Getting There First and Don’t Be a Problem Solver Special Note: While this method solves the problem, it requires little skill or forward thinking. This story takes 3 minutes to read. If you are in a time crunch, skip the story and jump to the moral of the story. A few years ago we studied the Mechatronics Industry, which is the marriage of mechanical systems (gears, belts, electric motors and hydraulics) and electronic systems (computers, PLC’s, sensors and digital screens). Along the way, our work discovered mechanical distributors were almost always the first to learn of customer projects. Why? Customers designed mechanical portions of their system ahead of the electronic portion. In all but a few situations, the mechanics were engineered 60-90 days ahead of electronic controls. We believed this gave the person selling both the mechanical components and electronic controls a competitive advantage over a “controls only” seller. Knowing about and working on solut...

This month the fine folks at InTech Magazine were kind enough to ask me to write an editorial on the automation market.  My guess is they really wanted someone who was “long in the tooth” to comment on the cavalcade of changes in product technology – "a back in my day the PLCs ran on kerosene" sort of piece.   Being a distribution guy, I penned “ Selecting an Automation Distributor?  It’s about finding the right stuff ”.  In the automation world, over 89% of the customers buy from distributors.  Yet many are tossing dimes down the drain because they aren’t tapping into the right distributor services.  Catch us on Lulu.com In the article I charged customers with asking their distributors these questions: ·          What can your organization do to improve the uptime of my facility? ·          Do you have a plan to help us drive down our cost of doin...