The low down on ALC?

[tridiumtech]

Numbawunfela made a good point: "Tridium is where the industry is heading". In regards to the 'MultiVendor BAS' camp - seems you can't go wrong with having an AX Certificate (IHMO, its mandatory). "Young, talented...aggressively trying to get my N4 cert" frame of mind could lead to very interesting future interviews.
Don't see your email in your profile. I'd be happy to send you my "Niagara Workbench Guide" (NGW). 174pgs of real world step-by-step instructions. Based on Tridium courses, Tridum User Guides + years of work experience. Tridium is not going away. If you don't want to post your email address, sent me a 'shout-out' to tridiumtech88@gmail.com

[Milkman Spawn]

Tridium is where the industry is heading.

Though I think this is probably about 10 years out of date (the industry is trapped in Tridium's pocket, even if its been trying to escape for a while), there are few better assets to your career as a BAS professional than a Niagara cert or even just experience, so I would lean towards employers who rep a niagara product.

As for ALC, I have only ever heard positive things from people who worked with it. In my limited experience(mostly from a user standpoint) I liked that their front end is consistent and pretty well done. I think they were basically the pioneers of the BAS web interface and have done a better job at it than others for a long time but it seems like everyone has caught up. What i dont like is their gigantic flat controllers with a huge footprint(might just be the older stuff) and the non-compiled programs that require a full download of the controller any time a change is made.

[Artrose]

My advice, move on. Remember. Never burn a bridge, and always honor your non-compete agreements.

During my career I worked for four of the majors and two wanna be's. Each time I moved, I gained knowledge, experience, pay, benefits, and respect.

Understand, there will be people who think you can't hold a job, or you can't be loyal because you move around too much. Those are the ones who don't understand, or care what you are, or your value. Those are the people you should avoid anyhow. And, there are a lot of those place holder parasites out there in their mid-level management positions.

Then there are the employers who see and recognize your talents and abilities. Make your move when they offer you a package that meets or exceeds your worth.

Never go in for less, expecting to do better as time passes. You also need to be careful that they don't abuse you. Some will try. Stand your ground.

Go for it. Good Luck!

[numbawunfela]

Understand, there will be people who think you can't hold a job, or you can't be loyal because you move around too much.....
Never go in for less, expecting to do better as time passes. You also need to be careful that they don't abuse you. Some will try. Stand your ground.

Good advice.

[stomachbuzz]

I will say to you what I say to building owners. It's not the equipment. It's not the company. It's the local business unit and it's culture and its implementation of control systems.

What you're saying is just the same as "people don't quit jobs, they quit managers"
Yes, this is something people don't usually understand. They think just because the cashier at 1 McDonald's said something, that must mean the CEO feels the same way.

But, for Siemens, I firmly believe it is their product line causing (present tense) and going to cause many, many issues. I have a long list of tangible reasons.
As a young person, fascinated with gadgets, someone who has intensely studied business, marketing, entrepreneurship, communication, customer rapport, and so much more... Siemens is going in a bad direction - with respect to their BAS. Which may be their Sunday morning hobby project for all I know. Like 1% of 10% of one of their sectors, ya know?

The entire Desigo suite (Desigo CC and the DXRs) are beyond awful. Nothing but problems. They offer nothing to empower the customer.
I've had extensive seat time with Desigo 4.0 and spent many hours fixing commissioning mistakes on DXRs and it's only going to get worse as the Desigo suite continues to replace Insight/TECs.
Aside from this, even in my short 1 year with Siemens, I've noticed an increasing amount of details and 'gotchas' that do not put the customer first. I'm just not interested in being part of the problem.

I would say 30% of me leaving is the product line. The rest is the attitude/culture of the local branch and corporate.
As far as corporate, there is just an unbelievable disconnect between them and the actual users - both the techs and the customer.
Somehow the people designing, producing, and approving these products has never spent a day as a tech or user.

The result is, not only are there a few mistakes/flaws here and there, but the product line is fundamentally flawed.
Instead of focusing on what the customer needs and designing it from there, they huddled with the engineers and said "how can we jam as much 'customization' in there as possible?" with no regard for the consequences that other people have to deal with.

