Cable management

D1PP1N

A guy at work retired and a "good newer" test cell opened up and my boss offered me a newer test cell to work in. I was really happy about it but after being there a few days the amount of neglect this test cell has received over the last 18 years is pretty bad. Im going to be very busy and irritated fixing up the test cell. This is a small example of something so simple to do that no planning or effort was taken. 

There isnt any reason for this we arent working on book time. The bad thing is we cant fix some of this while running so ill have to do it little by little over time. I need to take pictures of this stuff and give it to my boss when it comes to yearly review time so he can see the impact a person can make ina test cell. I get shit from people for taking marginally longer on jobs than others and after seeing this mess now i know why i take longer. 

isaeagle4031

More like mismanagement. Eek!

Nicholas_23

Ive been in the IT world most of my working career , I think what happens is , people have a knee jerk reaction to get something going and do so in a way to reduce downtime. Once something gets plugged in, and its up and running, it usually gets left there until it breaks again or gets replaced. Even if it get prettied up it usually turns into a rats nets in a few years from my experience. I even heard one douche bag call it job security because it would take a solid two weekends of down down time to get things straightened out.  

jhollander

You guys don't have to meet TIA stands?

D1PP1N

Just QS and ISO standards. Nothing for cable management unless its in an area were people need to walk it needs to have a wire way. This is in a corner where no one can see it. 

rjj45

I"ve worked in in IT, specifically networking for years, and I've seen worse closets, much worse. The key is making mid-level managers aware that messy cabling greatly increases the failure rate, and greatly increases time to repair. IE: it'll come back to bite 'em.

greywarden

Go to lowes and pick up a couple packs of velcro cable ties. That ought to help out a lot.

jr@mac

It is also rooted in end-users not willing to gracefully accept downtime "now", so "fixing it right" is often balanced against "some end user with no fucking clue what it takes to actually restore something to baseline and will NOT stop crying and whining and pissing and moaning". So, we hurry up and make the crybabies happy, knowing full well we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we ever have to open it back up. 

jr@mac

Not that 15 years of maintenance has jaded me, or anything

jhollander

Fighting that battle now.  Multiple same equipment failures, results in huge manufacturing downtime causing missed customer deliveries.  Why? because they would not PM & test the equipment. Why? because it requires downtime to PM & test which could potentially cause missed customer deliveries.

Will there be another failure? Yes. When?  We cannot predict without PM & testing...OK lets run like this...

D1PP1N

Lmfao i feel like we all work for the same company. As long as your stuff is running they dont care what kind of shape its in. Good to know it will be the same no matter where i go. They keep reducing our budget and nothing has been fixed or upgraded since 2009. They just keep band-aiding everything. 

PWRRYD

Same crap here pretty much.  The grass is the same green on the other side... the brown spots are just in different spots 

dcibel

A few stray wires as this  panel is was still a work in progress when the photo was taken, but I thought I'd throw in some fairly clean wiring to the mix.

squamishdroc

dcibel said:

A few stray wires as this  panel is was still a work in progress when the photo was taken, but I thought I'd throw in some fairly clean wiring to the mix.

What is that all for?

jr@mac

Looks like any number of machines in manufacturing. Looks like home to me - and goes to show my theory that panduit covers are hiding out in a parallel universe with random socks and 10mm sockets...

jr@mac

jhollander said:

Fighting that battle now.  Multiple same equipment failures, results in huge manufacturing downtime causing missed customer deliveries.  Why? because they would not PM & test the equipment. Why? because it requires downtime to PM & test which could potentially cause missed customer deliveries.

Will there be another failure? Yes. When?  We cannot predict without PM & testing...OK lets run like this...

I filled out a "5 Whys" form along those lines one time. It was not well received by the lean coordinator lol

Our CEO went on a fun-filled "lean and mean" tour several months ago. He came back with "autonomous" and "predictive" buzzwords vis-a-vis our maintenance program. He has expressed some frustrations that we are not at that stage yet. You can about imagine, I am sure. 

