Focusing on Operational Activities and new Roles provides a Path to the Future Operational Workspace.

As we enter the new year, the challenge of how and where we start designing the new operational solutions for 2020 and beyond will come up.
I have expanded on a blog I did in November with a white paper, on the facets especially around the Operational Workspace.
I hope this provides some food for thought as we enter the new year.

Companies have invested and executed on the traditional alignment in a plant across process systems, and business systems (such as SAP), leveraging such guidelines such as ISA-95. With the drive towards more and more agility and rapid deployment of products to markets, the alignment of multiple plants,and their operational/automation systems with the business strategy/ applications is a key area. The other key area of critical concern is the operational workplace. With rapid agility,comes the requirement for more alignment, and more complexity, combined with key / rapid decisions to be made in real-time, and as a result the new operational team collaboration, and operational workspace will be critical. Combine this with the facts that over 10,000 experienced baby boomers are retiring each week, (this rate is expected to continue for seventeen years), and that by 2020, 42%+ of the workforce is expected to made up of Gen Y.

So where do you start when planning to design an industrial operational system today?

Some people throw technologies around like Cloud, wireless, and mobile, and begin looking for how to apply them, instead of stepping back and looking at “how they will be Operating, based upon the business, market and both capital and human assets”. This requires developing a plan and landscape to satisfy this future operational state, and then apply the best technologies available to achieve the result in the most timely, cost effective and operationally effective manner.

The future “operational state” of the business needs to take into account:

• The production and delivery requirements of products and services, and how to satisfy the consumer demand, this will probably lead to an “enterprise Industrial/ Manufacturing Landscape” with a holistic view and operational execution across multiple plants strategically located for satisfying delivery.
• The “operational workspace” of the future and how the workforce, including all roles at corporate, in the plants, delivery and supply will execute their required activities in the most effective manner.
• The overall supply chain of raw materials, to delivery, the cost, the environmental impact, and how to minimize energy costs.

It is important to note that, in most cases the automation layer is mature and well established and that their business side is also mature on the second generation business system.

So the question of where do I start designing a system for 2020 a beyond, leads to all three of the above aspects of requirements, but of the three aspects of consideration above, the “operational state” is the one that least understood and probably the biggest impact. The opportunity of significant improvement and gain is in the “Operational Workspace” at the operational layer across multiple facilities. Based around the “activities” a role executes decisions in real-time with consistent actions across a range of workers in that role in different plants.

In defining the future “Operational Workspace” of an industrial landscape there are two key activities that need to defined:

• Define the “Operational Activities”: across the value supply chain, looking at each step of manufacturing and delivery. As these activities are captured look to determine a common set of “activities” that can be applied across the sites. It is important to have a defined set of work/ operational processes from which people execute, and then look to embed these processes in a sustainable manner so that they can evolve over time. The diagrams below show the importance of a framework for operational process and how these contribute to the site operational activities, based on what Toyota has applied.

Embedding these operational procedures is important so that consistency across sites, teams, and the dynamic workforce is achieved and sustained. The diagram below from ARC shows the impact of companies building standards and the difference in the long term if they are not embedded to become part of “Operational Workspace”.

• Define the roles in the new operational workspace: how they will work. These roles could be on site or off site, through the concept of the “flexible operational team”. Define the role, the day in the life of that role taking into account location, what “activities” that role is responsible for, and who and what he/she will interact with through the day. Yes, switch into a “Facebook” thinking of friends, but friends maybe people, (other experts) Assets, Processes, even products. Once this map of “activities” and responsibilities during the day is defined, this drives what information, systems and people this role must interact with in a day. By understanding how a role will work in his/her day e.g. if he/she will be located at a plant or roaming, the way that the role will engage with the operational workspace will become clear as well as the role of such technologies of mobile, cellular networks vs. wireless infrastructure, etc. For a particular activity, the role may be notified using one device, but actually executing the role may need to go to a different device based on the requirement for the activity’s execution. When looking at the role, also understand the expected experience in executing the activity, or the site awareness, potential age (e.g. Gen Y- are they experts providing support), etc. as this effects the design of the most effective operational environment.

This role map is key as now you have a starting point, as to driving consistency in a dynamically changing workforce. These role maps are then combined, composed of “operational activities” associated with the role, where the activity has the required notification, information, actions, community of expertise etc. and architectural landscape so these “operational activities” can complement existing systems.

