I always enjoy reading your articles and, as a systems integrator in the industrial vision field, find your ‘take’ on various aspects of the business to be very perceptive. We have been successful in the visual inspection of plastic caps and have been making systems for more than 12 years. Our primary customer has helped to shape the features we have designed into our system, and we now offer a turnkey system including material handling for about $55K.
In the last week several discussions with potential customers mirror your experience with high expectations for very little money. One of the major problems I have experienced over the years is that vision-system capabilities have been oversold by salesmen without real knowledge to upper management (the ones who go to industrial shows in Las Vegas) who don’t have the experience to verify the claims being made. The result is that many companies end up with vision systems that cannot properly perform and end up on the shelf. For that company, additional vision systems become a very hard sell.
I don’t know how you could do it, but your point of telling the engineer of the real cost of a system or the actual capabilities of equipment is an idea for future articles in your magazine. Keep up the good work.
Joe Gochar, President
Logical Systems
[email protected]