Fischer Technical Services is a consulting firm licensed by The West Virginia Board of Registration for Professional Engineers. We have been providing plant maintenance and electrical & instrumentation consulting since 1979. Our Principal Consultant has designed, built, commissioned and serviced a wide variety of plant automation, process control and radio communications projects. He has investigated thousands of electrical & mechanical failures and hundreds of industrial accidents. If your company has reliability issues, technicians that need to improve their troubleshooting skills or inexperienced engineers, give us a no-obligation call to discuss how Fischer Technical Services can help. We have an engineer who has lived "where the rubber meets the road."
Bob Fischer, our principal consultant, is a physicist and an electrical engineer. He has been designing controls, managing technical departments and solving reliability problems for over 40 years. Bob's unique education and diverse work experiences have combined to develop an enormous body of interdisciplinary skills. He has a history of hands-on accomplishments in construction, education, plant engineering and maintenance. His job responsibilities have included:
- Electrical & Instrumentation Manager, Vibration Analyst, Reliability Engineer, Water and Wastewater Treatment Supervisor and Maintenance Manager for the country’s largest activated carbon manufacturer.
- Electrical Foreman, Electrical Superintendent, Senior Maintenance Engineer, and Plant Engineer for the country's leading designer and manufacturer of railroad cars.
- High-Voltage Field Service Engineer for the most respected manufacturer of transformers and power distribution equipment for underground coal mines.
- Refinery Instrumentation Specialist for a large electrical contractor servicing petrochemical refineries, marine terminals and tank farms.
- Investigator for a geotechnical & forensic engineering company.
- Electronics Technician, Engineering Aide and AN/PSS-11 Mine Detector Supervisor for Department of Defense contractors.
- Community & Technical College Adjunct Instructor for 13 years teaching Robotics, Physics & Solid State Electronics at three colleges.
- As a Fischer Technical consultant, he has provided engineering services to machine shops, steel fabricators, foundries, quarries, manufacturing companies, chemical plants, insurance companies, electrical contractors and governmental entities.
He has developed and run craft training and apprenticeship programs, preventive and predictive maintenance programs and an award-winning labor-management safety committee. He was a major force in development and operation of a comprehensive reliability program that dropped one chemical plant’s emergency work to 4% and pushed the plant’s on-stream-factor to 99%. He has mentored many E&I technicians, maintenance craftsmen and engineers.
Bob was actually a pioneer in the development of robotic welding and robotic metal forging work cells. He has patents for a robotic safety appliance and for a plasma cutting torch electronic height control system. As an authority on both robotics applications and electrical engineering, he has made presentations to engineering, scientific and professional groups on topics in both fields. He has also represented companies before OSHA and other government agencies.
Bob has worked on complex transient voltage and resonance problems with one of the nation's leading electrical power producers. His approach to solving those problems caught the attention of the Electrical Power Research Institute. EPRI invited him to present his work to the prestigious plenary session of the North American Power Quality Symposium (1997). This was an international technology transfer conference jointly sponsored by the Electrical Power Research Institute and Electricite de France.
Bob developed, and for many years instructed, a three credit-hour course in industrial robotics for Marshall University Community and Technical College. He has served as a member of curriculum advisory committees for the "Instrumentation & Control Engineering Technology" degree program at Shawnee State University, "Electronics and Biomedical Instrumentation Technology" degree programs at Mountwest Community & Technical College, and the "Mechanical Engineering" degree program at West Virginia Institute of Technology. He has also served as a Proctor for the International Maintenance Institute's certification examinations.
He is coauthor of a three-volume set of texts titled Pipeline Electrical & Instrumentation Trainee Guides, Levels 1, 2 & 3. At this writing, these texts are being used by the National Center for Construction Education and Research. They prepare technicians for tests leading to nationally-portable E&I certifications required by law for certain life-critical and environmentally-sensitive work on interstate pipelines transporting hazardous materials.
Bob Fischer's comprehensive education and work experience in the trenches have given him the ability to examine both technical and managerial problems from many different perspectives. He has a history of working effectively with people at all levels of organizations. His "Experience" page summarizes diverse areas of expertise - acquired during a 40 year career that encompasses everything from carrying tools to managing engineering & maintenance departments. Just give Bob a no-obligation call to discuss how Fischer Technical Services might be able to put this experience to work for you. 304-654-1250