Siemens graphics and programming is now done overseas, engineering to follow and when they work out how to use VR goggles onsite bodies will be just eyes and ears for remote techs.

I have worked with all three (latest being 18+ months as a senior engineer at Siemens) and would take ALC any day over Siemens. Better software, better hardware and better support.

kontrol out

Yep. I heard about the graphics a few months ago. Then I heard about the engineering/programming recently. "India! India!"
Got a call from my manager today informing me that I'm never allowed to bill my time to graphics, programming, or engineering of any sort because it will cause a flag somewhere and he will get an uncomfortable email from his boss, or something like that.

Kinda awkward.

I was in my ABT Site training course last week when I heard from the veteran instructor that engineering is also moving to India. I got the same feeling as you - they pretty much want us to be dumb installers, that's it.

That being said our company loves JCI branch and other branches that fail to deliver to their customer base. It's dollars in our pockets.

Mom and Pop shops are making a living ripping Siemens stuff out and throwing Tridium in. Siemens is absolutely losing their shirt to Tridium. For the exact reason you said - Siemens' platform is simply no longer empowering to the customer.

[stomachbuzz]

My advice, move on. Remember. Never burn a bridge, and always honor your non-compete agreements.

During my career I worked for four of the majors and two wanna be's. Each time I moved, I gained knowledge, experience, pay, benefits, and respect.

Understand, there will be people who think you can't hold a job, or you can't be loyal because you move around too much. Those are the ones who don't understand, or care what you are, or your value. Those are the people you should avoid anyhow. And, there are a lot of those place holder parasites out there in their mid-level management positions.

Then there are the employers who see and recognize your talents and abilities. Make your move when they offer you a package that meets or exceeds your worth.

Never go in for less, expecting to do better as time passes. You also need to be careful that they don't abuse you. Some will try. Stand your ground.

Go for it. Good Luck!

very solid advice and pretty much exactly my thoughts.

I'm looking forward to the new insight. Learning a new platform, learning more about BACnet from a different perspective, seeing how other vendors do things, learning about BAS in general. Seeing if I'm being overdramatic or well grounded.

[stomachbuzz]

Someone mentioned I was a bit grumpy,

Well, yes.
First of all, yes, I've become a bitter person since working for Siemens. It's not that I wanted more, I wanted better. And when I realized that was unlikely to happen any time soon, it was time for me to leave.

Second, yes... this forum seems to have a bad habit of not actually answering the question, but rather hyper-focusing on the minor details.
I really didn't want this to be a conversation about Siemens but rather a conversation about comparison and transition to ALC.

I've reached out to a few people on a Facebook Controls group who work for/with ALC and their responses seem to be nearly unanimous, same with the responses here. There has been overwhelming approval and appreciation for ALC which I'm quite surprised to see as it's a much smaller vendor with not very much market share.

I submitted my letter of resignation to my manager at Siemens and accepted the position for the other local controls vendor for ALC.
Siemens still wins by far in the long term benefits such as 401k matching and long-term job security, but I received a 20% straight jump in pay, as well as trading my Siemens vehicle for a $200/week vehicle use compensation.

The company vehicle was definitely nice, but I was the very odd one out at Siemens in that I lived within ~5 miles of most of the job sites. Most days I drove ~12-15 miles round trip, while some/most techs lived upwards of 75 miles away and didn't care because the vehicle and gas were free. Pretty crazy.

So an extra 20% flat pay, plus $11k/year (car + phone compensation), puts me at almost 35% more simple monetary boost. In exchange, I lose about 5 days PTO, most 401k matching, and some other benefits that only a mega-huge corporation can offer. And then gas and vehicle wear/tear is on me.

Seems like a no brainer to me. Maybe now I can buy a house in the area I work.

[numbawunfela]

Hope it goes well for you Mr buzz. Keep posting keep us updated.

[gazoo]

fyi....where im at Siemens got rid of their graphics crew and PPCL(engineering) crew. I am wondering if its not the best time for you to leave? outsourced to india. Apu is taking our jobs again.

