Make the Most of Migration

摘要

YOUR GOAL: maximize the efficiency of your equipment while keeping costs under control. This sometimes translates to a modernization effort that will improve throughput by enabling decreased cycle times not feasible with current equipment. A modernization project will help you reduce lifecycle costs. Old equipment gets more expensive to maintain over time and, if you upgrade, you'll decrease downtime by having systems that are easy to maintain and troubleshoot - ultimately improving your quality metrics and cutting scrap rates. What you certainly don't want is being forced to launch such a project because of an emergency. Take the case of one company that was running a legacy system that included three of the nine controller units the vendor ever manufactured. No conversion utilities existed for the units, so every change required manual re-programming. Multiple legacy platforms, uncoordinated alarms that weren't tied together, poorly maintained documentation and lack of drawings meant the company continually faced the need for extensive engineering.