Computers - A Blessing or a Curse?

[TW]

When the computers fail how are you effected?

Yesterday the company that I work for learned a lesson (I hope). The server that handles our graphics load failed yesterday morning at about 7:15 a.m.. The loss of a small portion of the total computer system should not present much of a problem for a manufacturing facility. Right?

Wrong!!!

Several years ago, the big money guys decided to eliminate all "paper copy" storage in our facility. This means that virtually everything is stored within the computer system. All inter-office communications, book keeping, reports, engineering drawings, etc. are now stored on a computer somewhere off site. When we lost the graphics server it literally tied the hands of both the Engineering Department and Quality Control. Both departments are totally dependent upon access to the engineering drawings.

So that you can understand the magnitude of the problem, we have over 7800 different parts that are used in the plant everyday. Each of these parts must be reinspected at least once a year, a Current Parts Validation inspection (CPV). That averages about 35 parts a day. Next, every time we switch vendors, or our vendors switch suppliers we must do an Initial Sample Inspection Report (ISIR). In the last two weeks I have done over thirty of these myself. Plus every time a part on one of the production lines is suspected of not meeting our standards it must be inspected (a CPV). Every time that a CPV or ISIR is done the engineering drawings for that part are needed to verify the dimensional accuracy, the material call-out, the Rockwell hardness, ets. are to our engineering standards. As is easy to see, computer access to the engineering drawings is a must!

The problem we had yesterday did not effect the productions lines yesterday, that effect will be felt in a day or two when all the in house stock has been depleted and we are struggling to make up the lost inspection time. I hope that the company now realizes that it needs to have a backup system in place. As it stands now, there is no plan "B." No micro-film records, no hard copies for us to resort to should (dare I say, "the next time") this occur again.

Computers are great, when they work. When they don't . . .


TW

[RamboPreacher]

blessing. BCP for the win!

[Billy n NC]

Sorry to hear about that TW.

When I was workfing for the textile company in the 90's,one of my jobs was Backup Responsibliity. I had 16 servers scattered arond the country. Each of which had there on tape backup system. When I got into work each morning I would check the backup tape for completetion. sometimes it would seem like time stopped when I saw the failure light.


Going paperless is not bad. Not planning for hardware failure is. Nightly backup is crucial. Not to mention mirrored servers, Raid technology, and the many otheres that have come out since I got booted out industrial market. Even with complete hardware failure your company should have been back up with a full tape restore within 12 hours.
I spent many nights doing just that restoring tapes.


Its not that difficult to setup a backup server.

Good luck.

[MacUser]

Who was in charge of backups?

[Pianoman]

When the computers fail how are you effected?

Having been on both sides of this fence - they're great
when they work (correctly) - and we die when anything
goes down.

My company does a daily backup of all our files (we have
3 different servers). If anything goes down - worse case
we might have to redo the work we've done since the
last backup (has happened to us once in 15 years & we
had to do 4 hours of work over).

With the wide availability of automatic backup options (including
internet back-ups, tape drives & cheap external drives) - there
is really no excuse not to have a good backup plan in place.

Of course - if a server goes down - that may be an issue in itself
if you have no place to restore the backups to. We've got Dell warranty
service on our servers & if one goes down - we'll have a replacement
in the next day. Just because you have a backup doesn't mean
you're back in business if you don't have a spare server or extra
server space/capacity. Then even if you do - there's the
possibility that all your workstations will have to be mapped to
the temp. or new server.

We're a relatively small company - but we physically wouldn't
have the room to keep all our hard copies if we wanted to.
We also share info between buildings & trying to pass the
hardcopy paperwork back & forth would be nightmarish.

The biggest problem we've faced (especially with the freaky weather
& ice storms we've had the past year) is power failures. If the power
goes out for more than 10 minutes - it completely shuts us down.
The heat the last couple weeks has caused a couple transformers
to blow in our area & it sends us to a dead halt every time. No phones,
no fax, no email - NO INTERNET - dead in the water!

[free]

Sometimes I want to curse when mine messes up!

[Billy n NC]

I used to tell peopel that the HourGlass is religous.


The bible says Tribulation worketh Patience.

Everybody got smart on that one. Nobody was praying God give me patience.


So along came the Computer and hourglass.

Hurry up and wait. LOL

[Alan]

The school system that I work for is in somewhat better shape. We do nightly backups stored both locally and offsite (well that's still a work in progress), our servers are all setup RAID 5 for fault tolerance. However if we lose a server we are down until we get a replacement (next day). I would love to have the money to purchase another server for each machine that we are running. We had looked at doing virtualization this summer, which would easily allow us to come back up from being down, but we ran into problems getting some of our software to run on the virtual machine. It's really ashamed how dependent we've become on computers. We lose power or our internet connection for any extended period of time and many of our teachers seem to be lost.

[PastorDaniel]

I find them to be both a blessing and a curse.