[el_andy]

What you're saying is just the same as "people don't quit jobs, they quit managers"
Siemens is going in a bad direction - with respect to their BAS. Which may be their Sunday morning hobby project for all I know. Like 1% of 10% of one of their sectors, ya know?

The entire Desigo suite (Desigo CC and the DXRs) are beyond awful. Nothing but problems. They offer nothing to empower the customer.
I've had extensive seat time with Desigo 4.0 and spent many hours fixing commissioning mistakes on DXRs and it's only going to get worse as the Desigo suite continues to replace Insight/TECs.
Aside from this, even in my short 1 year with Siemens, I've noticed an increasing amount of details and 'gotchas' that do not put the customer first. I'm just not interested in being part of the problem.

I would say 30% of me leaving is the product line. The rest is the attitude/culture of the local branch and corporate.
As far as corporate, there is just an unbelievable disconnect between them and the actual users - both the techs and the customer.
Somehow the people designing, producing, and approving these products has never spent a day as a tech or user.

The result is, not only are there a few mistakes/flaws here and there, but the product line is fundamentally flawed.
Instead of focusing on what the customer needs and designing it from there, they huddled with the engineers and said "how can we jam as much 'customization' in there as possible?" with no regard for the consequences that other people have to deal with.

Long time Lurker, first time poster...


I feel all of this conversation so much, it basically echos how I feel daily. I'm gaining experience with DXR's and trying to move forward with Desigo, but there is commonly a snag. Hundreds of Obseleted TEC's running with no upgrade path, then when you finally move to DXR's the friendly structure of points is so helpful and easy to use!

Best of luck in your new position!!!

[tridiumtech]

S-Buzz -
Still open to send you the NWG (still don't see you email in your profile). If ALC mgt. offers to pay for Tridium certification, I would definitely go for it. 'Multi-BAS' vendor career strategy. Example: learn the ALC BACnet mapping tool so you can interface an ALC BAS workstation to a JACE which then communicates to the AX/N4 'mothership' (using Tridium's BACnet Export feature). That could please some clients who has, or prefers, an AX (or N4) supervisory workstation - the 'mothership' (eg, trending, alarms, graphics, etc). Anyway good to hear about your new ALC position - all the best.

[MaxBurn]

Honestly I don’t use the ALC integration mapping tool much myself. It’s only moderately handy if you are starting from absolutely nothing, which is rare.

What is fantastic between tridium and ALC is exporting points in T paying attention to the names (valid) and pulling them in by name in ALC. All the av/bv# stuff just gets worked out in the background automatically.

[numbawunfela]

Long time Lurker, first time poster...

Welcome!
Hope we get more posts... make the community better.
https://youtu.be/7YvAYIJSSZY

[stomachbuzz]

Long time Lurker, first time poster...


I feel all of this conversation so much, it basically echos how I feel daily. I'm gaining experience with DXR's and trying to move forward with Desigo, but there is commonly a snag. Hundreds of Obseleted TEC's running with no upgrade path, then when you finally move to DXR's the friendly structure of points is so helpful and easy to use!

Best of luck in your new position!!!

I'm sorry, I'm a little confused by what you're saying. You say you feel the same as me, and agree that Desigo is cumbersome, but then say DXRs are "so helpful and easy to use". Not exactly sure what you're trying to say.

S-Buzz -
Still open to send you the NWG (still don't see you email in your profile). If ALC mgt. offers to pay for Tridium certification, I would definitely go for it. 'Multi-BAS' vendor career strategy. Example: learn the ALC BACnet mapping tool so you can interface an ALC BAS workstation to a JACE which then communicates to the AX/N4 'mothership' (using Tridium's BACnet Export feature). That could please some clients who has, or prefers, an AX (or N4) supervisory workstation - the 'mothership' (eg, trending, alarms, graphics, etc). Anyway good to hear about your new ALC position - all the best.

Not sure what NWG is, sorry. I will add my email now.
As far as Tridium certification, I'll ask specifically. I did ask about their tuition reimbursement policy, if any.
To be clear, I am not working for ALC directly, but rather a controls vendor that deals ALC. Starting with them tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll have a better grasp of that relationship soon enough. Definitely a bit different working for the OEM as Siemens does all the R&D, manufacturing, engineering, as well as the actual install and maintenance/service. So the dynamic is a bit different. Working for Siemens, I had a hierarchy of technical support, from local to zone to calling SBT headquarters in Chicago. And they were the best resource possible because they literally made the thing. So, working for a dealer may dilute that dynamic some, which I plan to be mindful of.

