ISA-95 and Operations Transformation

Tyhe questions around S95 where and how to use continue to grow, especially as the guidance for operational system alignment, we though it was time to give an update.

The ISA-95 standard has been in place for over 20 years, and recent progress in operations management transformation and Cloud adoption have triggered questions about this standard.  The author offers an observation:

·         ISA-95 is essential for higher performing operations who are implementing sustainable improvements, in conjunction with best practices such as lean.

Higher performing operations often have the capability to achieve and sustain best practices which directly produce best business performance.  A key enabler to this improvement is exchanging operations knowledge in more detail and more frequently.  Examples include:

•          Tracking of containers in high-volume continuous food cooking, so that successfully cooked containers can be recovered after a machinery failure with compliant tracking and reporting.
•          Assessment and tracking of ore grades in mining from the pit to the port, including in the stock piles and in the rail cars, so that yields and prices can be optimized.
•          Assessment and tracking of chemical components in petroleum refining and petrochemical manufacturing, so that yields and costs can be optimized.
•          Detailed and accelerated distribution of new manufacturing instruction in consumer-packaged goods, food and beverage and discrete/aerospace manufacturing, so that new products can be introduced much faster.

Each of the above examples depend upon exchanging “insight” in great detail throughout the manufacturing/processing and its associated supply chain.  Lean principles can be reliably applied, including eliminating wasted work; specialists can reduce time spent on producing useful information and focus on continuous improvement.

ISA-95 provides an information exchange model, and standardizes how activities are defined and relate to each other, such as quality, inventory, maintenance, production and the notion of “work”.  Sets of information are exchanged as “events”, and the relationships between activities and events are standardized.  Without this information exchange model, knowledge workers don’t have a sustainable operations management system, and as a result, the organization doesn’t have sufficiently useful information.

How can architecture decisions be made?  Consider the following information model in light of the 3 implementation options summarized above:

Wherever these functions are implemented in different locations (with or without Cloud), what mechanisms are necessary for requirements such as “business continuity”, “access control” etc.?  How much context must be exchanged between sites and the Cloud to recover from network and Cloud outages?  Only an appropriately detailed and standardized information model can help.

ISA-95 focuses on the functions of operations management; it is independent of the implementation, including technology and location.  It is the foundation of high performance operations management transformation.

The Industrial Software space continues to outgrow its labels!!!!

As the 2014 draws to a close, I seem to be sitting in a growing amount of long term strategic meetings both within Schneider-Electric and within customers and discussing the landscape of 2020 -2025. What immediately happens is the labels we have used for years for products, spaces, and roles no longer mean the same thing. We rapidly find ourselves setting up a glossary of labels and what they will mean in 2020-25 in order to gain alignment.

Putting a label on this space has been challenging because it has evolved over the last 20 years and will continue to change as many technologies converge towards an integrated industrial software platform strategy.

1990 - 2010: The label “MES” was first introduced in 1990 to refer to a point application at a single site (typically Quality Management). Over the next 20 years, more functionality was added to MES to keep pace with Automation trends.

2010-2015: In recognizing its evolution, some industry analysts have offered new acronyms like MOM (LNS Research), while others have redefined MES as follows:

“For many, MES is no longer a point application, but a platform that serves a dual purpose: integrating multiple business processes within a site and across the manufacturing network, and creating an enterprise manufacturing execution capability.”

-          Gartner Group, Vendor Guide for MES 2012

Today/Tomorrow: As the industrial computing paradigm shifts to the internet, the platform is now being leveraged for other assets distributed across the interconnected value chain while extending the rich optimization functionality via new applications to get more productivity in areas outside of manufacturing. This platform maybe on premise but is rapidly growing to been a hybrid of on premise and “off premise” (cloud) solutions that enabled the shift to “managed Solutions” with standards. Required to gain consistency, and transparency across the value generating assets.

We started to see this transformation in early 2000s when a simple activity such as Performance /OEE on a packaging line became dramatically more complex. A different solution when it went from one line to many lines on a plant, and then the same standards, downtime reasons across 100s of lines over multiple plants. It was then that I realized in the meetings internally I could not use the word MES generically and needed to become specific.