The architectural landscape should define the layers on top of existing systems, in a neutral way, where these operational activities (model driven approach) will reside, these could be local or remote hosting but will require clear governance and require models to defined in an environment that enables constant evolution of the practices but process experts locally and centrally as a “crowd development”, with governance control.

Initially focusing on a role or set of key roles allows the company to gain an approach on how the operational plant will run in 2020 and the key decisions / activities that required, and start applying these now in an architecture that lives with the current systems, but starts to drive consistency and faster decisions across that same role over multiple plants.

Notice that the discussion is independent of technologies; my assumption on mobile and Cloud that the architecture is set up so that these activities will be able to execute independently of the device, so that the adoption of what devices are used on a plant are relative to the plant and the support that they get. The key is the devices, no matter if desktop or mobile or web, should be suited to efficiency of the role execution.

This approach defines the “Operational Workspace” with roles and activities in a defined framework applied across the industrial landscape of the required value chain for delivering products in a timely manner to desired markets. Optimizing these processes and procedures lowers the cost of materials, wastage, and energy, and maximize the utilization of available capacity.

The Changing Execution of Flexible Operational Team

“What does Operational Collaboration Mean for my Modern Supervisory System?”

Last week I travelled to Western Australia, a state where there is a significant mining boom, and a challenge of how to operate it’s plants with a 3 way changing market:

·          The need to be agile to maximize production, which drives a push towards streamlining  “Value Generating Assets”.

·          The shortage of skill sets and experience

·          The changing demographic of the workforce to a younger more “digitally native” aware personal

As I spoke with people in the industry from engineering to operations, the topics I have been discussing in this blog over the last couple of months were confirmed. It does require a different thinking on how to put a system together, and not just different technologies but also an awareness in the design of the system of the constraints these new dynamics bring. This is calling for a rethink of operational practices and collaboration in real-time, to enable the “Flexible Operational Team Work” required, this goes beyond “Operational Centers” it is a new level teamwork, which will require a new thought pattern when designing the operational systems.

In the past we have run our plants and systems in a isolated or independent way with planning looking across them, but this was at best a daily evaluation/plan but if we are to really get the full agility, and performance many leading companies across the world are looking at the industrial production capacity in a more holistic manner.  This we started to talk about with the concept of “Federation” but will expand on in latter blogs.

The skill shortage and especially experience shortage continues to come to the surface when I discuss directions in companies thinking, and constraints which effect how they run, and therefore the changes needed in their operational practices. The fact that experience cannot be assumed so intuitive learning online, and access to experience in knowledge, people etc, we have covered this at length in earlier blogs.

So we are seeing a different thinking from operational execution across a plant or plants. Companies are looking at “Operational Centers” which span multiple plants assets. In refining we have seen this huge operational centers started appearing in the last 10 years, but when you look at “transport” such as airports, and railways we have seen them for a while also in the water utilities industry. If you walk into the Barcelona Airport control center it is a very large control room with huge screens in front, and then operational work stations covering every aspect of the airports operations. This is instead of many control rooms in plants or terminals. At the back of the room their “collaboration rooms” used to discuss situations with experts, where operational people can be drawn into discussions with experts, and it is only a couple of steps to get access to information, and other people. We have seen the same in Power in Eskom’s (South Africa’s ) power utility looking across their 22 power plants.

But when I really speak to teams, and customers, and people step back, the “Operational Center” is only a stepping stone to a new operational paradigm of the “Flexible Operational Team” the diagram starts to illustrate this. This shows from the Operational Center which is permanently manned but this person or persons become the “quarterback” call the plays, and aligning the people across the team into execution of activities. Utilizing the user interfaces below in the plants which traditionally were manned but now are moving to transiently manned.

Also the introduction of the plant team being “active/ roaming” so they have personal devices for notification and interaction, and the ability to go to a local UI maybe a machine or plant room, and “take on control” in a smooth safe manner, to execute the task/ activity and move then pass back control to the Operational Center and move on.

This is a dynamic/ flexible team; able to do more jobs, and respond to different situations, but to achieve this system must incorporate “exception based awareness”. Conditions in the plant must “pro-actively raise awareness” to Operational control room, it must provide operational procedure recommendations to the operational center and to the team members.  An alarm is one form, but to understand a developing condition and trigger an automatic investigation, and procedure so awareness all the way to the experts is key so as an operational person comes aware, these people are already aware and active.

