What is the best piece of advice you can give to someone who wants to buy automation?
Mike Borders, Eastman Chemical: Start early to identify the benefit story. Begin today to measure the key indicators, such as reliability, that you can use to justify automation projects in the future. Develop a good understanding of the business drivers for a particular process area, because you will be forced to match your automation plans to the corporate business plans. You may have a new system in place that you’ve just installed—that’s the time to start your measurements. Someday, you’ll want to upgrade that system or do new projects, and you’ll need that data.
Make sure that you involve your suppliers early on in the purchasing process. Develop strong communications and share what you can with your suppliers, so they understand your needs and can propose the most cost-effective solution. Communications are key, both within and outside of your organization.
Francisco Campa, The Dixie Group: Don’t just buy a new system, install it, and forget about it for five years. When you make your purchase, look at the cost of equipment, but also calculate and budget for, the costs for implementation, training, maintenance, service and ongoing technology migration. It’s much cheaper to maintain a system than to completely replace it. Make a commitment to upgrade your system every six months to a year.
Larry O’Brien, ARC: Apply long-term strategic thinking to your purchasing strategies. The main sticking point between engineering and the purchasing department is initial cost vs. total cost of ownership.
There is no single application that can calculate total cost of ownership. Users can implement an asset management system to track equipment maintenance costs and downtime, but they also need to establish a baseline of metrics to measure lifecycle costs. A good starting place is to use a system that has a single database, single point of data entry, and a common hardware and software platform.
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