Another area we finding this is around the HMI (human machine interface) traditionally it was a window into my process/ PLC and that is what InTouch was famous for. Again in internal meetings and with customers I struggle when they use the term as we have completely different functions in the operational experience been referred too. The diagram below shows the landscape we face in Operational Experiences today in a typical industrial company; they are all often referred to as HMI.

Just last we in a design meeting we were defining the strategy for certain notifications to brought to attention. The architectural suggestion was to have the advanced asset application send events to platform alarm and event system; this will expose them across the enterprise. This is the correct answer, but people struggled with it as they had in their mind HMI/ Supervisory, yet when defining the approach I was not thinking supervisory. I was thinking roles and that operational planning, asset planning roles require these notifications. By putting them on the common event bus, they could be picked up their interface which is filtered for these events, or by workflow so that procedure who notify them.

Again it was simple case of labels and peoples understanding of labels, when we ended up on the white board it all became clear.  

  

In the diagram above a Process HMI is a basic screen with alarms typical of InTouch, this very different to Site based system which requires process awareness, alarms, but operational data such as asset state, production schedule, log books etc.

 It is much easier to avoid labels and define the situation. scenario / role, and start the meeting or strategy session laying out the landscape for discussion, gain alignment on the “desired outcome” and destination first, it makes it easier!!!!

Dynamic Discussion on Transformation From MES to Operational Management System

In the last 2 months I have lead a number of public sessions and forums on this subject with my college Stan Devries two weeks ago we hosted 2 of these in Dallas, and again there was a lot of reactions and good discussion. A couple of months ago I blogged about the third generation of MES / MOMs, creating a lot of interest.

The diagram below shows the concept of transformation, it is really a move from traditional server, API based solutions with heavy customization restricting the required agility required today vs an SOA (service orientated) and model driven architecture. 

 

The discussions in the sessions centered on the amount of custom code surrounding the core MES functions which have been fairly stable for 10 years, evolving by industry. This custom code is a “ball chain” impact on the ability for the MES / operations system to evolve, due to integration with real time events, and the interaction with people. The one consistency is that the human interaction and operational interactions / process are continually evolving with new procedures changing regulations. Too much scripting, custom user interfaces, have been traditionally required.

The notion of “Model Driven Operations” where the design of an operational system is modeled based upon operational activities such as Material consumption, quality sampling, new product setup etc. The associated steps in the action are modeled within a workflow, and the required human interface forms are included in the associated steps, in the workflow. These are bundled interfacing with the MES functions, initiated manually or automatically from a plant event. This change from user interface to design based upon application, location to activity based design where the activities can be reused over multiple roles, locations, and sustained and evolved in the model. This shift was discussed a lot and too many this was a new step or thought process in the MES/ MOMs design approach.   

Also, the discussion of the concepts around the Gartner “Manufacturing 2.0” architecture combined with the emergence of “cloud” and the opportunities this new hybrid architecture proposes for consistency in management of operational processes, and measures while sustaining the local execution. The diagram below provides a view of one potential architecture here. There are several options we are trying at the moment, and it appears that Operational Management is ideal for a hybrid Architecture.

The sessions we held outlined the above topics and discussion was constructive and in agreement, key is that “are solution builders really taking into account all these points?” There is so much opportunity for small through to multi nationals.

Next week I want outline an interesting discussion on the shift to “distributed” world centered on the “Third Industrial revolution debate, I had on the flight last week across the pacific, as the concepts we seeing so much in the industrial world.

 

Commentary Feedback on “Third Time Lucky for MOM/ MES!!!! YES, it does have a significant chance this time!!

It is an interesting writing this blog as there is little comment feedback in the blog, but I receive a lot of email on certain subjects with substantial input. The topic of “Third time lucky for MES” I received a lot of both email and discussion face to face, this blog expands on the topic.

The first comment from many people was “that MES has been around for years and has been implemented successfully”, and I agree, but the first 2 generation architectures involved significant services while they have run extremely well for a number of years, but with limited ability to absorb change without significant cost and risk. Also, companies are expanding in multi sites and the requirement to enforce operational practices over multiple sites, again this requires alignment of sites. So yes MES has been successful in concept, but not in a sustaining mechanism.