An import concept in this “Flexible Operational Team” is the harnessing of the external experts, these could be local or remote and these experts have different skills and expertise, which the operational center can call on naturally, and have them actively interact with the plant or other experts. Providing expertise/ experience on hand, today this hard to pull together but as we move into this new operational paradigm the interaction and sharing must become a natural act. The different team members are naturally aware of which expertise is online, their capability, and the ability share, interact at a point of click. The foundation to this “Flexible Operational Teamwork” is the concept of a  “Real-time Virtual Situation Room” (will expand in the coming weeks) the expert is probably automatically interacting or aware of the developing situation, they are able to access, see the situation over plants, with focus, and context in what ever state they are in (roaming, desktop, web etc).

The concepts here are not new, as we co-ordinate across these teams today but they must become more active and real-time.  While technologies and product are evolving to make this more possible, infrastructure like bandwidth is allowing the experts to be anywhere, the full advantage will only be realized when people start designing this flow, and interaction naturally into their systems.

Food for thought as we evolve our systems, and the concepts of a Real-time Virtual Situation Room and Operational Innovation will become common concepts, we will discuss in the coming weeks.

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.

The Perfect Storm in Industrial Operations = People Excellence

The most significant disruption in operational strategy thinking is happening in this post GFC (global financial crisis) era, in determining an operational execution environment enabling timely contributions by the operational team to plant execution. The focus is on currently on operational processes, but quickly this will drive a new operational experience to go with a new operational execution plan. Traditional user interfaces will not “cut” it both in products, or the way they have been implemented. Let me expand on my thoughts on this operational experience, which I refer to as “People Excellence” driving a new paradigm of operational empowerment for all roles in plant operations.

In order to contribute to strategy I spend a significant amount of time a week, listening and asking end-users, and implementers, discussing changes and ideas. A common thread  around the world is operational personal challenge, especially the finding of people to replace to existing “baby boomer generation” and lack of experience available in the market.

This is only part of what I believe the most significant disruption in operational strategy in the last 20 years, yes since the introduction of the PC.
There is a perfect storm happening with these vectors:

·     Aging workforce: the significant amount of current experienced operations, maintenance, process workers who will retire in the next 5 to 10 years. I have heard some mangers in “oil and gas upstream” talk about 80% of their current team will be gone in 5 years. We have to be able to capture knowledge and enable

·      Operational Agility means Decision NOW: To be competitive decisions must be made now this has caused a change in thinking that workers need to be empowered to make more decisions, through more information, higher knowledge and access to experience, a transition from “worker” to “knowledge worker”. This also means they have more responsibility. As one customer said last week traditionally they had an operator cover 5 to 10 wells, this was fine when you have 100 wells which lived 20 years, but in the next 5 years he stated “we will have 20000 + wells, we will not have 20000 operators”.

·      The Rotating operational person means “time to experience” is shorter than ever: With the experienced generation retiring and transitioning to a generation 30 years their junior, and the new factor that people are not staying in their role or location longer than a year. One company stated 10 years ago people were in a role/loaction approx. 5 years, now they are seeing 8 months, so we have to design assuming limited experience. 

·      Transition to digital native worker, with very different expectations, causes challengers with worker retention: The new generation is “digitally native” they expect access to knowledge, they expect “touch experience”, they expect collaboration form anywhere, they expect to learn on the fly.

Step back and look at all these vectors; you have significant disruption happening for those in charge of industrial / manufacturing operational execution strategy. 

That will require:

·       A new generation of user interface products with more than interface capability, but embedded knowledge access, experience access, actionable procedures, collberation services and natural intelligence to really empower the operational workers in all roles.

·       Operational experience design. Notice I did not use HMI (Human Machine Interface), as it is a true “operational experience” that goes through the “day in the life” of the new generation of operational knowledge workers.

Example you see a massive $10B projects but they are all at risk due to lack of people to execute them and more importantly run them after they built.

As I stated in the last blog one of the “legs” of what Enterprise Control is about is “Empowerment of Operational People” this will be through a multiyear program of “People Excellence” which will evolve Invensys from a product centric approach to user interaction, to a more “operational centric experience”. Providing freedom to knowledge worker to execute his daily tasks, decisions through a number of user interface devices, different locations, and interacting with different team members naturally no matter the state.

There are many concepts here which I will explore over the coming weeks.