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.

Virtual Expert Teams, Provide One answer to “Time to Performance”

We often hear of the aging workforce as a big problem, and certainly it is due to fact that it is not a evolutionary transition to next generation of workers it is leap to new generation of workers missing at least one generation. So from "baby boomers" to Gen Y or Millennials.

As has been stated many times comes with this a change in "Experience levels" of the job, and site, but correspondingly comes a change in the way they native work, engage with others sharing more, asking more, providing the opportunity to bridge this experience transition.

Last week in some discussions around Integrated Operational Centers (IOC) it was clear that IOC is not about bringing what happens field control rooms into a central location, the real transformation happens when experience and operational work transformation happens. Shifting to an operational experience where:

• Experience can be shared across sites, and workers through standard operational interfaces and experiences
• Shift to Exception based experience from monitoring, where the user interacts with the system only when required.
• Where planners, operational control, and subject matter experts can align, and collaborate in real-time, sharing the same view on a situation.

But it was clear that the companies making the big step are going further, and really introducing the "Flexible Operational Team " concept, shifting from an operator to a true operational team. From site workers who now are agents (eyes) to the rest of the team on site, to central control working closely with real-time planning and work order execution, to experts in maintenance, process, safety, and management providing the real-time knowledge and experience across multiple sites, and multiple situations. The diagram below shows this "flexible operational team" and the associated transformation in operational work across the team, due to new work ethic of sharing and asking.

But what we seeing in the market is some innovative approaches to solving this existing experiencing and the transfer, and it is through the use of “Virtual Experts Teams”. So what is this concept?

Key is to have these highly valued knowledge experts which could be across different aspects of the business e.g. asset management, process, planning, optimization, quality being empowered to work across the many enterprise production assets/plants. Today many of these experts are restricted in their contribution to their local plants, but a number of companies have started strategies which say we must leverage these people. These experts must be able to access the state, information of the plants in a consistent manner even though they may have never been there. They must also have the natural ability to collaborate with the local teams.

This means a local team is able to call upon the best experts relative to the situation they are dealing with. The expert is able to go online and access the plant situation in “near real-time” so they can see the situation while collaborating with the site team. They are able to drill in and do analysis, so as to draw upon experience and provide advice in real-time to the local team.

Now is this easy, I would say no, as just accessing the plant data is not effective, as the expert maybe over the other side of the world, never been to the plant and so the data will be in different measures/ context to what he expects. So in order to achieve this virtual team we need to have a “trusted information” system, where the data / information is a consistent context.

But the above concept is real, and is valid with leading companies currently implementing these "virtual communities" with subject matter experts on call across sites and situations. The operational team experience is not a "rip and replace" it is built on the existing automation/ supervisory systems installed in 90s, and 2000s, but now aligned with a validated model, and context. Plus a collaboration user experience where systems notify of "abnormal situations" and the controllers will share and collaborate in real-time, and virtual experts can access their view of the situation in real-time. Note the view of the expert may be different angle on the data relative to their expertise, 

But the system is NOT a one way information system, it is bidirectional, interactive experience with accountability, of action and role, with a built in ability to evolve the knowledge and experience of the system for the future.

Too often I am seeing slices of this Operational Team landscape, being implemented without realizing the whole picture to realize the paradigm shift in value.  

Cost of Delay: Realtime Actionable Decisions Critical at all Layers in Industrial Operations

In a number of recent discussions with people when they have listened to sessions on the operational transform and the concepts of people and team transformation, they incorrectly feel the focus is only on the  “operator”. While the operator is the closest person to the “coal face” a fundamental concept of the operational transformation are the shifts to:

·         Actionable decisions performed as early as possible

·         Collaboration across the operational team in making the decision, and taking the action

·         Sharing of current situation and experience

·         Awareness of the situation as early as possible.

As seen in the diagram below if a situation is left then by the time it hits the weekly report even daily report the cost of the situation is significant.

Not all actions belong to the operator, some should be detected in control system, acted upon in that system, this is where apply some real time optimization tools is key like APC ( Advanced Process Control). Other actionable decisions may be on quality, safety issues or  maintenance issues that need to act upon early, and the escalation of the system should directly to the responsible role.

No longer is an alarming system good enough we need a intelligent notification system that brings awareness to responsible role, and immediate access on what ever device to the detail and ability to see situation and act.

The diagram below I talked about before but it continues to critical to understand that an alarm is “as is” situation, the cost of detection vs action is significant. The bottom axis is time, and the vertical axis is value/ cost. If we are able to move all roles to the “to be” state where decisions and actions are seen early and corrective best practice action is taken early.   