Charlie’s comment in “The MOM Chronicles” reflects this:

“The first two MOM attempts occurred in the 1990s, and 2000s, actually were also found a primary hindrance to continuous improvement efforts because the MOM system owners were typically understaffed, under skilled, and un governed to support real innovation. “

So what is different this time? Was a common question, as mentioned in the original blog the SOA (service Orientated Architecture) actually been adopted correctly with conforming service contracts at the ERP side and business side with the “Enterprise Service Buses” (ESB) becoming a norm, not just a term. This flowing down into the operational world with vendors looking at aligning with web services, but also model centric alignment vs point integration is key. The figure below taken from “The MOM Chronicles” illustrates the concept:

The experience we have MES implementations at Invensys has pushed us to evolve our architecture, and the key areas are:

1/ The MES functional Capability has evolved in richness

2/ The plant events are now linked into the System Platform, using templates so now plant equipment and events can be templates and managed, also validation is achieved as close to source as possible.

3/ The Human interaction and the business rules and processes are no long programmed they are implemented in a model driven (workflow) environment. So now face plates/ forms that present information and interact with humans validate the data entry as early as possible and with no code but in graphical modeling environments. This area alone is transformational as I have sat down with process/ operational teams with these graphical workflows and worked through with them relative to their process, we mark up the diagram and implement fast. No longer programmers are involved in business rules it is the operational/ business / process teams work know their rules and behaviors they require and they implement.

The diagram below shows the realization of the aspects of the Invensys MES architecture, and it is all three aspects that make this a sustainable solution, that scale, and also work in a multiple site situation. But most of all it is agile aware been able to absorb change.  Again this is a different approach to tradition MES solutions which have at MES Functionality, but honestly depended on coding around the system for events, human interaction and business rules. This architecture is SOA so it is plug and play and services like the MES can run in different locations, leaving open the opportunity for MES data bases and rules to run in an elastic “cloud”, combining with the on premise interactions with the plants and people.

 

Third Time Lucky for MOM/ MES Architectures?

For the last 15 to 20 years companies have implemented MES (Manufacturing Execution System)  systems, and MOM (Manufacturing Operations Management) systems, remembering MOM is a super set of MES. These implementations executions have been both custom, and using off the shelf applications for MES, and success has varied, but even the successful ones are struggling to evolve to current agile requirements due to the method of implementation. One end user asked me on the flight “has MES been successful?”, I stepped back and thought about a couple customs who have implemented end to end MES. Based on one MES system so that manufacturing master data is managed by one system, with the customer stating their MES has been the most valuable software implementation on the plants, it just works and is the heart of their manufacturing. So the answer is yes, but the fact of the question allowed me to reflect on the normal bumpy roads MES implementations have had.

I was read Charlie Gifford’s latest book “The MES Chronicles” (ISA 95 best practices book 3.0), which has a set of articles around Gartners’ Manufacturing 2.0, explaining the concepts, and reality to the concepts. It is well worth the read if you are looking at the industrial/ manufacturing operations space.

 

 

In the introduction,  Charlie does an excellent job raising the challenges of MES, and the fact that we now with Manufacturing 2.0 going through actually the third architectural attempt at MES. How true his comments are when I reflect on my own career which had gone through all 3 since 1995 when we released InTrack (original MES Product).  A key consideration to this discussion is that MES is a concept of managing the executing the manufacturing, with the off the shelf solutions and customer systems built for a particular industry  with rules and practices for that industry. So looking at Invensys’s first generation MES system InTrack it was built for the semi conductor/ electronic industry, and the outstanding success stories I referred to were from that industry. Invensys’s second generation product built Wonderware MES for food and Beverage industry, and again has worked remarkably well in that industry and related industries. This does not mean they cannot be applied in other industries, but the “glove fits well”. That is why I do not like the generalization of MES, we should categorizing them by industry types, to help selection, and stop companies force fitting the wrong models into their practices.

Charlie in his book reflected on the three generations of MES/ MOM as:

“20% of advanced manufacturers discovered that the first two MOM attempts lead to:

• High cost MOM systems with extremely poor data integrity
• High cost change during new production introductions, production scaling time to market and continuous improvement.”

