The CITS Solution

The problem is a lack of understanding of the nature of a controls/automation solution. A building automation is an ongoing phenomenon and not a one time deal. At installation time we do have as built drawings which reflect a departure from the original physical specifications. But there also needs to be another document that delineates an "as programmed/as engineered" solution which reflects a departure from the original (not physical ) software and functional specifications and must include items that failed to be programmed. The items that were changed/deleted and/or worked around should be in a separate document called "as programmed/as engineered" as mentioned above. The document should clearly remark that these items should or may be addressed as service items and whether they need to be persued further or dropped( meaning they are acceptable as currently engineered). Then there needs to be a set of items "Failed to Configure" if you will that should be designated as items to be strictly persued and to be completed to an acceptable level. The provider and the owner can then put a price tag on these items and should be able to settle their financial differences through their attoneys.There may be some serious problems at this level. CITS can help put a price tag on each item from a purely technical point of view, taking into account the total numbner of  itrems and the critical intrinsic weight of each item. CITS can also help resolve any financial dispute of this kind  to everybody's satisfaction from a purely technical point of view and the prevailing market conditions/current price levels.

The above analysis shows how the "as built" philosopy needs top be expanded to address the entire automation problem. This is largelty ignored in all such contracts and other arrangements and all of the software specs are not qutite fully implemented which leads to serious deterioration of the systems and causes contual problems and apathy on the part of everybody and a teremendous expense for everybody. This is an essential part of the understanding of the the automation problem that I talked about earlier. You need to understand this thoroughtly if you are going to get a handle on your building maintenance apparatus.

So this seems to shed some light on the installation proiblem. But what about the other problems that we talked about specially the service and operating problems on a day today basis?

Notice that if the installation hurdle is done away with one way or another, that incidentally does say that the complexity of the automation problem is a problem rather than any fault of the provider both in their installation capability or the capability of their intrinsic system. That itself should help defuse a situation and then all sides can concentrate on the actual solution of the problem. At that level the original provider may be one of the solution providers. But remember now the problem will not be that of an installation nature. It will now be a "service problem"  since it is going to be an ongoing phenomenon and probably already past the installation stage.  This requires a whole new point of view on the part of the solution providers and the receivers. It is this new point of view that CITS claims is the key to a functioning , responsive and complete automation system. 

What is this point of view? This:

The owner needs to know that a Complete System requires the attention of a dedicated, qualified auomation engineer that has complete control of the all the programming/engineering tools of the provider automation system. Such a person may not necessarly be an employee of the provider but a 3rd party engineer doing this specialization for a living. Also the provider may not be able to address this type of service request since their engineering is farmed out and the local branch may not have any people that meet the completeness requirement that I mentioned above. Indeed, their competent people may be quite remote from the site and the engineering database may be going back and forth between the branch and the remote enginering site. It is even worse . The original Application writers may be in one country and the program/database creators may be in another country/city and the database writers may be unable to provide the functionality requested because the sales person (in yet another city!) misquoted the capabilities of the system or the Application writers ' s implementation of the functinalallity in question may be faulty or not fully debugged. To make matters worse, the providers although looking to sell something, may actually be looking for monopolistic advantages by withholding some items from sale by their rules of proprietay and "restricted products". The providers use these arguments to withold or restrict sales on items they know are not available on the open market. And yet they are selling a product that is inherently incomplete since the vendor does not have full control of its functionality. An example will make it clear:

Let us say you buy an exalted system from Honeywell such as EBI. This is a front end program and allows you to communicate with all Honeywell legacy systems and the latest controllers. But in order to configure these controllers you need a piece of software called CARE. They use this software to configure the controllers and then the resulting database is installed in the relevant controllers. But the customers cannot purchase the CARE Software without a hassle, if then.  So the custpomersr is stuck with the databse creatred for them. Any changes to this database must go through Honeywell and hence more business for them!  Also in oreder to keep or control ther bnusiness the software is not sold unless the customer sends somebody to get their so-called specialized training. There is actually nothing much wrong with this approach. It is their product and they can sell it the way they want to. But the customer has some rights too. If I am the customer and I buy some piece of software I shoulde be able to use it the way I want to. I should be able to get training on it from whatever source it is available at, if it is available. Think of Windows XP. I paid the price and now I own my copy to do whatever with it and I do not have to go to Microsoft or a Miocrsoft certified provider to get to know the use of it . I shouild be able to do it mayself if I want to. All technical literature and the specifications on all Windows OS are public and fully available to any user. The reasons are simply eceonomic. Honeywell or any other vendor cannot support or service their (definitely good) good products all on their own. The customer must have the freedom to do what they please with their purcdahsed product. The large vendors do not have anything really to worry about since most customers will indeed want them to be their supplier and supporter and it is not very often that the cautomer will need many changes with their databsase.

Conclusion:

The large vendors are overly and unnecessarily concerned with or afraid of competition and by their restrictive tactics are earnig a bad reputation but they are learning: Witnes the exclusion of proprietary requirements in many new  contracts and the use of "open" systems in the specialized markets and the popularity of the "open source software" such as Linux and Open Office. Microsoft is still making a lot of busness and Honeywell and Johnson are still around inspite of a host of other smaller vensor like us that are going in Honeywell's and others' wake. Indeed we have serviced and supported a lot of Honeywell systems that would otherwise be taken out and sold hundreds of thousamnds of honeywell products. Indeed it is the smaller vendors (but often more competent and hi-tech for special reasons) that allow the big one to continue without even being aware of it.

