Be nice to the IT guy

Modern manufacturing businesses depend on their Information Technology (IT) systems. It’s not just for payroll and accounting any more; everything is done electronically – taking orders, billing customers, purchasing materials, managing inventory and of course, scheduling production. This means that the IT people are (a) central to the running of business – no IT means no cashflow, which means no jobs, and (b) they get very, very touchy about people hanging various nonstandard systems on their network.

Inevitably, this seems to lead to conflict with the machine vision people. In my experience, these conflicts really stem from two causes:

1. The machine vision people complain that the standard spec PCs aren’t up to the machine vision task, and therefore they need to buy their own hardware.
   
2. The machine vision people want to disable such irritants as antivirus software and firewalls while simultaneously hooking the PC onto the network and providing unfettered access from outside the organization.
   

If you slip off your “Vision” hat for a moment, you’ll see that the IT people have some valid concerns. They want a standard PC used across the business: this helps them provide user support as well as providing some purchasing economies of scale. It’s also reasonable to want to keep outsiders off your corporate network; there are a lot of mischievous hackers out there just dying to cause trouble.

So how should you, the machine vision guy, deal with this? Well having a big fight and insisting on the power to do things your own way is a battle you’ll probably loose. Instead, I suggest you take the time to show IT what machine vision is and how you use it. Explain how cameras are triggered and the importance of consistent timing. They’ll recognize straightaway how other non-essential Windows processes can lead to false rejects and he’ll be able to offer ways to help.

You and IT work for the same company, so there’s no need to fight over control of IT resources. Instead, try providing a little education on the subject of machine vision. It will get you much further, I guarantee it.