“ The first two MOM attempts occurred in the 1990s, and 2000s, actually were also found a primary hinderance to continuous improvement efforts because the MOM system owners were typically understaffed, under skilled, and un governed to support real innovation. “

His % might be low, but the point is that MES / MOM solutions have typically been architected in a “point to point” / application integration, with high levels of customization restricting evolution to the original developer. Many of the original InTrack MES implementations have maintained the database well, and the rules within it, but significant custom code has been developed for human interaction and data validation, and data validation on automated events acting on the system.  Like highly customized ERP implementations the ability to evolve , upgrade the systems become an anchor on manufacturing agility. Yet that is the reason why people put these systems to increase efficiency and consistency of production, but the issue is manufacturing practices, new product introduction is constantly changing and evolving, and the systems must be able to absorb this change naturally if the implementation are going to allow for the required agility needed today.

So the third attempt at MOM with the Manufacturing 2.0 concepts undoubtedly lead to:

·         An SOA (service orientated Architecture) that allows plug and play of the 15 to 20 Operational applications required to run a plant, allow the inter-operability to set up using messages through sustained services vs application integration.

·         This integration is a model based using tools such as workflow and sustainable environment.

·         Validation and data entry rules will be model driven, so that embedded best practices, that can evolve in a sustainable way as staff evolve in the organization.

·         Semantic information, and data management models based on proven models such as ISA 95 will enable existing and different models of the different operational applications to align.

The book outlines many of the concepts. MES are not a standalone product, it is  an architecture that merges level 2 events from automation, with validation of data, events in a structure asset/ operations model that can interact with the different operational applications through the life of a manufacturing operation. Key is the acceptance of  architecture which has model driven interoperability (so the model can evolve with governance) and the introduction of workflow to be a natural part of the operational system to capture the procedures as embedded operations that again have governance so can evolve as the practices of the plants change. Like successful ERP implementation, customization must be avoided, configuration within the tools provided make the system sustainable, but this will be a mind shift for people. Too often people talk about APIs, and taking coding tools to build a solution, this is fine for the short term, but will come back and bite when time for change and evolution. The project and program owners at the end users need to take a more holistic view and enforce an architectural cadence of configuration vs programing and making sure the “human to application”, and “application  to application” integration are model centric approach where configured services  using workflow configuration is key.

 

 

Can Sustainable Manufacturing Operations Management Exist without Master Data Management? NO,

Again last week the discussion of operational integration raged in few project discussions with customers, without really understanding the arguments and I needed to pull out a log from mid last year on Operational Data Management. Data Model Alignment will be key in a viable interoperability architecture for level 3 applications with out “rip and replace approach” in making Manufacturing Operations Management sustainable and effective.    

Synching between systems, people look at data warehouses , they do manual binding, but these are just not practical in a sustainable and every changing world. There are many systems usually upwards of 20 + systems which come from different vendors and even if they do come from the same vendor they implemented by different cultures in the plants. The thought pattern on “just asset naming” is different between these groups. So the concept of Master Data Management (MDM) for Industry is a hidden one, but we believe is a key one for the future of sustainable solutions that are federating multiple systems together, so expect to see investments and products to trying to address this. In this blog I want to have a discussion on why MDM what it is, and Gerhard has done a good job, and I will expand on it.

 

When you are talking to customers you see comments and projects and so many are trying to deal with this issue without really looking at the big problem and plan. The same issue of naming happens with Assets between the Alarming system, MES system, Batch System, and EAM system for example. The capacity or size of a asset(Eg Tank) is key to their operations but often changes are made to the actual asset and then say the EAM and alarming systems are updated but the others are not realized, and the plant starts up with half the systems updated. Yes now you get faults and plant delays, and trouble shooting. Imagine having a system that is aware of all the systems that are modeling an aspect of that asset in their data models, now you can have a “master change management” over it been changed at one location and making sure it is changed at all systems prior to start up, even if updates are manual.

Again Borrowing from As Gerhard Greeff – Divisional Manager at Bytes Systems Integration put it in his paper"When last did you revisit your MOM?"

“MDM or Master Data Management is the tool used to relate data between different applications.

So what is master data and why should we care? According to Wikipedia, “Master Data Management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization (which may include reference data). MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, assuring quality, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.”

Processes commonly seen in MDM solutions include source identification, data collection, data transformation, normalization, rule administration, error detection and correction, data consolidation, data storage, data distribution, and data governance.

