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.

Help Operators move from “Coping” to beyond “Optimizing”

This is a great blog from Stan DeVries, really opening some of the challenge thinking.

"A recent meeting with a customer discussed the best practices for centralized control rooms and integrated operations centers.  They summarized 4 levels of operator performance:

•         Coping
•          Aligning
•          Optimizing
•          Stretching

While the focus of the meeting was on optimizing, the customer pointed out that we must enable the newer operators who begin by “coping”.  It is worthwhile to consider the differences between these 4 levels:

•         Coping requires high concentration on operations activity and events, where the operator has little flexibility to adapt to teamwork with other operators.  The operator has been qualified to work in a centralized control room or integrated operations center, but they have difficulty to maintain pace.
•   Aligning requires moderate concentration, where the operator can safely and reliably adapt to most of the teamwork activity, but reaching team targets is still difficult, such as value chain efficiency or throughput.
•   Optimizing requires a different type of concentration, where the operator has learned how to cope and how to align, but now the operator focuses on achieving the team targets, and the targets change periodically – in some industries (e.g. power generation and natural gas liquids processing) the targets change every 15 minutes.
•   Stretching is achieved by “error free” operators who have learned how to beat the optimization targets.

The key question is how can operators achieve and sustain best performance?  A quick answer is more training, but too often the training paradigm isn’t adequate.  Best practices have shown that the effective method is treating the targets like a game, and applying newer visualization to support it.  Before we look at any example of a “game” or possible visualization, we need to consider the innovation in the training approach:

•          Training becomes holistic – the students learn about how to perform in team settings
•          Training moves beyond the classroom – classroom training is essential, but structured on-         the-job training becomes very important
•          Operator performance becomes less “private” – team performance is visible and shared.

So what can the new training experience feel like?  Consider an example which has been published in regional industry conferences, where the initial focus was optimizing energy across multiple sites and all operating shifts:

The dark blue diamonds is hourly efficiency performance over a wide range of throughput, across all sites and all shifts.  The magenta squares are the result of one month of teamwork, and the yellow triangles are the results after two months.  Please observe a few key characteristics of this experience:

• Very dynamic operating conditions
• “Blind” presentation – operator names are not shown
• Graphical context – instead of bar or gauge displays, operators see how their performance compares with others.

The operator is given other detailed displays both during training and for normal operation, but the exercise is focused on teamwork.  Consider the significant improvement in the above displays."

Operational Windows Enable are a basis for Operational Management Experience (IOC)

I have talked about the drive by many companies to reduce “Operational Variation” across plants, teams, and industries. This is core to the journey to "operation excellence" gaining consistency, awareness and early detection of situations. When you look at the table below on the levels of human operational automation, the drive of the integrated operational experience is trying to reach level 5 "Worker management by exception", a big part of this is awareness of current operational process status relative to optimum.   

There are many ways that operational control will be implemented, as pointed out it could be through actions and processes becoming embedded and certainly this will be the big driver in the road to “Operational Innovation”.

But another way is through displaying key operational indicators to a knowledge worker, where  these indicators are mapped within boundary conditions. These boundaries are set up based on the time and relevance to the role and activity/ task the knowledge worker is performing. This sort of “operating Window” enables the knowledge worker the context, and recommendations, knowledge to enable operational decisions in a timely and ever consistent way. This same operational window can be used over multiple sites/ and teams for that role and activity providing consistency control.

The figure below is an example of an operational window.

Where on the left you can see the operational running trend, but you can see the changing boundary conditions of operation based upon product etc., The green shows the area where optimum control, safety, and production performance is. The right hand side you have reasons, and number instances of deviations for periods out of operational control.

Placing this sort of operational window where the operational boundaries come from the business strategy but in context of the role and activity no matter where in the plant operational team, but the feedback and running side is real-time from the plant. This window is place adjacent to  current control/ HMI screens the operator is using, or the maintenance or process screens the users are working, and you start the transformation to a knowledge worker. 

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.  

The Smart Plant Culture, What is it?

The concepts of an agile / smart plant, facility are not just in the assets, equipment, and systems, the key to the modern world is the efficiency in the work, and how people and expertise is used across the given tribes of people working and contributing to the business success. This article by Stan captures what is core to that culture.

 The Smart Plant is characterized by its behavior, which is a combination of technology enablers and the culture of the organization.  If the people don’t effectively use the technology, then the plant won’t behave in a “smart” way.

