Operational Innovation !! Technology is here but Culture Needs to Evolve!

Through the travels of the last 2 months talking with many of the leading companies in mining and other industries the concept of “Operational Innovation” is a hidden objective. Why is it hidden because it is not natural for innovation to driven from all parts of the business, companies have a habit of centralizing it. Actually we can all contribute to innovational improvement to the way to take on, execute our “jobs to be done” during the day.

There is always ways to improve, but the key item I see being missed is the “culture not just innovates, and try”, but capture this and embed it. Innovation is about lifting constraints of risk to enabling trying to change items with improvements, yes this means making “failure” as a success measure. When I say failure people look at me twice in the industrial space. But I am talking constructive failure e.g. freeing people up with an environment where they can try new ideas on improving their job, and this experiment/ trial is done in a safe none intrusive environment into the plants operations. But the user is able to allocate time, and feels empowered to come up with ideas, and try them. Once the improvement is validated and tested, the ability capture this and embed it for consistency across plants and teams. Diagnram below comes from ARC comparing the effects of embedding processes vs manual implimentation this takes a significant leap even further ahead if you build in operational innovation culture and systems into your industrail operations. 

This is a step change in thinking in the manufacturing environment but the technologies exist today to embed operational processes (which is where there is huge opportunity to reduce variance across plants and teams). Example is the ability to put a simulator/ operator training system in place, as not just a trainer but as a bigger opportunity as environment to enable operational workers to go in a test a new idea, it is real, but a safe environment and measured improvement can recorded. I have seen one company use it with two or 3 of their best operators to put them through the same situation and capture the workflow/ process they took to resolve the situation, and then look to come up with an embedded process which they will put back into their system.

This is similar to what happened on Apollo 13 where they used the simulator to test the start up sequence over and over again until they go it correct, it formed an operational process. What we saying today and you can see in the diagram below the significant value increases in operational improvement come from enabling all people to innovate and contribute and feel like they can contribute in a constructive way. By embedding the process you are moving to a sustainable process, that is model driven.

You will hear many of us in Invensys talk about Dynamic Performance Measures and I will evolve on these in the next couple of weeks as the concept involves aligning strategy, with a context measure and the supporting actions to take that activity to success. Yes a DPM is a part of the activity discussion of last week.

The key learning I hearing around the world is that in the industrial space people and culture is not aligned with innovation, it is about insurance, avoid risk, why not look at the opportunity through safe environments and constructive safe trailing. Providing a frameowrk and environment for improvment and reduction in operational risk through consistency and alignment, and building on proven best practices.

Next week I want to start working through the Central vs decentralized management, and how it is really a combination of boat and key is putting things in context of the users role, an area people talk about but they miss.

Activities Behavior Starts to become Reality
As I flex back from South Africa last week I was listening to an interview on innovation, and there was interview with Microsoft Manager for Australia, and she talked about the change in culture they have implemented in the Australian offices. Switching to Activity based officers meaning that no one has a permanent seat or desk, you go in a morning and select a desk based upon the activity you are doing that day. As you may be on the road, you may be do activities that do not need you in the office, you maybe at other offices. She talked about it as a significant change in culture but it allows agility and focus to adapt your day and role based upon activities not a role.
This is the same I see in my own life and how I have discussed realtive to the Flexible Operational Team in the industrial space, these can only be achieved when people and the culture support an Activity Based thinking and Approach. In South Africa last week, I continued to see the evolution towards this thinking in mining, and food and beverage as I spoke with customers, many do not realise they on this path, yet their actions and ideas are heading in this direction.

This is no different in my life every day, I talk about my work life being in my back pack, with my lap top, IPad, mobile cell, and mobile  wireless hotspot. Based upon the activities I have that day, meetings, calls, site visits, PowerPoint presentation preparations, technology knowledge catch up, interviews,  strategy brainstorming, these are distinct activities require different modes of thinking, I choose the best environment and location for doing these.

This is very different to the way I worked 10 to 15 years ago in an office and defined role, today my activities and role change daily based on the situation and achieving our business goals and the contribution I can make each day to that, certainly my agility, and effective working time and delivery has increased.

This is the same for the industrial world and the changing approach I am seeing in the industrial place, where companies are going to the Flexible Operational Team, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, can only be truly achieved when people are working against activities vs roles. Key to evolution is that there will be a management of activities, both planned and reactionary, which will be acted upon by the best person, or team in order to respond as fast as possible. This does not mean that people are assigned to a certain interface/ roles,  they should be able to go to best location in the plant in order to execute that activity. This is why the whole operational control is evolving to a an aligned set of systems, that allow people to access, understand and take action in the most effective place possible.