They do offer a tuition reimbursement policy, $4k/yr, which should be plenty for a certification course or two.
I asked, and they do dabble with JACEs and Niagara occasionally, but seems mostly to be when it's required rather than by choice.

Honestly I don’t use the ALC integration mapping tool much myself. It’s only moderately handy if you are starting from absolutely nothing, which is rare.

What is fantastic between tridium and ALC is exporting points in T paying attention to the names (valid) and pulling them in by name in ALC. All the av/bv# stuff just gets worked out in the background automatically.

Hopefully I'll know what this means in a few weeks or so

[bigguy158]

Just a word of advice which is worth less than nothing. Stay humble and try to absorb as much as you can from the older techs. Try to find one that doesn’t have his head stuck up the bosses ass and has been around 20+ years. If this person is available they will be your first line of “tech” support/mentoring.

In my experience changing control ecosystems was frustrating for the first 3 months. But I really only changed the head end programming not the field controllers, your results may vary.

Also going from Siemens to anything else is going to be very different. Metasys, ALC, Tridium are very similar how you navigate. Kind of like they are Microsoft machines and Siemens is a Mac.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[numbawunfela]

Just a word of advice which is worth less than nothing. Stay humble and try to absorb as much as you can from the older techs. Try to find one that doesn’t have his head stuck up the bosses ass and has been around 20+ years. If this person is available they will be your first line of “tech” support/mentoring.
In my experience changing control ecosystems was frustrating for the first 3 months.

Great advice.
I went from Johnson to a dealer doing Alerton, and Distech.... it was a HARD 6+ mos. Head vs wall all day, every day. I leaned on the senior guys, but was prevented from getting training.
In the end several installers said they thought I was picking it up pretty fast compared to others they saw doing this. That was nice to know after the fact, but it did not prevent the bloody circle on the wall where my forehead spent a lot of time.... but it may be that bloody circle was the necessary path to get there.
Be sure to set your personal expectations of yourself and your company accordingly. It will suck for a while. But being the multivendor BAS guy is a goal worth struggling for.

[stomachbuzz]

Just a word of advice which is worth less than nothing. Stay humble and try to absorb as much as you can from the older techs. Try to find one that doesn’t have his head stuck up the bosses ass and has been around 20+ years. If this person is available they will be your first line of “tech” support/mentoring.

In my experience changing control ecosystems was frustrating for the first 3 months. But I really only changed the head end programming not the field controllers, your results may vary.

Also going from Siemens to anything else is going to be very different. Metasys, ALC, Tridium are very similar how you navigate. Kind of like they are Microsoft machines and Siemens is a Mac.

I'm a very humble person most of the time. This is both my conscious and subconscious plan with my next ventures.
Minus the politics and BS, I genuinely enjoy the job.
Controls work is kinda sorta what I fell in love as a child, I just didn't understand there was an industry. I always hooked up the new VCR, DVD player. I was always taking remote controls apart to see what was on the inside. Tinkered with bicycles, then naturally moved into cars. Then my landscaping biz, where 100% of maintenance and repairs were done by me. Looking back, I was always the most intrigued in the 'controls'. From mechanical linkages (engine speed governors, throttle control, etc) to the satisfaction of chasing down an wiring loom fault.

So I take great satisfaction in throwing these parts and components together and delivering a finished product. And taking the time to figure out the necessary intricacies that most people just toss aside and say 'F it'

As a result, I quickly identify the people who are good resources and try to cling to them where appropriate. Have their number on speed dial.
I also spend lots of time tearing through documentation...where it exists.

I would say, if it's a half decent platform, I'll be fine. But if it's some asinine cluster of convoluted BS, I'll be walking away shortly.

