Should you throw away the instruction manual?

Most of us are averse to reading instruction manuals when we take delivery of some piece of equipment. We used to joke about getting the kids to program the home VCR because it was so complicated and the instruction manual was too hard to follow. But when it comes to electrical systems that are even more complex that we have to install and commission, we don’t have the luxury of being able to fob it off to the kids to get it working.

Like it or not, instruction manuals are a way of life with complex electrical systems. Typically, equipment manufacturers go to great lengths to explain how to install, commission and operate their products, with the expectation that we can understand what they’ve written. The only problem is, most manuals are written by engineers with an intimate knowledge of the product, but the people who are expected to read them are usually quite diverse and have trade or maintenance backgrounds and are therefore not intimately familiar with the product (case in point - ever tried reading the Windows manual to sort out a minor Excel problem?). I should know - I’m an engineer who wrote product instruction manuals in the past and I’ve been told to “lighten up on the technical mumbo-jumbo” by many customers.

So how do you get around the dichotomy (there I go again - using fancy words that only engineers understand) - or challenge - of communicating complex installation, commissioning and maintenance instructions in a simple, straightforward manner?

In my research into this topic, I came across WEG - a company that manufactures VSDs and inverters for motors, which took on board feedback about instruction manuals from its customers over several years and actually produced a simple and intuitive human machine interface (HMI).

I contacted the company’s local division, WEG Australia, and spent some time with Automation Product Manager Sean Richardson, who explained and demonstrated to me just how effective the HMI is in assisting installers, commissioners and maintainers.

But before demonstrating the onboard instruction set, Richardson let me in on some ‘home truths’ about electrical contractors and instruction manuals: “Unfortunately, most of the time, installation and programming manuals for drives and controllers end up in the bin because they’re rarely used. It’s no secret that contractors didn’t want to read them. Compounding their dilemma was the fact that they’d have to deal with different brands of electrical devices, all of which have different installation and commissioning procedures, so they’d receive heaps of manuals they had little inclination or time to read.

“Because hard-copy manuals are usually bulky and costly to produce and ship, WEG decided some time ago to put the full documentation onto CDs to save costs. But the contractors let us in on another secret - there’s often no PC on site, so many of our CDs ended up as drink coasters.

“Like most drive and automation manufacturers, in recent years, we’ve found ourselves with conflicting demands from customers - end users want more sophistication and functionality from our equipment, but contractors want less complexity to install and commission it. We can certainly deliver the sophistication, but the real challenge is how to communicate it to installers who have a history of rejecting instruction manuals.”

So how did WEG go about satisfying two seemingly conflicting customer demands?

“The biggest finite resource we have is time,” explains Richardson. “We can’t ‘buy’ more of it, so we developed a set of instructions for our products to help make contractors and maintenance operators more time-efficient.

“WEG turned to an existing format that most people were already familiar with - mobile phones. Current-generation phones are very sophisticated, but their navigation systems are developed to be simple and intuitive. We adopted the same approach. Across our latest range of drives and inverters, we’ve placed a common HMI that looks similar to a mobile phone, with LCD display and a few control buttons. Despite their simple appearance, our engineers have built the full suite of control and monitoring functions into them to fully commission, operate and maintain the system.

“The ‘instruction sets’ are designed specifically to be a ‘what do you want to do?’ control. WEG calls them ‘parameter groups’ and they’re divided up into a series of easy-to-follow sub-menus (even without the manual) and allow the user to set the unit up by a visual interface with the drive, rather than an instruction manual and the drive.”

While at the WEG facility, I tried this HMI without any instructions from the manual or from Richardson, and found it very intuitive to operate.

Some of the basic functions I tried on an AC inverter were:

• Start motor to a set speed, at a defined acceleration rate;
• Stop motor from a set speed, at a defined deceleration rate;
• Adjust motor speed while running between defined upper and lower limits.

For this ‘basic parameters’ set-up sub-menu, all I had to do was scroll through the list of functions on the display and select the following instructions and control numbers:

• Acceleration rate;
• Deceleration rate;
• Minimum speed; and
• Maximum speed.

“These instructions are simple and very easy to follow,” Richardson told me, after I played for a while. “Of course, the drive has nearly 1000 parameters divided into various groups and, depending on what it is you want to do, you simply look at the sub-group menu list and define what seems to be right. For example, if you want to see what parameters have been changed from factory settings, we have a group known as ‘Changed parameters’. If you want to change something on the HMI, you go to the ‘HMI’ sub-group, and so on.

“The good news is that contractors can ‘learn’ how to install and commission these units virtually on the job, without having to invest several months of their time into reading manuals and learning how to install every new drive or inverter that comes onto the market.

“The thing to remember is that contractors don’t typically work on these systems every day, so when they get a call to reconfigure a drive, the challenge for them is to know what to do as quickly as possible. WEG’s approach to designing the HMI was to make it as intuitive as possible for the contractor to look at it and briefly scroll through the menu and have their memory jogged because it’s so familiar to them.

“Out of the box, controllers default to ‘descriptive parameters’ but have the ‘engineering (numeric) parameters’ in the background, so they can be easily accessed from the menu if that’s the preferred format.”

The same keypad and navigation system is used across a wide range of WEG controllers, from basic 1.5 kW units up to huge 2000 kW units. This means contractors who normally work on smaller installations aren’t baffled when they have to install larger systems.

WEG has carried over the same intuitive HMI philosophy with soft-starters, which are far less complex, but still require adjusting a few parameters at commissioning. For example, it’s common for contractors to install motors and soft-starters under ‘no-load’ conditions, with fans or pumps added afterwards. This invariably causes operational problems that the contractor is called back to correct, which he may do reluctantly, because he may end up doing so at his own cost.

“The way around that situation is to provide simple and easy adjustments in the starters,” adds Richardson. “We provide four small ‘pots’ that can be adjusted with a Philips screwdriver. The adjustments are simple, but it allows the motor operation to be quickly optimised when needed. We also mark the factory settings on the pots as reference points.”

Richardson finishes on just one cautionary note: “Despite the relative simplicity of the HMI, only authorised personnel should work with this equipment, especially so if the equipment is live.”