 I was in South Africa at the annual conference there, as usual I saw a lot of innovation, and thought leadership, building on what I have seen in Western Australia in the last 6 months. The big discussion was around effectively using the human asset, through "time to Experience shortening" knowledge access, and actions, and collberation.

 But you see this continued evolution from:

Applications        to        Roles        to         Activities

Activities require a change in thinking:

·         How align information and actions from different systems to enable a co-ordinated and assignable activity.

·         How the UI changes to activities with the information, ability drill and understand and then the associated actions, which may require multiple people and certain procedure.

·         Plus a culture that allows roles and people to be flexible to take on different activities in a must more agile process.

I will expect to see this activity thinking and approach accelerating over the next year but as I have said this means aligned systems, access, and contextualization in order to make it fully effective.  

Why Exception based Operational Systems are the Only Practical Way?

As you unify your operations the more and more you roll up data, the more you drown in data and events etc. It becomes very quickly impractical to digest this information at the rate it is coming, and then it gets ignored or situations missed.

This calls for different thinking and taking the users away from MONITORING to now been naturally made aware of a situation through presentation, of the condition.

Concepts like the Advanced Process Graphics are  changing the thinking in the way data is presented so time to awareness to situations is dramatically reduced.  This I will discuss in the future.

But the big point of this discussion is move to Exception Based thinking meaning that the system notifies the correct people of a condition. This reduces the data needing to be consumed by a operator, and reduces the data that needs to be sent over networks. The issue with post analysis like through historian it is not real-time, and means you has gathered all the data not the critical data.

Now the concept of Exception based is not new most instruments today have exception based handling in them. But that is at a too lower level for most operations, especially as the operational scope of a operation worker increases.

The system now calls for “agents” (objects) that represent a Asset, including the operations within that asset that it must perform. This agent therefore is not a data structure, it is model representation of the asset, which is “self aware” of it’s condition and it’s expectations. It is then able to raise alarms, and trigger escalations.

This is the concept of “self Aware’ you may be asking what is he talking about, but it is logical. Take yourself do you have doctors monitoring you and advising you when you have to go for check ups or health activities? No it is the other way around, you are aware of your health condition and when you feel unwell, you visit a doctor to investigate and take action. This is the concept of being “self Aware”.

So why cannot we effectively make the assets “self Aware” but naturally modeling this in your supervisory system/ operational system. Working in conjunction with your control system, which should be controlling the asset execution. You may say “well I do that in my control system” you may have a lot of the data, but do you have the full understanding of  expectations relative to production for that asset, are you going to put your KPIs down at that level. No the natural division is the supervisory platform should provide a representation of the asset that worked closely with the control, instruments to understand the current condition, but then there is additional intelligence of the expectations of that asset from a performance, safety, environmental  to perform.  

The need to make the asset “Intelligent and self-aware” as close to source as possible, where for example the “oil/ gas well” is aware of it’s expectation and current state, the incoming data is VALIDATED, so the information in the well is “trusted”. So now the “well” can act on exception. This allows the operations center to be able to manage much larger numbers of processes and assets, and where the “the situational awareness” is pre-emptive, vs monitoring.

  

Intelligent objects can also have inbuilt workflows to automatically guide the operator to corrective actions and procedures e.g.

·         Alarm/ safety condition escalation when an operator does not acknowledge in time the escalation continues through email, alerts and/or notifications

Again this is one of the big mis-understandings in the ArchestrA concepts is the fact an Object is not a data structure it is a representation of the asset of what ever it is representing, and is “living” in memory so can be intelligent to understand conditions from a number of inputs to create a say “an unsafe condition”. Now if you have these objects built as standards you are able to evolve them with new capability and roll that new innovation out in a consistent manner.

Virtual “Situation Room” for Industry

We are not talking about just large Operational Centers but as pointed out over the last couple of weeks these are coming into play more and more especially in Mining, Upstream, and refining, but realistically it is just a part of the new “Virtual Situation Room” that enables the “Flexible Operational Team ”.

The key aspects of a “Virtual Situation Room”:

·         Operational Activities are Transformational across the "day in the life" of the worker, who does not need to be tied to a particular location to execution that activity

·         Collaboration and Interaction is Natural across the Operational Team

·         Awareness and context is native so situational awareness and decisions can be made dramatically faster, workers are not monitoring systems, they brought aware of growing situations.

·         Team work is natural, learning is natural across the team

·         Embedded operational practices enable Operational Innovation as a part of the operational culture.