With this being said, it's laughable to compare Siemens to a Mac. I understand I'm very ignorant in different controls platforms, but the Siemens platform (even the good ol' Insight) is ROUGH at times. There's really nothing intuitive or user friendly about it, just that Insight is less worse than Desigo.

I would say Siemens' best piece of software is probably WCIS (for TECs). You plug it in, connect, and...it's all right there. And the point names make sense. "DMPR POS" okay, gotcha.
It's all just one screen. No navigating around.
Granted, 1200 baud is painfully slow, but in terms of understand-ability, it's pretty much near 100%.

Additionally, they added some great features on the newer versions. The Auto-Discovery thing (once you figure out how to make f***ing BACstac work reliably) is pretty awesome. And then using WCIS 'online' from the field panel to connect to any TEC at the FLN baud is like pure bliss. Really some cool stuff there. Unfortunately, even 20 year veterans had no idea what I was talking about when I tried to ask them for help...
Towards the end of my stint with Siemens, almost weekly, I was sending video clips to veteran techs of certain software features and they were like "Wtf is that? How did you do that???"
Lots and lots of digging around...and piecing together snippets and fragments of documentation, my friend.

Insight is a good platform in that it's kinda like Windows. You have a menu bar, right click, hints and help here and there. Which is what every single person in the world is used to. Desigo has none of that, so it basically ripped out all of your lifelines when trying to 'figure something out' on the spot. Then the documentation is missing, or even plain wrong in some instances.
Even so Insight is kinda confusing at time. Report Generator brings up about 60 different report options. "What does all this mean??"
And trying to connect to a field panel using CT Online is always a game of Russian Roulette.

Really the saving grace of Siemens' entire platform is the HMI Terminal Emulator. About 75% of my access went through there when Desigo was too slow, too vague, didn't have the feature, etc. Or I didn't have access to the Insight front end.
I was a HUGE fan of FPWebUI when I finally discovered it though. That thing is pretty neat and very helpful. Unfortunately, it morphed into Desigo vs something better.

Great advice.
I went from Johnson to a dealer doing Alerton, and Distech.... it was a HARD 6+ mos. Head vs wall all day, every day. I leaned on the senior guys, but was prevented from getting training.
In the end several installers said they thought I was picking it up pretty fast compared to others they saw doing this. That was nice to know after the fact, but it did not prevent the bloody circle on the wall where my forehead spent a lot of time.... but it may be that bloody circle was the necessary path to get there.
Be sure to set your personal expectations of yourself and your company accordingly. It will suck for a while. But being the multivendor BAS guy is a goal worth struggling for.

Sorry to hear that...sounds like a genuine lose-lose-lose to me. You're pissed off, and not a productive tech. Your employer is paying you for...basically nothing, and paying for 'training', and then you just make the dealer and the brand look bad.
But that was basically me at Siemens.
As a result, I just had to spend all my office hours reading through PDFs

[stomachbuzz]

Update:

Finished up my first week with the new controls vendor.
Jeez, what a difference. This local branch is much more organized and 'put together' than my Siemens branch. Just across the board, through and through.

ALC is definitely leagues different stuff. Mostly good observations so far, but a few slight criticisms.

Starting off with the negative - there seems to be an attitude that equipment on the order of 8-12 years old is OLD. ANCIENT
Which is a bit...curious for me, as most Siemens stuff gets ripped out at 30 years old simply because better stuff has come along. Still chuggin' on just fine, can still access it perfectly well, re-program it to the heart's content, just like the newer stuff. Only a bigger footprint and less brain power than newer controllers.

This doesn't quite seem to be the story with ALC, but - to be fair - I've seen this before.
I was at a site with 4 McQuay RTUs, 'MicroTech II' controllers, which were the JCI-made variant, NOT the Carel Controls-made ones...
Long story short, after 2 days of Siemens' warranty troubleshooting we found 2 RTUs had duplicate Instance #s. Worse, confirmed by Daikin/McQuay, the instance #, nor the baud rate, could be changed by anyone except an authorized McQuay tech. "So I need to call a tech out to change the instance number...?" Yes, either that or ship the boards back to Daikin to reprogrammed.
Ooooookay.

