Here, as a cautionary tale, is what can happen if the two departments don't see eye to eye. The names have been eliminated to--as they used to say ominously on Dragnet--protect the innocent. But the events described did take place at a major food manufacturer in the U.S. We'll call our narrator, who has major electrical engineering and controls responsibilities at the food manufacturer, Clarence.
"Not long ago," said Clarence in a recent phone conversation, "a packaging machinery manufacturer putting a system into one of our plants wanted their machine to have their own proprietary network. But we have multiple machines on multiple lines in our plants, and proprietary networks aren't compatible with the PCs we've come to settle on in most of these lines. So the packaging machinery OEM proposed using what might be called a translator. Essentially it's a driver that permits our PCs to receive and share information with the machines from this particular OEM.
"In EE we would not have endorsed such a solution, because in this day and age there's just no reason to have a proprietary network in the first place. Unfortunately, the OEM in this case worked through our IT and MES groups without communicating with EE, and those groups were convinced that the translator solution was the way to go. Among the results of this installation, networking cards that can ordinarily be purchased for $8.00 cost us $800 because they need to be compatible with a proprietary network. Worse, when data from those machines enters our network, it has the potential to crowd the network to the point of bringing it down. Remember, band width isn't infinite. Overloading a network in an office setting is one thing. You reboot the computers on the network and you're back up. In a manufacturing setting, it's a different story, even though you'll always have the IT guys telling you that 90% of your network band width is available. But if a device on the network starts chattering, you can eat up that 90% real quick and bring your plant network down. These are some of the issues we've had to contend with when IT and EE don't work cooperatively."