Pardon me for this digression but it is interesting to see how scare tactics are used and restrictions employed when they are not even needed in some cases and create needless bad blood. Moreover, it brings out to the open the complicated nature of the automation problem in our country. It also shows a piece of the complexity created by greed and the desire to control. To top it all, our laws are constantly interacting and reacting with the web of the ever changing market eceonomy of ours and the cycles of laws that are passed back and forth to fix one thing only to create another fix,  is the exact current state of our business and national economy. It is a veritable cat and mouse game with evrybody wanting a bigger piece including you and me!! Even the government at all levels is doing this. Witness the new regulatory agencies that are cropping up all the time and the fees that have to be paid just to support them are extracted from the very people they are trying to control. And these fees are not dimishimng but increasing both in amount and in the intrusive nature they are assuming. They are even contradictory so as to be ridiculousl. For example, there are places where rent control is in effect but the regulatory agency allows the power companies to raise their charges. How can the owner keep his rental business going when he cannot pass the utility incresase to the renters. This can be done only so long before landlords begin to unload the properties. Witness the real estate crisis! What do you thing is causing this? There are thousands of such contradictions in place, all brought in with good intentions but implemented and sponsored by those that need to know something about what these intentions are costing. The burden of of the overhaed and infrasturcture is choking the very eceonomy and peopole that ist is trying to protect and support. Like I said good intentions all over the place but no knmowledge of the economic cost of these good intentions. The government agencies are imagining that by rasising taxes and fees they can gather more money and balance the budget and that they can win. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The government agencies and other public companies forget that they have to buy from the very same people that they raised the taxed and fees on! What do you think they are going to do? Their prices also go up and they are clever too. They raise theirs even more than the taxes and the fees would justify that. It is all built into the bids they submit.

Who do you think is winning this war? Nobody. Who is losing this war? No one. Who is suffering? Everyone. Who is unsmart? All of us!!   

This is a large subject. I could begin to dwell on the solutions of this large issue. But I will not but I do have those. Instead I will get back to our immediate problem. Pardon the digression once again.

So what do we do? This is where CITS comes in.

We are not installing sytems (not yet!) instead we shall fix each functionality within the capabilites of the provided system using the tools provided in the system in close contact with the everyday users of the system. This requires an extensive knowledge of the system in question and a a local service or installation technician or even the local engineer typically will not have the expertise or knowledge required. Indeeed he/she will be spending a lot of time on an '800' or other line talking to some engineering support station of theirs and will basically be learning the system on line or sending the database back and forth for retooling. But once we understand that a service problem requires a competent, fully empowered engineer, the problem will melt away because the engineer will solve it right onsite using the provided capabilites of the system and the received theory of its operation. We have now arrived at an undrstanding of  the automation problem and its solution.

There is another aspect that is worthy of mention. How should the owner request or get this type of competent service? There is no easy or simple answer. Here is a few observations:

The owner may request this competent service specifically.

The owner may request that the service be responsive and not circular unnecesarily.

The service must be provide directly by the engineer on site and not passed to another enginer or entity or department.

The owner may also request a direct listen/execute service from the competent engineer of the service provider company and may request to know why this  service cannot be provided in this fashion, if they claim it cannot be provided in that way. This brings me to the statemet that all this has been leading upto:

Corporate Informatiuon Technology Services has such a SERVICE in place already!!

Incidentally this also brings out the nature of the service typically provided by an automation systems provider. In order to streamline their operations and to do standardized programming/engineering their local technicians may not have any engineering background/capability at all. Indeed they may be just hardware technicians. Also the technicians are dispatched from some central location and hence may or may not have any competence or even knowledge of the subject system. Also their account representative may be several stages removed from the database engineer so that the the time it takes the customer to intimate a problem to the time it actually gets listened and understood and responded to may be unacceptable to the cuatomer and may require an expensive "full service contract". Indeed that may be a ploy to push one knowingly, I hate to say.  But such is the state of our mental and psychological/moral state in view of our powerful urge for financial gain. But that is my conjecture, I cannot be certain that, that indeed is what is going on. (You can think for yourself, of course).

All this again brings up the need for a fully empowered local, competent engineer that can be approached, requested and gotten an acceptabnle response out of. CITS guarantees such a service. I will present an example of this competent and complete service that I would be looking for from the service tech/engineer/warm body sent out to my building:

Competent/Local Service Example

1.    I have a time program for an air handler that starts at 10PM and runs  through 8AM the next day. The built-in time program fucntionality may or may not do this. I need a program or solution that will do this. It was in the original specifications but never worked and users have been using the regular start/stop fucntions for this.

Here is what I want and know.

This is a simple request. If I get the response that the enginer has to be informed to fix this or that it will be 2 weeks to do this, I know something is wrong. The engineer or the service person should get his/her engineering tools and get right down to it! It should be delivered during this curent engineering visit. It may take more time but it should not have to be referred to some other provider department or agency. THE SERVICE PERSON MUST BE THE END OF LINE. THE BUCK MUST STOP AT HIM/HER OR ELSE WE HAVE A WHAT I CALL 'CIRCULARITY PROBLEM'.

If it was a chiller sequecing problem I want the service person to start work on it NOW and should not have to call the office or call his worker buddy to get some advice or some sample he/she may have done or look in some program library to fined some similar piece of code. I want him/her to do the code or engineering onsite! 

I hope I have made some sense. At least I think I tried. Please look at my service contract offering. QUIZZ: I will leave you with this thought "Can you tell how and where it differs from a regular service contract? "  See the answers here.

Thank you for your patience.

Riaz Hussain

Automation Systems Engineer and

Empowered Service Technician

I Pass No BUCK! And No Buck Passes me!

Remark:

I answer all Questions and Solve Every problem,  even the ones the manufacurers cannot solve or did not design to solve!

Indeed:

THEY MAY HAVE BUILT IT. BUT I AM THE ONE THAT CAN GET IT TO DO WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO.

WHY NOT TRY TO STUMP ME TODAY, (651)442-9044?