It Never Fails…

Our customers never fail to astound me. There are some things that are so unbelievable that you never expect them to happen.

For my Dad’s generation it was men walking on the moon. He was born on a farm in Italy with no plumbing, electrical or anything else. I’ve visited the place. It’s like visiting the Flintstones. Everything is made of stone. Every successive generation added another stone room to this “house”. You can tell by the different kinds of stones (rocks) that they used and the different way they put them together. For him, the first bicycle he saw was a shock.

Something happened to me this week that wasn’t as dramatic as that but it still knocked me back. I had a customer that wanted to pass data between two Modbus Masters. We’re building about 40 different versions of our Device Converter Product line but I honestly never in my wildest imagination thought to put on the list a Modbus Master – Modbus Master Device Converter.

We’re building units to move data from DeviceNet slaves into MicroLogix PLCs. Units to move Modbus data to DeviceNet Masters and lots of solutions to move sensor data of all sorts to BACnet Clients. But Modbus-Modbus – I never thought anyone need that.

I should have known. If you build something and there is any gap in product line, that’s the first call you are going to get from a customer. How do they know?

Lucky for us, we can easily handle this request. Scott, our ace applications engineer will get it done in an afternoon or less. That’s the beauty of the 460 Device Converter line. It’s darned simple to make what ever converter our customers can dream up.

So, I officially give up planning. From now on, all we’re going to do is to listen to our customers and build Device Converters that they really need.

I’m sure that won’t be the end of this story. There’s somebody out there that’s going to reach for the phone to ask me if we can do something equally unique and unheard of. But that’s what makes the job interesting and keeps me answering the phone.