Power Trip

I'm not god, I'm IRON MAN

dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-du-dun, dun-dun-dun, da-dun-dun.

Don't you mean Ironic Man?

No capes!

So...... We should allow anyone in quality to modify micrometers, calipers, blocks, gages, indicators to fit their understanding of how these things work?

The reason for the desire to lock up programs isn't entirely a power trip. It's to be able to say that the program is checking the same things in the same way every time. It is extremely easy to change a measurement routine so that it shows all the parts good or all the parts bad or to have alignments that have nothing in common with the way the part is assembled. It takes specialized training and experience to get a sound program working. With physical gages you need access to equipment to modify them and unauthorized changes are not terribly uncommon. I'm sure most people here have a horror story or two they could tell. Luckily most changes to physical gages are fairly simple to identify and track down. It's different when you have a 'software gage'. It's easy to write programs that make the same physical moves but have different alignments. It easily can take doing a line by line review to find intentional changes to a program that affect results. (Even worse for unintentional changes.)

There's one. Paranoid. Take the time to teach them, exactly what I'm saying, I knew absolutely nothing about CMM's or PC-DMIS at one time. Instead of going the extra mile to hide it, go the extra mile to teach them.

Absolutely, you should be passing on knowledge. But in the meantime, keep them out of harms way. Harm being both them and you. If something goes wrong, the original programmer is going to have to answer for the ensuing chaos.

a person who makes no mistakes is a person who doesn't do anything. You make none? You have never had a probe break? PC-DMIS is chaos to begin with, I even had proven programs just crash. I have mentored lots of people some take longer than others, some put the cart in front of the horse, some can't even find the cart. That's why we have more than 1 copy of our programs. I put the proven ones there on the network drive, The ones that are run are on the local. Let them make mistakes the only way they'll learn. I talk to machinist all the time, I don't just hand them a report and say, its bad. I walk them through it, and explain them the report. Monkeys, give them a report, don't know what they are looking at, then machinist don't know what they're looking at. I didn't say release the gate and let them roam. If you're going to so much trouble to do this and do that, when are you going to take the time and actually check the part or train them. PC-DMIS can't protect from laziness, stupidity, or any other non-sense. I have come into work places the next morning with broken tips, HOW???? lack of time training, which the company kept saying we don't have time for that. Yet they allow untrained people run the CMM at night. They do have down time available, I guess. I will admit being a little paranoid myself. I see some questions that some people ask on here, I become concerned because what are they checking? Is it a aerospace part? is it safe to fly? Is it a car part? Is my front wheel going to fly off my car driving down the road? Even if you don't do anything wrong, bosses will still always want to point the finger at you. Because you cost the most money for the company, of course it's your fault. I'm a big boy, I can take a punch.

At one time I was deeply involved with training people. I never trained on how to calibrate the probe rack, because once it's set up there's almost never a need to do it again. If you do need to do it again, you definitely won't remember from the 30 minutes spent on it during a training session a few years previous, particularly when that training session was overwhelming with new learnings to begin with. It's like the ellipse auto feature - why teach it? There are virtually no true elliptical forms out there (usually specific industries), it's worthless knowledge for the vast majority of people out there.

My point on that one above. Is a waste of time, put more effort in training people, then just making them a button pusher.

The thing is that you need both button pushers and programmers. Potential Programmers are much harder to identify and develop. I don't have a problem giving programmer trainees full access to the program as long as they discuss their changes with me. When they are first starting out I want to see every thing that they are up to so that I can provide feedback. As time goes on, I expect that I expect to be reviewing changes less and less. This is a whole different thing then letting anyone and everyone make wholesale changes to programs. Again, not an ego thing, but common sense.