A Personal Note

With this post, I am going to take a brief respite from the political commentary and post a recollection of a personal note.

Back in the early 1980's, I worked at the Cummins Engine Company in Indiana in various IT positions eventually advancing to the position of a CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) specialist. CIM was the organization of computers, machine tools, robots, automated inspection stations, etc. to produce a product in a way that promised huge leaps in productivity and quality. CIM was intended to eventually lead to the near fully automated factory which, at the time, was frequently referred to as the "lights our factory". Most of the technology used by CIM was available off the shelf and the challenge was to integrate the technology so as to enable automated manufacturing. At that time, CIM was new and CIM specialists needed to be proficient with all major IT technologies as well as know manufacturing methods. I might install and configure a database such as Oracle one day, install an operating system on VAX computer another day or write some custom software another day. Consequently, we CIM specialists were very rare. I used to say frequently that I loved my job and would not want any job where I couldn't make a ton of metal dance with the press of an ENTER key.

In around 1985, I was the CIM specialist working on a project to implement an automated machining cell (computers, machine tools, robots, etc.) to produce replacement water pumps for diesel engines. Diesel engines can be rebuilt and consequently last for maybe 20 years. Consequently, with the different engine series and engineering changes to each engine series over the years, there were hundreds of water pumps that might be ordered. Long story short, the project was a huge success and, at the time, was ranked as being in the top 100 factory automation installations in the world. I was invited to speak at major trade conferences and participated in a project with Purdue University to assist the university in designing courses for manufacturing technology.

In 2000 while driving to Florida, I stopped in Indiana to see a friend with whom I had worked on the water pump manufacturing automation project. He explained to me that Cummins had decided to outsource as much manufacturing as possible to reduce costs and the water pump cell had been sold to a former manufacturing engineer at Cummins who was producing the replacement water pumps required by Cummins on a contract basis. My friend asked if I would like to see the equipment that I had worked on so we went to see it. As it happens, the manufacturing engineer who purchased the equipment had a side line business as a pig farmer. In the middle of his pig farm, he had erected a large metal building in which he had installed the machine tools shorn of all the computers and robots. What had been one of the most advanced manufacturing installations in the world was now sitting in a building next to piles of pig manure.

I suppose that there are several lessons in this story. Be proud of what you do and not what you have comes to mind as being at the top of the list. With some changes to the software perhaps I could have made pigs dance.