One of the most effective analyses of culture and culture change comes from Roger Connors and Tom Smith, who have written a book called Change the Culture, Change the Game.  They assert that actions and results only change when beliefs and experiences are changed.  When management attempt to change the results without changing beliefs and experiences, the organization doesn’t produce lasting change, and the amount of “disengagement” and rebellion increases.  These authors have also analyzed a key aspect of culture that they call “accountability”.  In this analysis, they recommend shifting an organization’s behaviors from what they call the “blame game” to a behavior of openness, ownership, teamwork and collective actions to solve the problems.

Dr. Stephen Covey has embraced these and he has written a book called Principle-Centered Leadership, which recommends a combination of changing the goals and measures, combined with a different approach to managing performance.

In the above diagram, the most important goals are called Wildly Important, and these are made clear and prominent.  The second step is to shift from the traditional “lagging” measures to “leading” measures, so that organizations can continually prevent problems and take full advantage of opportunities.  The third step is a “compelling” scoreboard, which requires all workers to have information with sufficient frequency and detail that affects their jobs.  This often requires hourly information focused on manufacturing or processing “cells” or “units”.  And the fourth step is a supervisor “cadence” or regular review and adjustment of targets.  In many industrial facilities, this might occur daily.

The Smart Plant culture reaches across organization silos, reaches across locations and reaches across time to share ownership of challenges and solve problems together.  The “blame game” is minimized and new employees are oriented into the shared beliefs and experience of problem-solving and sharing information, both good news and bad news.  Training shifts from isolated prevention of blame to team training which share performance.

Article authored by Stan DeVries Snr SOlution Architect at Schneider - Electric

Smart Plant a Realistic / Holistic View

Smart Cities, Smart Airports, Smart Farms, Smart Upstream Fields are all the talk, but when you get down to interviews with companies, cities etc, the definitions change from city to city, from major oil company to another, so if you looking for a clean definition it not to be found. But there are underlying trends you see across all of them:

Trends/ Objectives:

·         Faster decisions and less people monitoring / responsible for more. Leading to the Integrated Operational (control) centers.

·         Increased agility and efficiency through transparency across the whole landscape, so better alignment to plans

·         Increased Operational Continuity

·         Lowering of cost through increased understanding of operations, and operational efficiency of assets. Energy management and material management.

·         The Operational Workforce transition of experience and to a dynamic, digital workforce.

·         Environmental/ Safety and regulation control, limiting exposure and cost

·         Change of equipment/ instruments to “smart equipment” which have increased intelligence and “self monitoring” , a dramatic increase in data that needs to be understood, and used for more predictive awareness

Yes this is all a part of the Operational Transition I have been talking about, and believe will transform the industrial sector over the next 5 to 10 years, as part of the 3^rd industrial revolution.

But in the last couple of weeks we have worked with a company in Asia who has a really good grasp of “smart plant” and the overall concepts that need to addressed in their journey.

They are really looking at the 4 main themes with their unique names, but they also looking across these and how they interact, as well not just a plant but across assets.

This is built on their belief that Operational Workspace is changing and not in one area but multiple dimensions, with workforce change, but also ICT changes like “cloud," “Bandwidth," IOT (Internet of Things), Smart / intelligent devices, and the move to naturally using simulation.

The diagram below shows the two big axis they see changing, not too different to People and Asset changes we have seen before.

An interesting observation is the shift to “larger, more complex process” this is true in all industries, as the problem we are being asked to solve is significant compared with the traditional control, but the opportunity for return is significant as well. But with the use of centralized computing, and shared learning, the cost, and ability to solve these today over all size plants is possible.

In reality the fact that this company has engaged on journey and understands it is journey is important, understands the goals, and direction, the shift to manage “work” and transition their architecture to embrace “intelligent devices” so they can leverage the IoT developments and Big Data, Industrial Analytics. Probably means they will lead the transition and be positioned well in the new world beyond 2020, but we all entering this world!     

Operations Innovation & Transformation – Transformation from Individual roles, people to a Operational Team

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.

The example below we have an operational team, made up of different roles, usually in different locations, and different value in the operational decision value chain. Key is all roles can work together in real time, see the same information and collaborate in real time for decisions. So a roaming user on site can take photos, look at situation, share this the operational center and virtual expert members to rapidly understand, leverage experience and make a decision. 

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.