Why is it necessary to differentiate between enterprise MDM and Manufacturing MDM (mMDM)? According to MESA, in the vast majority of cases, the engineering bill-of-materials (BOM), the routing, or the general recipe from your ERP or formulation/PLM systems simply lack the level of detail necessary to:

1. Run detailed routings through shared shop resources

2. Set up the processing logic your batch systems execute

3. Scale batch sizes to match local equipment assets

4. Set up detailed machine settings

This problem is compounded by heterogeneous legacy systems, mistrust/disbelief in controlled MOM systems, data ownership issues, and data inconsistency. The absence of strong, common data architecture promotes ungoverned data definition proliferation, point-to-point integration and parochial data management strategies. Within the manufacturing environment, all this translates into many types of waste and added cost.

The master data required to execute production processes is highly dependent upon individual assets and site-specific considerations, all of which are subject to change at a much higher frequency than typical enterprise processes like order-entry or payables processing. As a result, manufacturing master data will be a blend of data that is not related specifically to site level details (such as a customer ID or high-level product specifications shared between enterprise order-entry systems and the plant) and site-specific or “local” details such as equipment operating characteristics (which may vary by local humidity, temperature, and drive speed) or even local raw material characteristics.

This natural division between enterprise master data and “local” or manufacturing master data suggests specific architectural approaches to manufacturing master data management (mMDM) which borrow heavily from Enterprise MDM models, but which are tuned to the specific requirements of the manufacturing environment.

Think of a company that has acquired various manufacturing entities over time. They have consolidated their Enterprise systems, but at site level, things are different. Different sites may call the same raw material different things (for instance 11% HCl, Hydrochloric acid, Pool Acid, Hydrochloric 11% etc.). Then this same raw material may also have different names in the Batch system, the SCADA, the LIMS, the Stores system, the Scheduling system and the MOM. This makes it extremely difficult to report for instance on the consumption of Hydrochloric Acid from a COO perspective, as without a mMDM for instance, the consumption query will have to be tailored for each site and system in order to abstract the quantities for use.

The alternative of course is to initiate a naming standardization exercise that can take years to complete as changes will be required on most level 2 and 3 systems. That is not even taking into account the redevelopment of visualization and the retraining of operators. The question is, once the naming standardization is complete, who owns the master naming convention and who ensures that plants don’t once again diverge over time as new products and materials are added?

The example above is a very simple one, for a raw material, but it can also be applied to other resources, utilities, equipment, operating parameters, recipes, WIP and products. If a company has for instance implemented a barcode scanning solution, the item numbers for a specific product or component may differ between suppliers. How will the system know what product/component has been received or issued to the plant without some translation taking place somewhere? mMDM will thus resolve a lot of issues that manufacturing companies are experiencing today in their strive for more flexible integration between level 3 and level 4 systems.

Figure blow shows the relation between mMDM, MDM, SOA and SOAm and how they are meant to operate together.

The objective of the proposed split in architecture is to increase application flexibility without reducing the effectiveness and efficiency of the integration between systems. It also abstracts the interface mechanisms out of the application into services that can operate regardless of application changes. This will get rid of numerous “point-to-point” interfaces and make systems more flexible in order to adapt to changing conditions. The SOAm architecture also abstracts business processes and their orchestration from the individual applications into an operations business process management layer.  Now, one person is able to interact with multiple applications to track or manage a production order without even realizing that he/she is jumping between applications.

Even with SOAm and mMDM, integration will not be efficient and effective unless message structures and data exchange are in a standard format. This is where ISA-95 once again plays a big part in ensuring interface effectiveness and consistency. Without standardized data exchange structures and schemas, not even mMDM and SAOm will enable interface re-use.

ISA-95 provides standards for information exchange as well as standardized data structures and XML message schemas based on the Business-to-Manufacturing Mark-up Language (B2MML) developed by WBF, including the verbs and nouns for data exchange. Standardizing these throughout the manufacturing operations ensures that standard services are developed to accommodate multiple applications. “

Why not a central directory “Yellow Pages” that manages this relationship without replication????

 

Time for “Off the Shelf” Operations/ MES Solution

As I sit on another plane heading across the Pacific from California, I have time to reflect on the discussions both this week, and over the last 6 months, with leading food and beverage and process companies.

