theere is very little inveested in plants nowadays. a lot of equipment is held together by literally duct tape. we are so short staffed that our maintenance guys take out 3 bolts and put 2 bolts back in. everything in our plant is falling apart. the budgets keep getting cut. overrtime is cut and good mechanics/teechs are leavving. its ridiculous.
Bumped from @1wkd+1my5QXTt.
Love the “you can’t fix stupid” 🤣 My dad said this all the time.
I've been in plant engineering over 25 years.
Q1: Yes, we buy obsolete controls hardware on eBay, Radwell, and other industrial surplus sites several times per month.
Q2: We have multiple production lines relying on obsolete PLCs, drives, etc. that if it failed could not be swapped out for a new generation component without a significant project and extended downtime that would not be tolerated by management. Even when multiple upgrade EWRs have been submitted in the past, managers usually act surprised like they had no idea the line was at risk of going down. I tend to forward old emails they were copied on and cancelled EWRs where they were listed as approvers to remind them of proposed plans to mitigate risk that weren't funded. They don't like it, but I don't care.
Q3: We have boxes of failed / known to have issues controls hardware that are obsolete and hard to find, but we can't send them in for repair due to cost-cutting. A couple times we've had a drive failure on a machine and sent that drive in for repair and were told the repair shop can no longer source parts to fix it. Then we send one or more failed devices from our junk pile (same model / part number) to the shop and they were able to combine parts from 2 or 3 bad drives to make one that works.
I also keep a list of obsolete part numbers for hardware that we don't have spares for and are likely to cause significant business interruption if there is a failure. I try to copy and paste them into the search bar once a month or so to see if I get any hits on eBay, Radwell, etc. When I do find an item, I have to do a deep dive into past work orders to come up with an estimate of when our next failure will occur, how long the line could be down, and what alternatives have been considered in order to justify buying used/surplus spare parts that are often priced < $1,000.
I once had a plant manager ask me why we shouldn't just run to failure and then order the used replacement part from an industrial surplus company. I explained that I'd been looking for this item for over 2 years (since the last failure) and this was the first time I had found one. He responded that they must not sell many and would probably still have this one when and if we ever needed it. Better for them to hold the inventory on their books instead of 3M's books in his mind. Even if they didn't still have it when we needed it, he was confident we could "leverage 3Ms size and influence" to have a repair expedited and returned within 24 hours. The used part was priced at less than 25% of what the repair and air freight would cost and the production line was running 24/7 on a 4-crew rotation. You can't fix stupid.
Varys is right on target. It's nigh impossible to justify a controls upgrade as financial justification will never meet our guidelines for ROI. Until there's a major failure that requires significant downtime during the scramble for replacements (or re-design and extensive work to replace what failed with something that's currently available), it seems the risk of that failure is down-played. I recall regular "renewal" programs with insufficient funding becoming available, and many hours spent gathering data on which systems were at highest risk to prioritize requests for funds. Those programs then put plants at odds with eachother, vying for the limited financial resources made available. Those "renewal" programs were often the first capital spend commitments to be cut when spending on new equipment & plants exceeded the annual allocation.
I was once told that one of our competitors in the pressure-sensitive tape industry had a completely different approach - they replaced production lines on a regular basis.
Echoing Varys' comment - we have production lines that are 30, 40 years old, and the margin on products coming off those lines is too attractive to replace them with safer, newer equipment.
Ahhh.... the infamous 'controls upgrade' AFE. 3Mers have been eBay-ing obsolete controls parts for easily a decade, probably close to two now.
To answer the poll questions: Seen all three in multiple plants and at the center on a regular basis for YEARS.
The problem that leadership has is that they really fail to see these costs as the basic maintenance costs that they are. They love the low depreciation costs of old equipment, but don't want to pay the higher maintenance costs to keep the same old equipment.
Yes, exactly at the center. Ebay and Radwell were used quite frequently. Now, we don't use them because management does not want to spend the money.
3M is famous for upgrading a line with obsolete automation. A year after an upgrade the parts are already obsolete by the manufacturer. Seen it for 30 yrs.
Poll Questions for those in the plants:
Q1: In the last 12 months, have you or someone in the Plant Engineering group needed to buy obsolete controls hardware off eBay or from Radwell to keep an asset running after a component failed.
Q2: Do you have lines that are relying on obsolete very old Allen Bradley, Modicon, Reliance, or similar hardware that if it failed, it could not be swapped out for a new generation component and work without a significant project and unexpected downtime?
Q3: Do you have any pallets of unknown condition controls hardware that was purchased and kept on hand because the EBay and Radwell inventories were so low you couldn’t count on them in the future?
I have first hand experience with this a decade ago when things were still going pretty smoothly at 3M. I can’t imagine what its like to be responsible for equipment at such high risk in today’s environment.
It’s the same for our plant too
Management doesn’t want to invest in automation despite it will eliminate the risks to injury
Safety always……my foot
We ran out of boxes to ship sh-t. Lol?