"You get out on the shop floor and you may have four different PLC
suppliers, four smart controllers and three pre-packaged software vendors," says JOHN JENKINS, CEO of TAVA Technologies Inc.(Denver, CO), which specializes in Y2K problems for manufacturing.
Jenkins says one major food processing company recently took inventory and found it had more than 6,000 unique items to check at 60 separate installations.
Year 2000 problems also affect plant floor systems such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). "Many control systems have trouble with trending data that spans the Year 2000 rollover," says Andrew Chatha, President of Automation Research Corp. (Dedham, MA). "Some applications will stop collecting data altogether."
TRENDING A PROBLEM?
"In the process industries, many users collect all process related and time tagged data in a process information management system (PIMS), so careful attention must be paid to the interfaces of control systems with a PIMS," states an ARC white paper on Year 2000 solutions. The consensus is that most distributed control systems won't have control issues with the Year 2000 rollover, but trending could be a problem."
The first step in fixing Y2K problems is knowing what they might be. Jenkins says that means conducting an inventory of your facility to see what might be affected. This includes identifying every single piece of programmable or programmed equipment in your operation. It doesn't have to be user programmable. If it has programming burned into it by the manufacturer, it represents a risk. However, those are only potential risks. Just because something iss programmable doesn't mean it will go belly up on January 1, 2000.
The next step is to check with the manufacturer to see if the identified hardware and software are Y2K compliant. Manufacturers vary tremendously in their approach to the Y2K problem.
"We have a database of vendor compliance information on close to
5,000 items," Jenkins says. "Twenty percent of that is non-compliant and another 20% is suspect. 'That means the policy may be unclear, unstated, or the vendors aren't arround any more."
...
Commercial hardware and software isn't the only problem. There are also the scripts, shells, applications, batch files, etc. written in-house. These are particularly fertile grounds for Y2K problems.
"We recently did about eight plants for a major food processor," says Jenkins. "We found that 15% of their hardware was non-compliant. However 70% of their custom code was suspect. When we examined it, we found 20% of it was non-compliant."
MANAGING AUTOMATION, Jan 1998 - Excellent industry trade journal. Read by tens of thousands of engineers & managers in manufacturing.
EXCERPTS CONTRIBUTED BY: R.B. Golfing Jan 14 '98
TAVA's PlantY2KOne Website:
planty2kone.com |