I am slowly moving my department forward along those lines, but we have an absolute wildcard on our equipment that is proving to make predictive maintenance programs elusive. Well, one wildcard and one serious limitation.

The wildcard is we are an USDA facility with a very paranoid washdown process. I have found water in Nema4X and IP67+ enclosures, for example. Plus, a lot of our equipment is simply not intended to be washed down under any circumstances. So, the chemical and water has resulted in a lot of failures - especially seriously annoying electrical failures. Ugh. On the positive side, my preventative maintenance program is essentially rendered moot as we destroy equipment faster than we wear it out. Our equipment is constantly having new bearings installed, new motors, etc. Expensive, but - I do not have to schedule downtime to swap out a few bearings, it is inherent to our washdown process. 

Due to the above, we lack any actual historical data from which to draw predictive maintenance tasks. Explaining this to a salesman turned CEO is difficult - especially when every fucking lean expert pretends every facility is a picture perfect Toyota plant. When they are selling their system, they ignore plants that have failed at lean or that have had only very moderate success or write them off as "not trying hard enough". Lean worked extremely well in the electronics plant (and I enjoyed it, usually) - I am not seeing much evidence of it working at a high level in this plant. Food is competitive and marginal profits prevail - so it should be the poster boy for lean systems. Alas. 

jr@mac

...and I understand the cabinet is a WIP. People who have opened enough equipment panels in their career will understand the panduit comment

jhollander

We've done every acronym'ed maintenance plan. I even travelled the world to benchmark maintenance practices at plants in other countries. 

Lean works for manufacturing along with theory of constraints. This helps our manufacturing to set priorities and establish critical equipment.  Our maintenance plans use the priorities and critical equipment within the frame work of our quality policy (plan, do check, act) to evaluate risks (yearly) and set plans to abate the risks.

While it sounds complicated, it's quite freeing.  Only critical or high risk items get a PM, everything else is run to failure.  We don't measure everything only the critical items that impact manufacturing are measured.

After re-reading this I should probably delete it, I come here to get away from work...
   

dcibel

squamishdroc said:

dcibel said:

A few stray wires as this  panel is was still a work in progress when the photo was taken, but I thought I'd throw in some fairly clean wiring to the mix.

What is that all for?

It's an industrial PLC cabinet for a small town Water Treatment Plant. The brains are in the top, the middle is all terminals for field device connections (each device gets its own fuse), and relays. In the bottom is an alarm autodialer.

Once these things are turned on they are live and must be operational 24/7, so it's very important for every wire to be clearly labelled and match the drawing set, so that it can be serviced easily without shutting anything down.

Panduit covers are still off on this one as it was incomplete when the photo was taken.

squamishdroc

dcibel said:

squamishdroc said:

dcibel said:

A few stray wires as this  panel is was still a work in progress when the photo was taken, but I thought I'd throw in some fairly clean wiring to the mix.

What is that all for?

It's an industrial PLC cabinet for a small town Water Treatment Plant. The brains are in the top, the middle is all terminals for field device connections (each device gets its own fuse), and relays. In the bottom is an alarm autodialer.

Once these things are turned on they are live and must be operational 24/7, so it's very important for every wire to be clearly labelled and match the drawing set, so that it can be serviced easily without shutting anything down.

Panduit covers are still off on this one as it was incomplete when the photo was taken.

Thats cool. I work on ambulances at my shop and all the wiring is very neat and tidy just like this. Each wire has the circuit number and name of the circuit printed right on the wire jacket the whole length of the wire. Makes diagnosing very easy.

Nicholas_23

Res install/upgrade , we extended the rack to another room 15 feet away. The headend was in the furnace room and I think they are water issues in there? Had to splice it all in , I know its not optimal but its tough in an existing build with out conduit.  

Tom_S

I love the look of well done wiring loom. Nice work! It reminds me of the wiring in old Tektronix tube scopes.