today, March 13, 2020

Depending upon your location, it's here or about to be.
Containment is mostly yesterday's news.
The new term to our lexicon, "Social Distancing", with all the ramifications that brings, is now becoming the new norm.
It looks like this will peak in May?
It will get better, after it gets worse. (Every pandemic ends)

Where does that leave ERS and our Customers?

We are open for business and still having fun solving manufacturing challenges!
ERS purposed to be growing into the next downturn, and we are.
Our folks are working as much as we can from home.
We are staying focused on improving our systems, training and organization during the downtime we now anticipate.
It is up to each of our crew to decide what sites to work in and under what conditions.

2 Comments

It smoked, Now what?!

30/1/2018

3 Comments

...and, it's a new piece of equipment and the vendor can't get a part until tomorrow

By Bob Tenney, for ERS Automation

Looks OK from this view but...

Notice the smoke damage on the vent grate.

New saw is purchased from an out of state vendor for a continuous production process. The installation and startup takes much longer than expected.

This line represents most of a plant's production.

The new piece of equipment stops.....again.

The "go to" man in the plant is down with the flu.

A breaker is "tripped", so the operator resets it.

Smoke comes out of the top of the power supply. (not good)

The OEM is out of state and can't get a part until the next day.

The line operator is told to "call everyone"

He calls ERS at 9:05am

ERS locates a supply and installs it that morning. As the field service team heads to the customer site, engineering is making sure this new supply is correct for the application.

Questions are asked:

What caused this supply to fail? If there was a short circuit, does this new supply have a "crobar" protection circuit on the output side? Will it fit since it is a different form factor?

Resolution:

After all is verified, the supply is installed and the process is restored.