Procurement poses problems for every company from time to time, and it
was one of those times for Samuel Jackson Inc., of Lubbock, Texas.
Nestled in the heart of the largest cotton patch in the world, the builder of cotton-gin equipment learned that its programmable logic controller (PLC) of choice had become obsolete and would no longer be available. Its engineering staff would have to find a new one that made sense for its dryers, heaters and other moisture-control equipment.

It was then that the staff came across an advertisement for a brand of PLC that was much cheaper than the one its distributor was offering. The downside was that these controllers were available by mail order over the Internet from AutomationDirect, a supplier halfway across the country in Cumming, Ga. So, besides wondering about the reliability of a controller unknown to them, the engineers also wondered whether a faraway company would be able to stand by its products and provide technical support when they needed it.

These are the typical concerns that arise whenever users consider buying automation from the relatively new class of online suppliers that have adopted an Amazon.com-type business model. Making the decision even more difficult is the fact that many of these suppliers disappeared when the dot-com bubble burst earlier in the decade, and many of the survivors have been seeing only slow growth since then. So, the natural question is, why should an end-user give up its relationship with its local distributor?

Five to one

For Jackson, the initial answer was price. “We could buy five of the PLCs for the cost of one of the ones that we had been using,” explains Mark Gentry, a controls specialist at Jackson. “We decided that, even if the product was not reliable, we could replace it a few times before we would spend as much money.” He and his colleagues decided to give the Koyo PLC from AutomationDirect a try, and developed a new heater based on it.

They discovered that their initial fears were unfounded. Not only was the product reliable, but so was the technical support. In addition to providing tutorials and documentation online, AutomationDirect runs a phone-support hotline that usually connects callers to “hands-on” technicians within three minutes. “The technicians on our staff have live equipment in their offices,” explains Gary Marchuk, the supplier’s director of business development. “So, if someone is calling about a PLC programming question, our technician is looking at the same software, live, with the caller.”

This service is important to Jackson because its engineers do their own programming in order to reap the greatest return from the company’s investment in both the PLC and its designs. “We buy a fairly inexpensive PLC and pack it with 36 analog inputs that we update every 50 milliseconds,” says Gentry. “In the past, we learned any PLC that we’ve used better than the local distributor did.”

In the company’s heaters, for example, a PLC modulates the gas valves directly, rather than overseeing a prepackaged combustion controller from one of the big automation manufacturers. So the engineering staff writes and optimizes its own combustion-control logic for the burners that it has designed for drying cotton.

They also program the PLCs to extract diagnostics and provide the necessary safety interlocks. “A cotton gin is a fairly unique environment because it runs 24-seven for about three months of the year,” says Gentry. “Then, it is shut down, the doors are locked and nobody looks at it again until the next year.”

He reports that he has not been able to stump AutomationDirect’s technicians nearly as often as he used to stump his old distributors’. The reason is that these technicians have an advantage: They are supporting the PLCs and human-machine interfaces (HMIs) made by their employer’s parent company. The technicians, therefore, have access to more resources and tend to know more about their own company’s products than most distributors would.

In the few cases in which Gentry did stump technical support, the technician was able to contact the design engineers in Japan and have an answer for him the next day. In a couple of cases, the solution involved new firmware. “When you attempt to do that through a distributor, it can take two weeks before you even get to the right person to ask the question,” says Gentry.

Is it in stock?

Another kind of reliability that he likes is availability: AutomationDirect almost always has what he needs on the shelf when he needs it, ...