Author Archives: Tom Marks

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DATA: How Well is Your Plant Running?

Regardless of your answer, chances are you’d ultimately like less loss and more pallets shipped from your loading docks. The first step in reducing loss is quantifying the performance of your system, followed by making impactful decisions based on the new found measurements. One of the most common ways to measure system performance is Overall Equipment Effectiveness, also known as OEE. OEE is calculated by taking into account your system’s availability, production counts, and quality. The resulting percentage provides a single indicator for the performance of your system. For more information on OEE and how it is calculated, please visit https://www.oee.com/.
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#ChiliThoughts - Cooking up a Project

#ChiliThoughts – Cooking up a Project

Recently I was preparing an entry for Avanceon’s annual Chili Cook-off (recipe below), and I started thinking about how engineers tend to make good home chefs. The analytical mind craves to understand how things work; this can include cooking techniques and ingredient combinations. Two of my inspirations in the kitchen are Alton Brown (host of Good Eats) and Kenji J Lopez Alt (editor of Serious Eats). Both offer more than just recipes; they provide data driven insights into the cooking process. They explain much more than the how, and dive into the why that I need. If you’re a food nerd like me, I highly recommend checking them out.
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#Plantlife: Mobile Office

#PlantLife – The Mobile Office

As an automation engineer at Avanceon, I spend a lot of time visiting customer facilities. These visits include a wide range of activities: sales visits, site inspections, project meetings, commissioning, etc. Because of the frequent time spent away from the Avanceon headquarters, my laptop bag has become my mobile office, packed with everything I need on or off site. Here are some of the items that I always keep in my bag, to be prepared for whatever #PlantLife throws at me:
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Work Hard, Play Hard

Work Hard, Play Hard

What makes a great company culture? At Avanceon, we have a defined set of fundamentals that reflect what is truly important to us as a company. These core values form the bedrock of our company culture. While each of our fundamentals is important to the overall culture of our company, my personal favorite is: “Work hard, play hard.”
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Programmer Humor: How to Write Unmaintainable Code

Recently I saw a humorous guide on GitHub titled, How To Write Unmaintainable Code. GitHub is primarily a repository for open source software, and therefore serves as a bastion for programmer humor. The author of the guide is claiming to be “passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes” so you can “Ensure a job for life”. While the guide is geared towards Java programming, most of the “tips and tricks” apply to all realms of coding. As an integrator the maintainability of the code is equally as important as functionality, so several of the points (listed below) particularly resonated with me.
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