The cost of delay, unawareness is huge especially when cost is a measure of “operational continuity” and growing the production output. So when we talk about the Operational Transformation, the goal is to enable the operations to become more agile, and efficient, and this can only happen when business strategy / operational execution, and emergent situations are all acted upon is well “oiled real time machine” with each level role and application/ human acting in a timely manner, and consistent manner. 

Bring the Problem to the Expert vs Expert to the Problem!!!!! Virtual Expert Communities are required!

 “The 2020 workplace will need to be adept at uniting a physically – present tribe of employees with a tribe of offsite, and often transient, staff. The latter will be specifically chosen for their ability to add value to the task or project, regardless of where they are on the globe.” Mike Miselowski Futurist

This is the concept of flexible operational teams, and the ability unify into a collaborative and sharing environment the people on plants with those outside the plant, and even outside the company or country, who provide expertise. As I continued my travels last week, I engaged with two clients in different industries one in Oil and the other in mining who have remote sites, and the need to bring expertise from elsewhere in their organization to the remote site. These sites are extremely remote, and will involve a day or so travel to get there, and age on the site is reducing and so with it the experience. Both companies talked about getting expertise to site, decisions support centers or often collaborative walls or environments.

Another company in oil and gas last year summed up the problem when he described his team of 35 experts doing 1300+ flights in a year that it was “taking the expert to the problem” and it causing the loss of the expert team as they looked for alternative jobs than living away from family. Also, the response to the problem was delayed, and in many cases the problem did not justify the cost in travel or wasted expert’s time in travel. So his comment,  we need change to a situation where we “take the problem to expert”.

Another company in the metals industry is implementing this on a global basis a community environment across their global experts  with the:

Vision

• Break Down Communication Barriers between Continents
• Break Down Communication Barriers between Plants
• Break Down Cultural/Language Barriers and Inhibitions
• Break Down Network Barriers Between Computer Systems
• Create One Secure Global Network accessible by whole Expert Community
• Standardized system with common variables, standard calculations and standard names for data points for all the like assets / process across the companies worldwide sites.

Goal:

• Share Experiences with Live & Historical Data
• Instant online Information Exchange For Problem Solving
• Create a Powerful Knowledge Database
• Create a Community For Helping Each Other

So how do you make this a reality?

How do you take experts on the other side of the world, who have not been to a site, and enable them to contribute expertise on a subject, e.g. a particular process on an asset type, to a worker sitting on site. If the expert went to the site, or called the site he would ask a lot of questions on data, status and history to understand the situation before he can contribute.

 So the above company is trying to enable a “facebook” concept across the company pockets of expertise and sites that will actively engage the experts with the operational workers and make an active community, breaking down all the traditional boundaries that prevent this.

To do this they need to:

• Capture the historical data, current state from the existing systems.
• They need validate this data to make it trust worthy in their case 100+ rules of integrity
• They need transform the data into standard measures and states for that process/ asset so that the variables mean the same no matter which plant the expert engages. 
• The need an operational experience both at the plant, the roaming worker and the virtual expert that naturally enables collaboration in realtime as well as sharing.

All through the last couple of weeks travel, this alignment and empowerment of local people with remote is of significant concern. The tradition Control Room  systems today do not make this part time, transient engagement natural, and it is only by changing the solution to a team/ community, which is available at the local workers finger tips this can become a reality.

This is not something new, people have been trying to implimentation something to enable remote support for years, often throwing technologies such as PC Anywhere etc at it to allow access, and now with the introduction of social media increasing that. Most of it has focused on remote operations from an Operational Center on shore or in a better location. The real step change happens when an active community is developed of experts who collaborate and build knowledge while directly collaborating with the site teams as seen below.

 

Below you can see examples of the Offshore oil industry especially in the north sea what they have been doing while this is a significant step it is only a step, vs and a significant jump to a community.

Yes,  it lines up with Mike Miselowski’s comment of “The 2020 workplace will need to be adept at uniting a physically – present tribe of employees with a tribe of offsite, and often transient, staff.”

Leveraging the social media functions, but in a secure way, that understands security access level, plant control access and location of the people to enable correct engagement levels. So we should not be designing an operation HMI, control room experience , remote access focused on just the plant and process, consideration must be taken how collaboration, and sharing of information will happen in a near real time manner!!  Not just adding messaging, key is making the data and information consistent and trust worthy in near real time, as well as having inbuilt knowledge capture systems.