John, what Ron meant about "underwent" was the LP unit underwent the tests and is still being tested. DEHC is doing long term tests under steady state conditions to be sure they believe the process will pass muster. Right, Ron?
I've gotten the impression that the new orders we expect are from customers who are actually groups who must work out their own deals among themselves. These people really do want to use GRNO units very much. That begs the question, if they want them that badly, why don't they just enter the stupid order and get it over with?
The answer probably has to do with getting all their own Is dotted and Ts crossed. There are new ideas that crop up and unforeseen disasters that happen to delay the finish of the order preparation process. These delays drive the management right up the wall. I know, I've been on both sides of the process.
As an example, set the Way Back Machine to the 1980s. Yours truly usually worked in a matrix management arrangement where I worked on projects run by several different managers. I would usually get called in a project after it had been in development for some months and had gotten into sufficient trouble that they needed a senior engineer to bail the project out of some residual bind. I would whip out a solution, build, test, and document it, and everybody would be satisfied because it meant we would still have a job next year. Typically the project was on the hairy edge of being late, and had the intense interest of management. Then somebody would come to me and say they needed me to change a dimension a 1/32 of an inch and needed me to make up a change order package and walk it through the plant. So since it was for a military order, it was under document control, so I had to hunt down the quality assurance manager, production control manager, reliability manager, and everybody else on the sign off roster. Then the head of document control goes to management and whines that we are never going to be able to document this thing because Charlie King is still making changes, and I get called in ...
Charles |
