We LOVE being onsite. We get more done. We see the bigger picture. We feel their pain. We connect.
There are risks to being onsite. This was a fire drill roll call two months ago...
"Debbie?"
"Here"
"Stacie?"
"Here"
"Ron?"
"Here"
"Anybody's name I didn't call?"
ME: (raises hand)
This is why you sign in!
Despite roll call risks, we LOVE being onsite. We get more done. We see the bigger picture. We feel their pain. We connect.
Bamboo started in 2020 (remember Covid?), and software already lends itself to working remotely, so we never drove the 6 hours down to KY for years. This year, finally, we've been driving down monthly and having a blast.
On our first trip, we FELT the annoyance of waiting 10+ minutes for a screen to load to run a machine.
“Wait wait wait... it takes this long EVERYtime??”
“Yeah, I usually just start it, go grab a coffee, check some emails, and come back.”
“This can't be right. Let's fix this right now.”
Turns out, it was some legacy code written by a brilliant PLC engineer that knew enough C# to be dangerous (clearly). For professional software devs, the problem screamed at us when we scrolled past it: thousands of sequential DB queries inside a loop. Took us 10 minutes to convert these into a single bulk query, 5 minutes to verify the fix, and 5 minutes to deploy.
“What did you do? It's like immediate now! ... When am I going to grab my coffee?”
It took 10 minutes to load EVERY time. And it wasn't the only one like it. A 30 minute fix saved the operators hours per week. Perhaps more importantly, it dramatically improved operator morale now and into the future.
Why did we have to be onsite to fix it, though?
I don't know. I think we never really saw enough of the full scope of their operations before to even come across this, and they just put up with it, thinking, “this is how it's always been, and there's a lot of data, so we just have to deal with it, right?”
We push for onsite visits for all of our projects. In-person demos of new software produce exponentially better feedback than a video meeting. Pushing buttons on the HMI while watching real-time OPC tags light up in order to trace down a work order connectivity issue for a new machine could be done with some cameras, lots of internet lag, and a good dose of frustration, but it's so much better onsite.
Quick sidebar to state the obvious: you can't do onsite if your software partner is offshore.
That doesn't mean we always work onsite, nor should we. When we're heads down coding, we're most efficient in our own familiar environments. But when we're away, we still try to be as “virtually onsite” as is reasonable: quick video calls, screenshares, video recordings, streams of updates on outstanding tickets, etc.
Anyway, we love it. Looking forward to October's trip next week.