[archiver]

Posted by James Jones at 03/14/2001 10:12 AM EST


Engineer on team #267, The Demolition Squad, from North Broward & St Andrews and Motorola.


In Reply to: Actually, I disagree
Posted by s_alaniz on 03/13/2001 11:45 AM EST:



The second objection to opening up the material list is that it simulates real life. If it does at all it is a very poor simulation. First of all, no team has unlimited resources so we are all limited by what we can procure in time and what it costs (just like real life). True, some companies have Approved Supplier Lists from which you must chose a vendor. In these cases this policy exists because there is value added by the relationship (negotiated costs, volume discounts, etc. ) and usually reached by a competitive process. However, if the success of a multimillion dollar project depends on going to another vendor, only the stupidest of companies will object to going outside the vendor base. I think we all agree that in many cases our robots could be more successful if we could use parts not offered by SPI.

Also, in industry, in most cases the bottom line is money and time. You make things in cheapest, fastest way possible with the minimal wasting of money. This is perhaps my biggest objection to the material limits. They waste teams' time and money. I remember several years ago there we a few of use working late in the machine shop. We needed some aluminum bracket and some lexan hubs. This was before aluminum was on the AHL. We had one person on a machine cutting a piece of Al round stock (because that was the only stock from SPI big enough)into a square and another person CNCing a square piece of lexan sheet into a round! What a waste of my team's time, my team's money and my company's machining resources. No sensible business would make parts this way unless for some reason it saved time or money.

We also waste time and money when we have to wait for parts from SPI either due to shipping or back order. If you have a few days to build or change a mechanism, you don't want to be sitting around waiting on a back ordered part. You end up buying the part from someone who has it immediately and swapping it out with a real SPI part when it comes in. So now your team has bought the part twice and built the mechanism twice. What a waste. In real life, if you need cheap, the vendor that has the part cheap gets your business. If you need it fast the vendor that has it fast gets your business. You don't buy two of something if you don't need two. Dean has made his fortune in a competitive environment. Let's start letting SPI operate in a competitive environment.