A call comes in from a customer whose assembly line has gone down, complaining that the Adept robot's video camera is seeing the product parts on the assembly line, but that the robot arm itself can't seem to find the part when it gets to the pickup point. Swanson explains that the vision system will need to be retaught, then gently turns down a request for some new software, gratis, that would allow the Rochester company to upgrade its robotics system. "You'll have to talk to sales and operations about that," he explains.
As the sun dawns over the Valley, Swanson finally gets the opportunity to call Germany. "David Brown, bitte," he says. Brown, the field-service lead engineer of Adept's European office, describes a problem that a Swedish customer is having coupling its video system with its robot. "We don't want to leave a bad taste in their mouth," Swanson agrees. "They're a hot customer. But the problem's with the disk-drive manufacturer, and it's been a problem for a year. I'm surprised you haven't seen it until now.'
So it goes, 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., caffeine and nicotine and a constantly ringing phone. "Good morning, Adept Technology. This is Bob. . . . '
* * *
While Swanson takes a break, his boss, Charlie Knowles, the 29-year-old head of customer service, is reviewing a list of new products in research and development, a list whose progress he'll ask Swanson to monitor. "When I joined the company three and a half years ago, customer service consisted of just 6 people," Knowles marvels. Today, it's a 42-employee emerging profit center for Adept, five separate divisions costing $3 million annually to run, but generating -- over the past year -- $3.4 million in revenues. Besides in-house technical support, Knowles's department provides field support, training for customers and employees, applications support, system upgrades, and spare parts.
For Adept to be competitive as a company, it has to be cooperative as a team, so at 9:00 a.m. Swanson meets with manufacturing engineer Jill Reed, looking at sketches of plans to add ground wires to the robot controllers. Adept's system of checks and balances requires this meeting, Swanson explains. If such a change -- a "deviation" in Adept terminology -- were to be brought to the assembly line without proper sign-offs, the assemblers would refuse to construct it. The ground-wire addition is deviation number 584 since Adept began building its machines. An exhaustive collection of design changes is recorded on 600 pages.
Swanson shakes his head over a note on the deviations list, a year-old failure that's already affected 150 systems. "We'll sell systems that we're still learning about. That's the tension between salesmen and engineers. It forces us in customer service to be correct. In the past 8 or 10 months, we've gotten much better on our product knowledge.'
Throughout the morning, Swanson immerses himself in a whirlwind series of meetings, spreading the knowledge he's gotten from the customer calls. A factory in Norway has had two of its AdeptTwo robots shut down, he warns product manager Paul Estrada, and could well have problems with the third. All are the same model, Swanson points out, all with the potential for the same troublesome defect.
* * *
After lunch -- Swanson grabs the sandwich and banana his wife has packed and escapes to his car to read Robert Ludlum for 30 minutes -- Swanson is beginning to wind down his day. It's 12:45, and he's been on the job for eight hours and 10 minutes. The next call, however, dashes any hope of a timely departure. An engineer from a major computer manufacturer is on the line, complaining of a system that doesn't work.
For a moment, Swanson loses his calm demeanor. He tested the system himself, before it was shipped, spending six hours in the lab to make sure everything worked perfectly. His system, the engineer is saying, doesn't work.
"Don't tell me this, Ted," Swanson says, groaning. "Are you sure your monitors are good? If you do 'enable vision' after booting, does it do anything? It doesn't even sound like it's loading up.'
Swanson patiently talks Ted through the starting-up procedure. After 20 minutes -- already Swanson's longest call of the day, and no end in sight -- Swanson brings in applications engineer Greg Orelind, a software expert, on a conference line. But Orelind can't fathom Ted's dilemma either. So after another 20 minutes of frustration, Swanson hangs up and heads for the field-services laboratory.
The lab is a small rectangular room with three robot arms set up in varying stages of readiness, two controllers to run their software, and a miniature video camera attached to a monitor. Deftly, Swanson loads the operating disks, points the camera at a cardboard sheet covered with random, part-sized shapes, and inserts a new circuit board in the controller.
Everything works. Perfectly.
When the lab phone rings -- Ted again -- Swanson tells him he's hooked up another system, it's working fine, and he'll ship the software and the circuit board before he leaves. "The only way I can get the blank screen you're seeing is by not bothering to check the exposure on the camera lens," Swanson says. "But of course, that's the first thing you would have looked at. Isn't it?'
Finally, at 3:20, after 11 hours, four meetings, and 19 calls, Swanson's day is done. The second pack of Merits is crumpled and tossed into the trash. The tenth cup of coffee is drained. All of a sudden, he slaps his forehead.
"Germany! I forgot to send David Brown his software!" Hurriedly, he pastes Adept labels on four disks and gets them ready to ship. Then, after picking up his portable cellular phone and turning on his Pagenet beeper, he closes the door and locks his office, heading home.
"Actually, I have the best job at the company," he insists. "I get to work with the past, the present, and the future.'