·         Alignment of the different levels of loops in the industrial landscape are aligned

·         Unification/ alignment through federation is core across plant systems, and multi plant

The concept of the “Virtual Situation Room” can be seen in the diagram, but is based on unified industrial landscape which we use the Enterprise Control platform as the foundation to align the different levels of industrial operations, as well as put things in context of the workers activities in a timely manner. This enables a harmony of automatic loops at the control, operations layer and at the business layer, but with the critical human intervention and decision in a timely manner. We all heard of “Lights out Manufacturing” the concept of no or minimal people on a site and the plant can run, this has been proven to be not practical as an “agile business” requires business and operational decisions to be made based on the different vectors effecting the business today. Such as price, energy, safety, environment, and supply with minimal inventory requiring a very reactive system, the human brain is the best device for making these more complex decisions.

As you can see in the diagram you have workers in and outside the plant who work through the appropriate device to access the information, in context and understand the required actions or best practices available to make the action in a timely manner. They are able to interact, drill in, access experience, and interact, and play out into the future understands the effect of a decision.

This concept while looking new terms is the essence of the Enterprise Control, and what I have been discussing for the last 3 months, you should have realised that the empowerment of the operational workers (no matter role or situation) to make timely decisions is the key.

To achieve this we need “loosely coupled and tightly aligned” plants, applications, people, systems, assets. This will require systems like ArchestrA a “peer to peer” model and architecture, to evolve even further to an even more federating system. But it will require a broader thinking in implementations as well.

There are many aspects to explore within the alignment of plants, key is we not saying a MEGA system, we a federation of many systems into aligned operational system that is manageable and sustainable. Next couple of weeks I want start discussing MEGA vs federated, and what happened to interoperability with the enterprise, as this area too has evolved in thinking a long way in the last 4 years.

Standards What do they mean?, What does it take?

As we evolve the Enterprise Control capability around multi-site and system, (yes distributed system), I have been out talking to people. A common topic is standards, the more architectures try to unify/ standardize process, operations etc., the more standards apply, but they have been round for years in control blocks. But why is it such a struggle at the supervisory level, and MES? Basically it appears to be:

·         Defining what is a standard? and Why make it a standard?

·         Governance and investment to make a standard but the much big investment to maintain and evolve the standard, it must be justified.

·         But at the core is this mis understanding that standards are like “applications”, when that are closer to “products”.

The whole concept of Enterprise Control is based on the ability to Federate and Empower Operational Workers, this can only be done if there is a consistency in operational execution, requiring standards. So we are committed to a significant investment evolving the enterprise capability especially around creating and maintaining standards.

Standards provide the advantages of:

·         Application reuse

·         Faster project time to Value

·         Reduced risk and errors

·         Reduced commissioning time

·         Provide consistency of experience, operations, control etc across applications

·         Etc

A standard is anything you want to reuse and duplicate across multiple situations. This could be symbols, documents, recipes, workflows, reports, data structures, objects, control strategies, on goes the list. But it is important to understand a STANDARD is like a PRODUCT, vs an APPLICATION, they are valuable as long as they are useful standards. As one customer said

"We are good at building standards in control, and supervisory, but useless at maintaining them so we go from one standatndard to many versions of these applocations now way to maintain."

When I quote this to many customers I get a nodd of heads, and I thought a great debate a week ago was a set of top technology executives at one company really asked the question where and what is a standard, realizing success  is based upon them, but only is if they get alignment on what they are and investment required for them to succeed.

This means standards must evolve, with new capabilities, and they will have issues so must issue tracking and fixing, so that each new version has new improvements, and fixes. This requires governance and systems to track feedback and issues against each standard, and then planning of the next versions. This is closer aligned to product governance/ lifecycle than an application/ project culture, this is probably the biggest issue we see is most companies fail to recognize the investment in governance and management of standards. This causes the standards too very quickly become un usable and not valuable, so adoption drops off.

Also the products you are applying the standards to must understand standards and templates, which a lot of tradition products do not. While ArchestrA was built on the concept of REUSE and templates, we are fully committed to evolving the standards management and governance to help sustain and evolve standards across sites/ multiple applications, and extend this capability to the other aspects of the portfolio which make up the solution. The “day in the life” in the life of standards the jobs to be done, and experience is being evolved based upon our product lifecycle experience combined with a number of customers who are apply standards, and have implemented governance.

Customers/ Sis start by building a understanding on how they will make the standards succeed, the investment in both culture/ technology and process will return significant. We hope we will continue to evolve to make this evolution to reuse of standards across enterprises a natural act. Your feedback on how you are using standards, or plans and evolution input is appreciated to tim.sowell@invensys.com.