I’m starting to lag behind since my last Top 10 Signs Post.  Things have been busy, but I promise to get the next one up shortly!

I wanted to take a moment to comment on some of the feedback I’ve gotten thus far.  It’s been interesting putting these criteria up here.  It’s sparked lots of great conversations, debates and emails.

I’ve had a couple of comments these criteria are good, but only really apply to high-dollar or technically challenging projects.  For commodity applications, or small low-dollar projects they don’t necessarily apply.  I prefer to think of these as tools to select an integrator use when you (end-user) can’t afford to be wrong.

If you can afford to be wrong on your project (i.e. late project delivery, not meet the desired OEE, incur some extra costs, excessive downtime to install/integrate, etc.) then you should go with the lowest cost provider.  Why wouldn’t you?  There are lots of projects that aren’t mission critical to production where a hiccup doesn’t sink the ship.  For those projects, these criteria don’t apply.

Project size isn’t a good gauge either.  One of our engineers that was embedded at Toyota once said to me “This work [small continuous improvement projects] is some of the simplest, no-glory work, but at the same time the most stressful.  We can make a small change to the line over the weekend and if everything goes well, no one knows about it Monday morning.  It’s business as usual.  If it doesn’t go well, everyone knows”.  They can’t afford to be wrong.

More to come…