Luckily, that was not our problem.
Anyway, the tech comes out and spend a full 8 hour day attempting to access the controller.
"Well...you need an old laptop that runs Windows XP, natively - you CANNOT use a virtual machine to run XP. Also, you need a specific laptop that will recognize one of the USB ports as COM1 because the software will not use any other COM port. Then you need the special cord. Additionally, it doesn't work half the time, BUT you don't know if it's the laptop, or the cord, or the controller is bad..."
blah blah blah blah... I mean JEEZ, it went on and on. To change a damn instance #. It was outright embarrassing.
"These controllers are OLD"
The building was finished in 2005....?
One of the newest buildings I'd been to at that point. Most sites were built 40 years ago, with MCC Powers stickers covered up by Landis covered up by Siemens stickers. With their most recent hardware installed in 1999, working great. Plug in RJ11 cord, log in and change anything you want within 30 seconds.

So I'm not sure ALC is quite like this, but I started to get that vibe when my manager spent a few hours doing some computer magic to be able to re-configure older WebControl software to be able to access a "10 year old" controller. I guess this is the gift and curse of choosing to honor legacy hardware, or not.

Browsing some forums, I notice that some vendors have fragmented product lines, almost coming out with a new platform every 2-3 years, so, effectively, their stuff from 10 years ago is radically different and considered massively obsolete. IDK.

Anyway, the good stuff -
ALC obvious builds their stuff around BACnet, rather than trying to piggy-back proprietary stuff to 'speak' BACnet.
This seems it will benefit them greatly.

Additionally, the ARCnet thing is kinda interesting, but maybe more clutter than its worth. 156k baud is neat, but...maybe unnecessary. At Siemens, 38.4k baud was top-tier speedy comm, and it was okay. I'm not against faster comm speeds, but not sure it's necessary to add specialty routers and a complex topology to do so. This obviously becomes a greater issue when there is more data to transmit.

Siemens topology, while maybe outdated, was quite simple: Top level 'front-end'; mid-level 'field panels', supervisory controllers; and then low level field devices. A 1-2-3 pyramid mostly.

With ALC, this doesn't quite seem to be the case. To their credit, partially because they seem to be better at implementing 'new' technologies, such as leaning hard on ethernet. At the Siemens sites I was at, an ethernet backbone was almost a rarity.
ALC seems to have a heavy reliance on routers, something which I never came into contact with at Siemens, except when a field panel would be re-defined as a 'router' when taking in an MS/TP FLN and sending it on BACnet/IP ALN.

It seems ALC has moved their platform distinctly into the web-portal area. I haven't had experience with that yet, but I'm excited.

Some of their interfaces seem to have an almost eerie mid-1980s computer feel to them. All their graphics backgrounds are a dull black and it's like the piece of equipment is floating in space. And the EIKON block programming software has a similar dusty, dull, 1980s school chalkboard feel to it.

[numbawunfela]

.Sorry to hear that...sounds like a genuine lose-lose-lose to me. You're pissed off, and not a productive tech. Your employer is paying you for...basically nothing, and paying for 'training', and then you just make the dealer and the brand look bad.

That was not the thrust of the post. The intent was to manage expectations.

.... but it may be that bloody circle was the necessary path to get there.
Be sure to set your personal expectations of yourself and your company accordingly. It will suck for a while. But being the multivendor BAS guy is a goal worth struggling for.

Yes it was frustrating, but did not make me angry. One big thing I learned was that Johnson has fantastic documentation, Niagara... not so much. Aright maybe, but not fantastic. So there are things for which there are simply not answers in a printed documented format in Niagara. Such is life.

[numbawunfela]

Suggestion - more Sociology than controls related. It sometimes happens that a person, especially in their late teens to mid twenties - but anyone really, tends to view interactions with others through a lense that reflects their personal viewpoint. More than just i see things in a particular way. Instead these are inclined to impose their viewpoints and motives on others when interpreting their actions.
Like this:
I tend to be selfish and look out for myself first, and will screw others without hesitation. So when I get a kind offer of assistance, I immediately think 'what is their angle? How are they looking to screw me?'
So too, be aware of imposing your viewpoints on others. Read their responses for what they are, not what you think they are.
As a suggestion