Industrial Electronic Repair

When maintenance departments send their Industrial Electronics out for repair, they often overlook the problem description.  Even those companies that tag their failed units don’t always require their technicians put down an accurate, detailed description of the failure.  This does not seem like a priority when your machine is down and production has stopped.  But taking a few minutes to communicate the failure can be extremely important.  The bottom line is that giving an accurate, detailed problem description can save you time and money and help provide a higher quality repair.

Lets look at a couple of scenarios.  The first one is an emergency situation.  Your machine has gone down.  Your staff has done its troubleshooting and has determined that the drive that controls one of the motors is the failure.  You don’t have a spare and a new drive must be built by the manufacturer and won’t ship for 4-6 weeks.  Your only option is to send it to your repair house and request an expedited repair.  You get it to them and they begin their troubleshooting, but the only thing you have communicated is that it is not working.  There is no visual evidence of failure, so that technician has to start testing and troubleshooting every section of the unit  to find the problem.   This can be very time consuming.  All the while, your company is loosing money, because you are not making product.  Not to mention the fact that the Plant Manager is camped at your office for updates.   Had your repair vendor been informed that the drive was not communicating with feedback circuit from the motor, the technician could have gone right to that area, troubleshooting only those components and fixed your problem in a fraction of the time at a reduced cost to you.

The second scenario actually happens much more often.  You have a failure.  The problem is discovered.  The failed unit is replaced by one of the spares on your shelf.  Your production is quickly restored and all is well, for the time being.  This happens a couple of times over a period of a couple of months and your spares are getting low.  You go to the pile of failed units and send them off for repair.  But, you can’t remember what the symptoms were, so the problem description reads “Not Working”.  Your repair house gets them and quotes you in the upper range of their repair cost, because they know they are going to have to spend more time determining and fixing the problem.  Plus, the possibility of missing something increases when the area of failure is not known.  Because even a tested unit may not reveal intermittant problems like the stress of machine duty.