The cost of failure

[swatts]

Hello My Sweets

This article is a plea! Sadly the people who really would benefit from listening to this plea will probably not read it, but it may add power to you my dear readers.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DEAR CUSTOMER IF YOU SPEND $$$$$$$ ON SOFTWARE, DON'T SPEND 0.000$ ON THE HARDWARE IT WILL LIVE ON!

Most LabVIEW programmers in the western world charge between $50 and $250 an hour. Most software that is written will cost in excess of $10k.

As discussed many times in this blog a well designed program will cost less to maintain than a badly designed one. Taking software maintenance out of the loop, let's reflect on some of the uses of our systems and how saving money on the hardware can be a bad thing?

Production Test

A reasonable percentage of our systems will be part of the production environment, generally these projects are costed on a payback basis, this payback is generally ❤️ years (if you can get the payback <2 years you are almost certain to get the job!). For most industry sectors the expected life time for a test system will be >5 years.

The cost of failure here can be as follows......

• Inability to produce
• Reduced capacity to produce
• Disruption in the product flow
• Poor test quality
• Lateness
• Cost of repair/support

Monitoring

We are looking for accurate measurements here, generally these projects are justified on a pre-existing failures and retrospectively costed on the cost of putting the failure right. They usually sit on the machines for years.

The consequences of failure here could be...

• Machine Damage
• Machine downtime
• Poor decision making

Control

Here we usually need lack of down-time and responsiveness, these projects are often new requirements or replacement systems. The costing therefore is a pretty standard process improvement or cost saving.

In addition to the costs discussed earlier we have......

• Difficulty tuning
• Poor machine capability
• Destruction of the thing being controlled
• Safety

In summary bespoke software is expensive, LabVIEW is usually written to do high value and important things. The cost of failure for the customer is high!

For us the real cost of failure is that the project fails and is not used, this can result in loss of business and reputation. i.e. damned expensive!

SO WHY THE HELL IS SO MUCH OF MY SOFTWARE BEING PUT ON $200 DELL VOSTROS!!!

By way of example here's a case study...

We provided the software to control a vacuum furnace designed by a bespoke machine manufacturer to a large Aerospace company, the total cost of the system was approximately $350k, our software services were probably <10% of the total cost. To save money they used second hand vacuum equipments, scrimped on the sensors, heating elements and lid control. The prospects for the job were that we could modernise vacuum furnace design and sell these on, we could also replace the aerospace companies 4 vacuum furnaces. The system never worked correctly in all the areas where money was "saved", we suffered additional software costs struggling to get the system working. Unsurprisingly none of the prospective work surfaced.

On top of this consider the concept of rare resource, in most companies the guys and girls who write the bespoke software are usually bogged down with far too much work. Isn't it just good business to ensure this resource is used efficiently and believe me trying to get cheap-ass hardware to work is not efficient!!!

Starting the week in feisty mood.

Lots of love

Steve