The life-changing magic of knowing what the heck you're talking about, or in slightly less churlish terms, the value of having the highest level of application knowledge at the point of sale.
I was lucky enough to start out my professional life by participating in an apprentice program run by the Society of Plastics Industry. Back in the late seventies they were starting to worry about the impending retirement of all the mold makers who’d learned the trade just after WWII. Many started as tool and die makers, and then grew into mold-making as the plastics industry grew.
As part of the apprenticeship, we were given a toolbox with the basic tools an apprentice would need. On the first day of the program the tools were useless to us, as we needed to learn how to use them and what they were for. Over the first six months of my apprenticeship, I was trained in the proper use and care of the tools, at which point their value was manifest and easily demonstrated. I fell in love with the idea that for every task, there was an optimal tool.
Early in my career at Gibson Engineering, I was exposed to PLCs. Joe Clancy, class of 1939 at Northeastern University and employee number two at Gibson taught me how to program a PLC. One of my customers did compression molding of cosmetic container lids and had a bunch of homemade compression molding machines that were controlled by motor-driven cam timers. The sequences and times of each step in the process were difficult to adjust, and the electromechanical nature of the control devices made them prone to failure and mechanical wear. The first program I ever wrote for PLCs used a shift register as the overall architecture controlling the machine sequence of those machines.
For the next couple of years, every PLC program I wrote used a shift register as the main sequence control architecture. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. At about this time, I had the opportunity to upgrade the controls on a four-slide die-casting machine for another customer. The challenge for my shift-register strategy was that depending on which parts were being manufactured, the sequence had to change. All of the steps were the same, they just didn’t always happen in the same sequence. I had taken to reading the programming manual in my spare time, learning at home in the evenings what each of the instructions did and how to apply them. I would read about an instruction and then try to imagine why it was there and what was the use case for it.
I’ll interject here that when I first started at Gibson, the PLCs we sold were manufactured by Eagle Signal, and the PLC was branded as the EPTAK controller. Within months of starting at Gibson, we partnered with Mitsubishi Electric Automation and started selling their PLCs. As I fell in love with learning about the tools in my mold maker's toolbox, so I fell in love with learning about the tools in the Mitsubishi PLC toolbox. The instructions are the tools, and the PLC is the toolbox. The Mitsubishi toolbox was powerful, and the reason is more easily understood if you know the story of the way their product was developed, but that’s a story for another day. Back to my four-slide die-casting application…
I’d discovered an instruction during my reading that I thought may simplify the writing of a program that had to run different sequences depending on the part that was being manufactured. In the F Series PLC by Mitsubishi, there was an IST instruction. The IST instruction enabled state-level programming. They also had the ability to do indirect addressing. By offsetting the state numbers with the offset registers, we could easily change the order of the sequence. This was pretty advanced stuff for a controller that cost a couple of hundred dollars back in 1988.
I sold a lot of PLCs because of the ease of use that came along with such a powerful instruction set. The IST instruction was one of the most effective tools I used to differentiate the product, enabling me to help more OEMs and End Users alike.
If you are in a role where you are selling, or if your role is helping someone who is selling, take the time to study the literature, websites, and manuals of your products, then use your imagination to figure out how the tools in your product toolbox can benefit your current and future customers. It’s hard to be passionate about things you don’t understand, and it’s hard to be successful without passion.
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