[Warning this contains geeky stuff.]
From time to time I write about what pops into my head.
Many of you know that I ran a test department in a factory… this is about how I ran my department.
Like most companies they sent us to school. Most of the time it was for factory training, like to Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) training. And once to Central Connecticut State University for a class in management.
The first night in class the professor asked us how many widgets do we make in a day? Some answered a 100, some 100,00 a day, and me? I said 1 every four years. Hun????? Well we make control systems for industrial plants; things that heat things up, things that cool things down, things that clean your water you drink, thing that clean… um… ah… your poop.
One of things we went to class for was to learn was to run four identical bays of PLCs in parallel and with two out of the four bay logic so if it detected a problem in two bays the PLCs shut down the plant. The cabinets were part of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) that monitored the plant operations.
As you see I miss not the work but the people. We were all there for over twenty-five years so we all knew out jobs and at our peak I had forty tech in my department. They were all highly motivated and knew their jobs inside and out, so how do you mange them? Simply, you don’t.
I had a list of jobs on the wall listing their due dates and I had a pile of work orders. They picked out what they wanted to do and did it. I saw my job was to keep management off their backs and if they needed some see that they can get it. I found out in the fancy college class on management that style is called Laissez-faire management style. I always gave them credit when the job went well and took the blame for when it didn’t.
The day I got my pink slip was the day I began living my true life. I went skipping out the building waving the pink slip, we were bought out by a Japanese company and they shut down the factory and use job shops instead to do the work like we did.
However, we got the last laugh. They went 2 billion, that is with a “B,” dollars in debt! You see we knew that each custom I&C (Instrumental & Control) system is unique and there will be design mistakes made “You can’t put that there! There is no way to gain access to it, you have to move it here.” we were a cost center so the engineering mistakes was just T&M (Time and Material) but with a job shop they took out their pencils and started calculating. And that was their 2 billion dollar lesson.
Do I miss work? No but I miss the social aspect of work and that’s why I don’t understand this “work-at-home.
From time to time I write about what pops into my head.
Many of you know that I ran a test department in a factory… this is about how I ran my department.
Like most companies they sent us to school. Most of the time it was for factory training, like to Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) training. And once to Central Connecticut State University for a class in management.
The first night in class the professor asked us how many widgets do we make in a day? Some answered a 100, some 100,00 a day, and me? I said 1 every four years. Hun????? Well we make control systems for industrial plants; things that heat things up, things that cool things down, things that clean your water you drink, thing that clean… um… ah… your poop.
One of things we went to class for was to learn was to run four identical bays of PLCs in parallel and with two out of the four bay logic so if it detected a problem in two bays the PLCs shut down the plant. The cabinets were part of SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) that monitored the plant operations.
As you see I miss not the work but the people. We were all there for over twenty-five years so we all knew out jobs and at our peak I had forty tech in my department. They were all highly motivated and knew their jobs inside and out, so how do you mange them? Simply, you don’t.
I had a list of jobs on the wall listing their due dates and I had a pile of work orders. They picked out what they wanted to do and did it. I saw my job was to keep management off their backs and if they needed some see that they can get it. I found out in the fancy college class on management that style is called Laissez-faire management style. I always gave them credit when the job went well and took the blame for when it didn’t.
The day I got my pink slip was the day I began living my true life. I went skipping out the building waving the pink slip, we were bought out by a Japanese company and they shut down the factory and use job shops instead to do the work like we did.
However, we got the last laugh. They went 2 billion, that is with a “B,” dollars in debt! You see we knew that each custom I&C (Instrumental & Control) system is unique and there will be design mistakes made “You can’t put that there! There is no way to gain access to it, you have to move it here.” we were a cost center so the engineering mistakes was just T&M (Time and Material) but with a job shop they took out their pencils and started calculating. And that was their 2 billion dollar lesson.
Do I miss work? No but I miss the social aspect of work and that’s why I don’t understand this “work-at-home.
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