Electric heating – Heating devices – With power supply and voltage or current regulation or...
Reexamination Certificate
2000-10-13
2001-09-25
Paschall, Mark (Department: 3742)
Electric heating
Heating devices
With power supply and voltage or current regulation or...
C219S497000, C219S483000, C307S040000, C099S325000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06294765
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This application relates to novel and improved ways to operate equipment, control equipment, and novel design of restaurant equipment and environmental control for providing a more efficient, safer, serviceable, and intelligent operation through a novel feedback system, and particularly to equipment which may use a hot solution, hot gas, heating, humidity, cold solution, cold gas, refrigeration, freezing used in food or product service industry where food or other product needs to be kept at proper temperatures using mechanisms and controls to transfer or remove energy.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
As restaurants and other industries expand into national and global markets, they have increased problems with their equipment running properly. Regardless of whether the failures relate to communication, education, installation, manufacturing, design, or service issues, the growing companies experiencing these failures have become increasingly vulnerable to food or product safety problems. The current technology available simply cannot handle their needs. Typically a facility will require on-site diagnosis, evaluation, and feedback which costs increasing amounts in order to do business. A company with thousands of individual locations has no realistic way of implementing a Zero Defect Program with existing technologies, absent a complete re-engineering of and homogenization of each individual facility. The term “Zero Defect” for such a company having multiple locations means that during no appreciable time period its thousands of locations will not have a piece of equipment down or out of specification. When a malfunction occurs, the “Zero Defect” system insures that the equipment will be back in service within a specified time and incur a known amount of cost. A system which currently gives these benefits is not available, but is acutely needed in the growing restaurant industry.
This aspect of being able to handle Zero Defects gives control to the quality assurance function. If a particular location cannot serve any products or cannot serve a product from a particular piece of equipment, quality assurance suffers. As companies expand, they lose more control over their equipment and departmental cohesion. In the company organization, failures in equipment can be debilitating and costly. Without some effective and low cost way to manage these pieces of equipment, the equipment owners are subject to excess losses, potential danger to the public, and creation of an internal debilitating atmosphere of indecision and meaningless blame assessment.
Serving food products from defective equipment can have far reaching, sometimes deadly consequences. Not only can such an instance cause corporations in product costs and legal expenses, but they can damage their customer base with a single food problem.
To solve some of these problems, companies have put in alarm systems that call quality assurance for problems with a single scalar quantity, such as temperature. A thousand locations with thousands of pieces of equipment that are unknowingly on the brink of failure can result in a major disaster. With all these pieces of equipment in questionable health, you have to dispatch repair personnel to each location to have them determine if the problem is one of service, installation, manufacturing, design, maintenance, or equipment abuse. Because of the wide disparity in technical competence of the repair personnel, the diagnosis and absolutely necessity of repairs becomes a further issue.
With existing technology, companies do not have the foreknowledge that something has broken in their equipment that will cause it to operate out of acceptable specification within an estimated amount of time. This foreknowledge if it could be had and at a reasonable cost, could give management time to have emergency repairs or formulate a backup plan and also gives quality assurance knowledge of the incident and the opportunity to get involved. With existing technology you will notice problems after the fact. Existing technology does not have a way to tell what has gone wrong and then what to bring to fix it and how long it will take from thousands of locations across the globe. With existing technology you have to send a mechanic on location and hope he will find the problem and not charge too much to fix it, as well as to rely upon his competence and honesty. Without the diagnostic information the company owning the equipment does not know when to schedule the repair, because many times repairs need to be done during off hours. In many instances, service has to show up many different times at a site and this costs the company. The Zero Defect Management for restaurant and other equipment for global access gives companies a way to manage these and other issues efficiently and cost effectively.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
This invention includes a number of novel ways to manage equipment globally. This implementation cost is higher than simply to rely upon existing technology, but can conservatively save seven or more times the amount of the initial investment during the first few years. The system of the invention reduces service costs, downtime costs, energy costs, monitoring costs, product safety costs, product costs, analysis costs, and checkup costs. The topology of the invention can be best understood as having three identifiable general areas. First, sensors and methods for their control includes a use of low cost sensors and methods for running equipment. Second, equipment designs that are integrated with the established sensors. Third, an integration of sensors and equipment design is expanded to the global level from individual equipment sites. Through the feedback from this globally integrated system, a control unit, such as an integrated company, can rapidly assess a problem, determine if the problem comes from service, installation, manufacturing, design, maintenance, or equipment abuse issues. The command and control entity will be able to identify what needs improvement and what does not, and this is done in-house, but without the necessity of keeping a large diagnostic staff. In-house capability also indicates no costly outside monitoring fees.
Over the long run, by using Zero Defect Management techniques and systems of the invention, the existing equipment cost will rise initially and then become lower. For example, if an existing unit of equipment costs $50 and costs $5 a day to run, implementation of a Zero Defect equivalent unit of equipment, by either new purchase or retrofit, would have an initial cost $500 and only $1 a day to run. Over 10 years the operating cost of the old equipment would be greater than the Zero Defect Equipment many times over. This novel concept wishes to show how Zero Defect Management can save money, time, and lives.
REFERENCES:
patent: 4090062 (1978-05-01), Phillips et al.
patent: 4419666 (1983-12-01), Gurr et al.
patent: 5023430 (1991-06-01), Brekkestran et al.
Harrington Curtis L.
Paschall Mark
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