Not everyone reads the Release Notes that are issue with OEM Firmware Upgrade Announcements; after this we hope you will, and if you already do, will look at them in a different light.
We took 18 months of Release Notes from an OEM supplying products (in this case relays) to the Utility Market and found some very interesting trends.
- 27% of the release notes indicated issues with metering, records and communications
- 16% of the release notes clearly stated that protection would be / was compromised - "protection may operate when it should not", "protection may not operate when it should", "protection is not available".
- 3% related to equipment rebooting unexpectedly
The impact of these issues on an organization are easily characterized by the 'iceberg' diagram, there's a whole bunch under the water line that you can't see.
The issues impact everyone from engineering to maintenance, operations to finance. When products do not perform to specification and upgrades are required the actual upgrade costs are the smallest contributor in the cost equation. Lost time in trouble-shooting, asset tracking, scheduling downtime, carrying more risk than necessary (until the fix can be applied), managing suppliers, inventory and implementation schedules, purging inventory, reviewing and updating data records to remove any contaminated data points (to ensure proper trending and forecasting in the future), all dwarfed by the cost (inability to deliver, income, safety, clean up, reputation, fines, etc) of downtime should a failure occur.
Release Notes are a great source of information. Individually they have value, collectively they are invaluable.
As with Service Bulletins, applying RCEM philosophies and ensuring all organizational functions interact for the overall effectiveness of the system is paramount.
This study was specific to the Utility Market however SKUs from the the same family of products are used in Oil & Gas, Mining and Heavy Industrial Applications.
www.RCEM.ca
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