Need Automation Help?

If your company is a small to medium manufacturer with some amount of automation, you are in a similar situation to many of the companies that reach out to us. You might even be frustrated with your current integrator and equipment vendors.

You might even have some of the same frustrating challenges:

• The custom code you paid for is locked down and impossible to maintain yourself

• The support services you’ve paid for aren’t reliable or are unavailable from vendors, past/current integrators

• Your company is told to wait for months before they can get on the schedule for future project roll-outs

• Other integrators will just assign any available employee on a given week to work on the project, not engineers who already speak your language and who know your operations inside and out

• Once a project is rolled out, the integrator or vendor’s training for your team is inadequate or unavailable

• Your current integrator or vendors have no knowledge or experience with the new technologies you need help with or are interested in implementing

Sadly, the list of complaints above grows every day. Since starting out in 2011, we heard these frustrations far too often. We decided there had to be a better way and we created one: the Corso Systems Process!

The Corso Systems Process

1. Start with a Small Project

   Starting a new relationship means getting to know one another. From our side of the table this means we need to learn to speak your language, understand your operations, meet your team, and provide the specific solutions to solve your problems. Likewise, you can meet our team as well as vet our skills and results against the sales call and proposal. We want you to know that your investment in time and money will have a great return.

   To accomplish these goals with the least risk, we like to start with a small project. One of our most successful long-term relationships began with the small project (rebuilding a pressure monitoring screen for a fire suppression system in Ignition). By starting small, we quickly demonstrated our design capabilities, communication style, and how quickly we became fluent in the language of their company. Then, we continued improving the other areas of their manufacturing process. Ultimately, we integrated their entire business system technology stack to automatically get their critical production data where it needed to go.

   Starting with a small project quickly gets you a useful project without a large cost up front. During this first project we will get to know each other without waiting months before you see results. We’ll learn how to best communicate with your company, and it all gives us time together to plan out where to focus next to have the maximum impact for your investments.

   This step of the process defined within our Power Packs approach. Power Packs give you everything you need to get up and running using our well-tested framework and templates to get your ROI as quickly as possible.

2. Understand Your Culture

   Even if you added a few zeroes to your budget, brought in the smartest manufacturing minds in the world, and had no technology limits, without the understanding of how a project fits into your company culture, your achievements would still be limited.

   The word automation might be scary for your staff. They might worry that you’re planning to replace them with robotics, or ruin your data management processes. Your IT team will worry that your network and infrastructure will be wreaked with havoc, and someone will be coming in with suggestions on how to improve things that might expose problems with how your team is performing their tasks.

   By starting with a small project and collaborating with your team we learn how you operate, who needs to be involved at each step along the way, and how to communicate most effectively across your organization.

   We are all on the same team, working together to help you do what you do better. Yes, some of your team’s fears may come to fruition through the course of a project, however in most cases those fears are overblown and effective communication throughout the project will help put everyone at ease.

   By understanding your current cultural landscape we can help you figure out what needs to change to support your investments. What got you here won’t get you to where you are going, and we can help make the transition as easy as possible.

   In our experience, automation technology helps make your team more effective. It also makes their jobs easier, less stressful, and simplifies communication across your company.

3. Expand Your Integrations to the Next Level

   During the initial small project, we will collaborate to figure out what comes next. This next step will build on to the initial foundation. We work with your team to understand their needs, and which integrations would have the most impact right now (and next). This step will set you up with forward momentum in the future, and help us assemble a plan together to make it all a reality.

   By understanding your culture we work with your team to get their feedback, message the plan across the company, address any concerns, and leave plenty of room for questions and discussions along the way.

   This approach helps your team manage the cultural shifts required for new projects to be successful, addresses your team’s fears and frustrations, and lets them be an active participant in the process taking ownership of what is being built.

   Many times, talking to a company’s operators will help us learn how they run the process equipment. In fact, an operator from the company that began with the fire suppression project shared that said he had to type in a page worth of data for every batch. To make matters worse, this was very difficult on the touch screen interface he had to use. When we discussed the process with the entire project team, we realized that most of this information already existed in a database, but there wasn’t a way to access this existing data. We created a new screen so that the operator didn’t need to type in all of the information, he only needed to use a dropdown on one field to enter a 5-8 character lot number to select the part, the rest of the data was pulled in automatically. The operator was thrilled to be involved in positive change at the company, his life was easier, and this change allowed them to run two additional batches through each piece of equipment per shift due to the time savings from eliminating all the typing.

4. Train Your Team

   As we complete more integrations with your company, we have a great opportunity to train your team to use the tools, and get feedback on how to improve the tools. This allows everyone to dive into a continuous improvement cycle as we continue to work together. We can continue improving what we’ve built in the past as our relationship with your people grows, more data becomes available, and as everyone on your team becomes familiar with the possibilities.

   The approach can be as simple as providing training to operators for using the process control systems we build, or as complex as working with maintenance and IT staff so that they know how to maintain your systems internally.

   We never lock down information, expertise, or our code, and we give every customer the training and education they need to manage as much of the system as they desire. In some cases we are effectively the Process Controls team for our customers, managing all aspects of the system, and in other cases the customer manages day to day operations and only calls us in for tech support or new projects. Wherever you lie on that spectrum, we will work with your team to train them on everything they need to know.

   When possible, we include operations manuals, videos, and other documentation right where people need it in the system, so that they can easily get up to speed on any of your technology.

5. Build and Implement a Future Roadmap

   Corso Systems’ goal is to deliver the solutions you need to run your business most effectively.

   As we work together on projects, we will better understand your goals and what it takes to achieve them. This may mean simply providing ongoing support for what we built originally, or continuing to develop and deploy new technology across multiple facilities.

   We work with you to develop a long term roadmap for future projects and implementations. Not only does this help you plan out future possibilities, it helps you manage your overall budget, needs, and expectations over time.

   This roadmap always includes how we will support everything we have built so far, and everything new we will deploy over time.

   From the very first project on to the next steps with a likely larger scope, we will continue to prove our value to your company, and help you get to the next level.

Ready to Try the Corso Systems Process?

Keep reading to learn more, or contact us to get started right away