The growing trend in the MES space, (which the dominate solution is “custom solutions”), is to replace these systems with “off the shelf” products, enabling companies to focus on the core business. This trend is similar to the ERP space in the 90s, and initially in the MES space in the late 90s, and 2000s, but MES solutions of this time did not deliver the complete solution, and the eventual solutions have become unsustainable for the “operational journey”. Thousands of sites have installed MES Products from Invensys and other vendors, that are  highly successfully having run for over decade delivering significant value, but this time around there is more functionality capability people want, the architecture is not just one plant but multiple, and tolerance for custom code has significantly dropped. So why? And why now?

Reflecting on the discussions across many industries from process, mining, food, beverage, and general manufacturing, there are some common threads to the demise of “custom MES”:

·    The customer MES solutions are functionally very rich exceeding the traditional functional definitions of MESA etc with inbuilt operational practices in code, often focused on only a plant’s needs. The pace of change in operations, and pressure for new capability is growing both in capability and time to deliver.

·    Opportunities have moved from one plant to multiple plant, in order to provide the consistency and agility across the industrial landscape. Requiring significant governance, and alignment both in execution and information.

·    There is a younger generation (Gen X born 1960 to 80s) at the CIO and engineering level that have grown up with “packaged software”, and know that it works and should be leveraged.

·     Rotating staff in all roles requires faster time to experience, requiring embedded operational practices across plants.

It is also necessary to note that the MES solutions on the market where developed from a level 3 point of view yet when applied they must interact with the plant automation systems, as well as the many workers across the plants.

There were two areas of solution that contributed to the custom code:

Automation Layer Integartion:

Since the MES Products originated from level 3 specialized supplies (even if they are now apart of automation companies their origins came from standalone companies) the plant floor integration was external to MES  model using OPC etc, requiring significant custom code in the automation layer was to validate the event, and data. A sustainable solution requires  level 2 and 3 systems natively modeled, with minimal custom code as illustrated below.  The ability to configure (not code) a set of equipment templates, that model the equipment (entities) with built in supervisory capability as well as operational capability for such things as production data capture, quality sampling, utilization capture etc. Rolling these templates out over multiple sites, providing a consistent automated production event/ data capture.

Client, Human Interface:

The second area of significant coding on the first generation of MES solutions was at the client or user interface that captures manual data, at production event generation. The data  validation is required as close to source, requiring significant custom code that guides the data entry for the  user with constructive feedback. Also, the  job never seemed to finish with the operational practices continuing to change/ evolve as the companies operational practices evolved. In the above solution workflow combined with form generation and interaction, enables change and evolution in a sustainable manner.”Activity” specific interfaces and associated workflows will guide the user through the activity, and interface to MES capability capturing the required information.

The above approach is a full MES/ Operations architecture, that enables the configuration of embedded operational practices of a site and company, but in “off the shelf” products, faster solution delivery and in a more sustainable way. In many ways, this adding of realtime natural interface, combined with workflow for human interaction and embedded operational procedures extends the traditional MES capability as defined by “MESA or ISA 95” to be  a second generation that does have the opportunity to be adopted across 1000s of plants.  

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.  

The User Interface is Evolving from User Interface Application to Role centric and now Activity centric!!

As discussed two weeks ago this is NOW not the case, a “day in the life” of a role in the plant, (e.g. process engineer, maintenance engineer, operator) today is transient in state. Today the knowledge worker in order to execute the activity they are responsible are often required to move  out from one state, say the control room, to a local operator station, then maybe mobile. Same can happen for other roles where they are still responsible for an activity or supporting the activity when they leave the plant, so may need mobile awareness, and interaction through the web.

This has shifted people to think that we should be designing the User Interface not based on App User Interface applications but based on role.

But in the last year there has been a shift beyond this to “Activity” based, this is significant move. Meaning that operational activities with their intelligence/ information and actions need to designed so that can execute on all User Interfaces (desktop and roaming devices). The change is that due to a workers location, and plant situation the worker may have to take on new activities which are typically outside of their defined role. Matching the growing demand for agility in operational roles.

But as discussed last week the requirement for natural training and certification becomes more critical, as a worker may take on an activity due to location, and they have not performed this activity for a while so the worker must be able access an online instruction, and sign off any required training before executing the activity. When I talk about this concept people say "this is not real, what about liability?" valid question. There are many activities that can performed in a timely manner that will reduce risk to safety , environment and therefore operational continuity. Yes it is key for the worker to be able to go through an online training and certification, the system will record all actions or audit.The worker may select a “best operational practice” and the system will guide the worker through the steps, with instructions to successfully execute the activity.

