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Thank You Telstra; Your Outage Has Opened Our Eyes
By Automated Electrics
Thank you Telstra for that brief period this week where our mobiles remained silent, we put our phones down, our efficiency soared and we were able to get a ton of work finished without disruptions!
Thank you Telstra also for reminding us that we need to be mindful of the points of failure within our own systems and processes, because if your chief operations officer Kate McKenzie is correct, this large and sophisticated system of yours can be brought down by one person’s simple mistake!
Thank you Telstra also for reminding us that we need to be mindful of the points of failure within our own systems and processes, because if your chief operations officer Kate McKenzie is correct, this large and sophisticated system of yours can be brought down by one person’s simple mistake!
Telstra’s official statement was that a field technician “failed to follow the correct procedure” and brought a major telecommunications system to its knees due to an “embarrassing human error”. Comforting to know that a specific procedure needs to be followed to keep Australia’s biggest telecommunications network running.
It is estimated that of the 16.7 million Telstra customers, several million were affected by this week’s network outage and the true cost of this will never be known as lost sales and production for businesses who rely on Telstra’s mobile network can never be accurately counted. We here at Automated Electrics use the 4G network for remote connectivity to automation and control systems on various sites for our clients. Fortunately there wasn’t too much going on during the network outage, otherwise we would have been left high and dry also.
System Checks and Balances Are Critical In Automation
All automation and control systems require some amount of human involvement, including the Telstra communications network, and human error is an inevitable fact of life. If plant managers are not careful, they could face a similar scenario with a simple error crippling their entire operations. Careful consideration is always required to identify the points of failure in a process which can often be counteracted with specific checks and balances to ensure that mistakes are caught and filtered out before the worst happens.
Points of failure are not just processing techniques or operational methods, they can be within the programming functionality also, and quite often the automation system controlling the plant can have simple tweaks or changes made to the programming code for a more robust and self-managed fault protection mechanism. For example, if the operator can shut down an entire section of the plant from the SCADA with the click of a button, a simple check might be a message popping up asking the operator “Are you sure you want to ……” requiring a double action from the operator to confirm that this is in fact what they want to do, and giving them an option out if it was a mistake.
We often say that programming is the brain of your automation system and the smarts to make your plant reliable and profitable. In this day and age with all the technology available, there should be no excuse for such a catastrophic failure from a simple “embarrassing human error”. Who knows, maybe this entire Telstra nightmare could have been avoided with a simple message popping up for the field technician!
Food for thought, Thank You Telstra.
Food for thought, Thank You Telstra.
Thank You Telstra; Your Outage Has Opened Our Eyes
Published By: Automated Electrics
Written By: Chris Orban
Category: General
Published By: Automated Electrics
Written By: Chris Orban
Category: General