Operations Innovation & Transformation – Flexible Teams

The 4 quadrants described in the article “Operations Innovation & Transformation – the 4 Types” positions the lower right quadrant as a strategy for using a team of human assets in a new way.

In this quadrant, teams of specialists (with the same or different areas of specialization) are grouped to provide value improvement to a group of physical assets, and the group of physical assets can be used as a “fleet” or as a “chain”.  This is much more than a passive “help desk”.  One example is where specialists use real-time benchmarking and other tools, working with new business processes with the physical assets and the dedicated workers, to unlock value of themselves and the physical assets.

In the following diagrams, a team is located in different sites at the moment.  This example has 4 physical assets, A through D, and specialist 1 is mobile (working from a hotel, home or in an office within the enterprise), and specialist 3 is in an operations center.  In the left-hand diagram, specialist 1 is supporting or improving the performance of physical assets A and B, and specialist 3 handles the physical assets C and D.  In the right-hand diagram, a change in performance in asset B triggers a workflow and specialist 2, who is on call or is assigned by the team supervisor, handles asset B.  Specialist 1 does not receive workflows for asset B unless the team supervisor changes the assignments.  Overlapping assignments are also used, especially when multiple disciplines or specializations are involved.  Both use the same integrated and federated information, and these specialists become champions to help all like operations and equipment improve performance.

In the following diagram, a workflow “brings the work to the worker”, using the same integrated and federated information, on-line performance applications, and human workflow.  The supervisor(s) can easily change assignments, and the workflow can include escalation, which can be guided by the performance applications’ output compared to thresholds (simple calculations of time to reach a threshold).

The strength of these workflow is to help specialists intervene early enough, using standardized and trustworthy data, focused on trends.  This processing of information is automated as much as possible.

The specialists spend most of their time working on improvements instead of processing data and analyzing previous performance problems, and their decisions.  As a result, major overhauls are safely and reliably delayed, equipment performance is improved, and operators trust the equipment more to help increase performance at each physical asset.

Why is the (Level 2-3) platform key to the future state?

I seem to end up in many discussions between IT/OT, the convergence that is required in order to achieve today’s agility. It is really is the transition of existing operational / business systems from “open Loop” to “Closed Loop”. For many of us from the control world this is just extending the “closed loop” control approaches to the supervisory/ operational architectures, but with longer periods.

As stated many times we have 4 pillars of change occurring:

•        Demand Driven supply driving agility
•        Changing work force to a Dynamic/ collaborative workforce
•        Changing Workspace and process “way of working”
•        Changing technologies with Big data/ Internet of things

Driving the creation of integrated, flexible platform that bridges knowledge management, and information / decision support, while naturally absorbing change through Model Driven Architectures.

The key is applications, and capabilities will constantly evolve, change, this should not restrict the agility of the system to adopt through a platform allows new processes and loops to be put in place, but easily adopted.

The shift to closed loops where a “process” is applied to reducing variation in the speed a decision is made vs the action that is taken, and that the execution of these processes can be monitored and tuned even if it just executed across humans. Correct action maybe improving the transfer of “knowledge” so people or systems involved in the process execution have the knowledge to make the decision and act in a timely manner.  

The required platform between automation/ and business must eliminate:

•        Silos of information and control/ elimination of disconnects.
•        Elimination of disconnects thru contextualization across systems so transparency of understanding can achieved across systems.
•        Elimination of delays thru aligned kpis and targets and decision across the different levels of business control. Removing isolation of decisions and actions through integrated bossiness and control loops.

This does not mean we replace existing automation and operational systems, it means we applying new technologies to federate systems where possible, into a hybrid solution thru standards, and managed processes that can be evolved over time.