So I encourage to start thinking of Operational interfaces as an interface to execute Operational activities, and what would be the “day in life” of those who would typically responsible for it.

As we move forward with evolving the User Interfaces from Invensys, expect to see more and more collaboration services which start to deliver this activity based operational interaction. But today everything I have talked about here is possible with the current tools. 

Next week I will expand on a real situation of this evolution in an Upstream Scenario...

Traditional User Interfaces have been thought of as applications, e.g. InTouch, Suite Voyager, etc., we have seen people and vendors start moving to Role based, but today the Thought Leaders are going to Activity Based, What does this mean?

Traditionally we in product development / marketing no matter what company I have worked for, we have thought about functionality relative to User Interface products, e.g.  InTouch, Information Server, Fox View etc., this was correct for the time as roles in a plant tended to be dedicated to one type of user interface and we satisfied this market by delivering a particular user interface product.

Why Enterprise Control ? Why not a traditional automation / MES like system?

No longer can we think automation/ MES system as we did in the 90s and 2000s, they will not satisfy, more importantly we cannot have many systems working in isolation, there is too much data, and speed for decisions is critical. This does not mean replace these systems (they basically work, and execute) we need to UNIFY, extend and align these into one PROACTIVE OPERATIONAL SYSTEM. This could be across one plant or across and “Industrial Enterprise” made up of multiple plants that make up the supply chain, or the operational capacity for the enterprise.

“Products and services can be copied. Our business/ operational processes and our business models are our differentiators.” 

  CEO – Global Enterprise (2011)

This quote captures a lot, products and services are commodities in this “flat world”, the differentiator will be on business and operational processes. How dynamic the business is relative to how quickly they can adapt these processes from strategy to business and operational practices and rollout across their industrial capacity into executing practices that are consistently executed.   

So what is Enterprise Control? No matter if this is the correct name or not (there will be many names in the market), to us it refers to an operational system (over one plant or over the enterprise plants) that aligns business processes / strategies from the business system, to proven operational processes that efficiently execute them in a timely manner by empowering and orchestrating the operational systems(automation controls, MES, Batch, optimization), and operational knowledge workers.

When asked what it provides in a short comment this is what I answer with:

The Enterprise Control Vision is to provide a set of capability that enables customers to achieve "Operational Excellence” through three strategies:

·         Empowerment of Operational People

Operational personnel (e.g. operators, process engineers, process experts, maintenance, quality, production management) are empowered in real-time to make decisions through operational awareness, access to experience, collaboration, and best practices in a pro-active system.

·         Unification through Federation across assets, applications and systems

Align the different assets and processes across the operational management layer (of the traditional automation levels) so that the industrial operations are more agile.  These assets that reside within a plant, process and across multiple sites are aligned to business and operational processes, and require consistent measures and information. So that each of the existing applications/ controls continue to run, but their models are aligned, and communication happens with orchestration execution, in order for the Operational Process to execute in the most timely and effective manner.

·         Built on a Sustainable platform of capability so that the system has longevity to evolve.

ECS will be implemented in stages and evolve in scope, breadth and functionality through its lifetime at each customer installation, which could be 20 years.  The system has been engineered and architected in a way that enables this evolution to occur in a sustainable way and caters to changing engineering teams and technologies.   

Over the next couple of weeks I will expand my thoughts, what I am hearing when talking to industry thought leaders, and what is possible and we investigating, looking at in concepts. What you should be thinking about. As a traditional approach to building a Operational System will not work there are significant differences, but “rip and replace” has no place either. So understanding the concept of Federation is important in this industrial sense stay tuned.

I often get asked this question, mainly from engineers, but when I speak with Operational people in all industries the focus has shifted from controlling the process, (this is assumed as most people are on at least second generation controllers) to controlling the profit and production. This means operational dynamics/ agility so decisions are made in NOW by all operational people no matter the role.

Over the next couple of weeks I will expand on the changes I am seeing and we looking at relative to addressing what some people are referring to as the biggest operational evolution since the industrial revolution. The “day in the life” of modern operational worker coming out of this recession is forever changed. As the market is not recovering from GFC,  it is fundamentally being RESET to a new operational paradigm in this “flat world” with a transition to a new generation of digital workers.