I visited another packaging machine builder last week, and it was a scene I’ve seen far too many times. An electrical troubleshooter, multimeter in hand, walking the line during startup, checking connection after connection, hunting down faults before the machine could even begin to operate properly. This wasn’t unusual for them. In fact, this is how they’ve always done it.
What struck me wasn’t the approach. It was the acceptance. This machine builder, like so many others, has come to expect electrical faults at startup. They’ve baked the troubleshooting time right into their project plans. One of the controls engineers even told me that around 70 percent of the electrical faults they typically uncover at start-up are related to electrical connections. Not faulty components. Not flawed logic. Just bad connections. The kind made by hand. The kind we should have moved on from years ago.
And he’s not alone. I’ve heard the same story from several companies lately. Terminal blocks that are miswired. Field-wireable connectors that don’t terminate cleanly. Wires that are stripped too short, or too long. Connections that are loose, misaligned, or simply not landed properly. All of it falls into what I call the homemade connection category – wiring that’s assembled manually in the field or on the shop floor, rather than being engineered, factory-assembled, and 100% tested before it ever reaches the machine.
The irony? We build machines to eliminate human error – and then wire them in by hand, one connection at a time.
The Hidden Cost of “Homemade”
The acceptance of electrical connection faults at startup has been normalized. It’s accepted that every new machine must undergo this ritual of fault-finding. That’s just how startups work, right?
It doesn’t have to be that way.
The most frustrating part of all this is that the solution to prevent connection faults already exists. The components are available. The systems are proven. The processes are well understood. This isn’t some futuristic automation concept or a wishful self-healing wiring scheme. It’s decentralized automation and IP67 connectivity. It’s technology that’s been around for years, quietly solving the exact problems so many are still struggling with. And yet, it keeps getting overlooked in favour of outdated, panel-centric designs.
Let me be blunt here. If 70 percent of your electrical startup issues are related to bad electrical connections, and that’s a real number I’ve now heard from multiple controls people at large packaging companies, then you’ve got a self-inflicted problem. You’re not just troubleshooting mistakes. You’re troubleshooting your own design decisions.
Outdated by Design
I get it. Panel-based designs have been the default for decades. They’re familiar. They’re the norm. They let you centralize your controls and keep everything inside a closed cabinet. But they also require hundreds of wire terminations, each one a chance to make a mistake. And when your team is wiring under pressure, mistakes happen. Every terminal block you add is another point of failure waiting to show up during startup and commissioning.
Here’s another reality I’ve heard over and over in the field. When you’re relying on field-wireable connectors, the failure rate is shockingly high. I’m not talking about one in a thousand. I’m talking about 6 to 7 out of every 100 connections. That’s what I’ve consistently heard from controls technicians and machine builders during installs. And here’s the kicker – those bad connectors don’t announce themselves. They don’t puff up in smoke or flash a red light that says “Hey, I’m the problem.” They’re stealth faults. A flaky output signal here. A dropped input signal there. You end up playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole, trying to figure out which of the 100 connections is causing intermittent failures. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack scenario, and it’s completely avoidable. You don’t have to live with a 6 to 7 percent failure rate if you move to factory-tested, pre-molded connectors. You can start every machine with the confidence that your wiring won’t be the weakest link.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. One of my customers in Quebec, Canada – a machine builder who transitioned from centralized panel wiring to a fully decentralized IP67 solution using Murrelektronik’s Cube67 system – told me they had a machine startup with zero electrical faults. Not less. Not better. Zero. They powered up the machine, and every I/O signal just worked.
That’s the difference. When you stop hand assembling your electrical connections in the field and start using engineered, factory-tested systems with pre-molded connectors and IP67 modules, you eliminate the risk. You reduce the variables. You shift the whole model from troubleshooting to just turning it on.
From Assembly to Confidence
Instead of using field-wireable connectors, this customer used factory-made cables throughout. Instead of terminal blocks, they used rugged 100% tested IP67 I/O modules and cables with pre-molded M12 connectors. Instead of spending hours probing for continuity and chasing signal faults, they spent that time fine-tuning the machine’s performance.
Imagine what that would do for your next machine build. No more scrambling at startup or commissioning. No more “who wired this?” moments. No more delays due to a signal not landing properly or a wire popping loose during shipping. Just power on and go.
I’m not suggesting you throw away your entire design philosophy overnight. But if you’re still wiring machines the way you did ten or fifteen years ago, it might be time to ask yourself why. Because your competition is not staying still – they are moving on.
Build for Success, Not Recovery
This isn’t just about technology. It’s about mindset. The shift to decentralized automation isn’t just a hardware upgrade. It’s a philosophy change. It’s moving from reactive to proactive. From building machines that need babysitting during startup, to building machines that practically commission themselves.
Every wire you don’t have to land manually is a problem you’ll never have to fix. Every pre-tested, IP67 module you install is one less thing your troubleshooters need to worry about. And every minute you save at startup is more profit on your balance sheet.
Let’s Rethink Startup
If your goal is a smoother startup, a cleaner machine, and a better customer experience, it might be time to ask yourself what you’re still doing with all those terminal blocks and still cutting cables to add connectors manually.
If you’re curious what a decentralized system would look like on one of your machines, I’d be happy to walk you through it. No sales pitch. Just a conversation. We can even do a complimentary control system evaluation and show you where the avoidable errors are creeping in.
Machine startups don’t have to be a firefight. They can be a simple formality. The question is whether you’re ready to build machines that don’t need rescuing.
