All,
The following is the content of an e-mail I sent to a group of people yesterday discussing the embedded systems problems and TPRO.
The next post will be the response from Mr Michael Daniel, aka Josef. Very constructive and informative indeed. I learned quite a few four letter words.
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TPRO's business plan
Thanks everybody for educating me on the Y2K problems. Let me propose
that we attack the problem this way. Pretend this is your own
company, you're going to start a company doing Y2K work for embedded
systems. You go to the SBA or to the bank and apply for a loan. The
first thing they'll ask you is to write a business plan. You'll need to understand clearly the market and which sector of the market you are going after, and the type of service you're going to offer. So here are the questions to guide you in writing the business plan: (I am sure a lot of them may be already answered on the thread)
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Define market
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Which sectors of the industry are likely to have problems?
Manufacturing (type of product), electric plants, nuclear plant,
medical instruments, etc.
Size of market?
Which sector of the industry is TPRO after? Which sector does TPRO
have the expertise to do the work?
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Define service that TPRO is offering
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What type of work is TPRO going to do?
- Sell CDs that contain database
- Assessment of Y2K problems
- Fix code or hardware (which kind - language, processors, types of PLC)
- Replace affected systems
- Planning and supervising Y2K work (work done by other companies)
- others
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Define methodology
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How is TPRO going to assess the Y2K problems?
- take inventory of plant equipment and systems
- create block diagrams
- runs some kind of diagnostics software
- use B-Tree testing equipment (LOL)
- set the date to year 2000 and see if the system fails, then using
block diagrams, isolate the problem.
- other
How is TPRO going to fix the problems?
- fix code at TPRO's site
- fix code at customer site
- replace with Allen-Bradley PLCs (TPRO may have more expertise with
PLC than with micro-processors)
- other
How is TPRO going to do the testing?
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Revenue estimate
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What is the percentage of revenue does TPRO plan to derive from Y2K
work?
Hourly charge? Charge per project?
Is Y2K work more profitable than regular factory automation work?
Manpower estimate.
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Competition
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Who are the competitors?
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There is much much more in a business plan. This is a rough sketch of
questions to ask ourselves.
To answer Ed's question: is the assessment an easy task?
My response is if it is too easy like setting the clock to year 2000
and finding out if the system fails, then the customers won't need
TPRO and they can do it themselves. TPRO will get called in by
companies that have great difficulty looking for Y2K problems and
isolating the problems. That's what I call shooting yourself in the
foot. The easy projects won't come to you but only the tough ones.
I don't have answers to all these questions. I think you guys/gals
know more than I do about TPRO. May be you can convince me that TPRO
is really into a very profitable business.
I am also confused by the term PLC that Ed uses. There are companies
such as Allen-Bradley that sell Programmable Logic Controllers. The
way I understand it, these are general purpose controllers that have
functions dedicated for controlling manufacturing plants. I
understand that the PLCs from Allen-Bradley are Y2K compliant. But
most of the embedded systems are also microprocessor-based systems.
So the Y2K compliance depends on the code that is programmed inside
those systems.
Mike. |
