A Different Approach to Design Operational Systems is Needed!!!

I have had the opportunity to review some new strategies of some companies are taking to designing their systems for operations in 2020 to 2030, and I am pleased to see they have taken not just a technology approach. But really turn around and looked at “who they will execute work across their value supply chain” focusing on how they will have operate in this period then how they will be executing their work to achieve this.

Now technology is key as it will enable vision to be achieved in “agile “ world, while making it a sustainable evolution.

The diagram below illustrates our current summary of change in thinking needed in approach the bigger picture programs.

Traditional world of application to application (project) approach and technologies, and effectively technology lead vs operational lead. This does lead to different implementations, a focus on features vs operational experience and efficiency. Many of these projects are focused on improving the process efficiency, vs the product.

The approach we are recommending and leading is a more holistic approach that is “operational” lead so how companies will need to run / execute their business on a longer term, and day to day basis. Focusing now on product delivery band the correct time, at location, at the correct quality and margin. But then instead of focusing on the how, the recommendation is to look at the required work activities that need to be executed these could be automated or human intervention. Understand the end to end process/ procedures and work required to efficiently deliver the product at the correct time, location , quality and margin. 

Eventually it come back to technology and systems, but now driven with an operational focus, and it will be implemented in a way that enables sustained evolution / innovation of those operational procedures as the business changes.

It is important to understand that the world is not about short term solutions, (yes they want quick wins but sustainable solutions) we accept that operational procedures must change with the business, and the systems/ platforms must accommodate this change. This has not been the case in the past, and the other accommodation must be dynamically changing user base, where experience cannot be assumed.

Next week I will continue this thought pattern as this aligns with what we seeing in the IT/OT convergence where the leading companies are putting strong operational leadership over IT and the convergence so all programs (made up aligned smaller projects) deliver aligned operational value in a shorter time frame. 

Empowering a New Generation of Front Line Workers.

Recruiting and retaining talent is a top concern for management as the global workforce transitions to the “millennial” generation.  Every time I am in front company executives across industries and regions of the world, yes operational efficacy comes up, but always the deep conversation and search for ideas comes around the changing operational workforce, and associated workspace.

The diagram below illustrates the changing workforce:  

While mundane tasks will continue to get more automated, what work remains in terms of executing on the front-lines warrant a smarter workforce to deal with the corresponding rise in process complexity and product velocity of the value chain. Or a Operational System that abstracts this increased and evolving complexity into the system, allowing variability in the workforce experience and skill. In other words, for those on the industrial front-lines, the boundaries between physical vs. information work will continue to erode – which in turn, changes the very nature of the software applications to support these workers.  

The next generation of industrial software must be able to propel the productivity frontier to new limits while accommodating the new expectations of the Millennial workforce. Examples include:       

• Information at the fingertips: The information they demand to do their job must be equal to or better than their experience as consumers of mobile, social and collaborative technologies.

• Work to be rewarding: They can accept tough work conditions if it offers them the autonomy to contribute in their own way in order to keep them engaged and committed.

•  Change jobs more often: As opportunities to grow “up the career ladder” shrink, they will seek lateral mobility for growth, putting greater pressure on software applications to accelerate “time to proficiency” and performance consistency.

As I sit in the Karoo in Southern South Africa, on Easter weekend away with a number of senior managers of companies in different aspects of manufacturing. The conversations do discuss the future of economics, but the big discussion comes back to workforce transformation, skill set development and retention, and new culture and work method with the Gen Y, how to maintain their engagement and interest. In this country (South Africa) where there has been a significant departure of “baby boomer and gen x” over the last 20 years, leaving the current level of Gen Y in the workforce is already at levels of 2020 expectations in western world (40%).

The issue is how to train, retain, and develop skill and experience, so that companies maintain the required output efficiency. The nice part of the discussion is the reality that it is not a transition of workforce, that it is a totally new workforce that will engage, operate and work totally different to the traditional Gen X and before, and the development of an company/ operational culture that is exciting to attract and retain talent is key.

The big question is can this exciting, attractive culture/ experience be created in an economical and sustained way, especially in the current cost restrictive climate? This then leads to a discussion on the alternative discussion around “generalization “ of “activities” through templatisation of processes, and information, so that decisions and actions can be abstracted from the variability in the experience levels of the work force.  The key assumption is worker experience will vary, and your operational practices will evolve and improve with the business at an ever faster rate, the operational systems of 2020 need to enable a workforce of different skill sets to work in a consistent manner making consistent timely decisions and taking proven actions.

The airline industry has done this with pilots being able to move across different plans, meet their operational team ½ hour before flight, and key still act in a timely and consistent manner. Perfect example was the “Hudson River Incident” where the pilots met ½ hour before take-off, and in the 3 minute flight they took actions only speaking once due to repeatable proven procedures to achieve a successful outcome. 

Why cannot we do the same with the industrial landscape and systems, so that we assume that workforce will change, evolve and the operational systems can accommodate this change while maintaining operational efficiency??     

Managing Variation is Corner Stone of Operational Growth but Requirements Platforms

I wrote about this 2 months ago, but seem to have spent the last two weeks talking and working through this “managing of Variability/ variation” as key. Too many people said that you are forcing standards, but these only come once you have a platform of abstraction on top of variation you want manage or accommodate.

 “How do you manage this Variability, so that production consistency, agility and increased production output are achieved?”   While the concept of everything being a standard would be great, it is not practical and there are variability’s that we must “manage” and others we must “accommodate”.

 “Standardization is not a business goal – it is a means to an end. 

The goal of business is to make a profit.”

                                                             - Continuous Improvement Leader

Thus, any standardization effort must distinguish between the different types of variety in a way that maximizes profit without constraining the business strategy. Thus, the business challenge can be summed up (using the mining example illustrated in the above) as follows:

1. Mastering necessary variety: When running a mine or plant, such things as Ore Body quality (raw material quality) that varies not according to the ideal plan. Breakdowns of equipment, weather like hurricanes/ cyclones disrupt ports and operations, tides effect ships coming into ports. These are “necessary variability” that all must be “mastered” to optimize production, operations, and you need to put systems in that allow you change plans and strategies as required. I had one workshop last week where the team was looking at long term strategies in the traditional sense. They had not adjusted their thinking to a long term strategy now has to make of shorter operational plans that can be adjusted in “near real-time” due to “master” these “necessary” variability. The operational systems must empower all people to be planners in their time span, to empower actionable decisions that are related to achieving the bigger strategy, and clear impact is understood.  As products, deliverables change and vary more regularly, plans will become shorter and increased volume of plans to achieve a business strategy.
2. Accommodating unavoidable variety: Situations like different automation vendors or implementations across equipment, processes and sites. It is impractical to think a company can acquire new or existing equipment and processes and expect a particular PLC or automation system, the OEM equipment suppliers just make the change to cost prohibitive. In order for companies to grow and be agile, they must “accommodate” natural variety from equipment suppliers, existing sites, but be able to apply their operational standards/ processes across the different equipment.  Another area that that limits operational excellence is the different “experience” levels of the workforce, from shift to shift, from site to site. The operational systems must abstract operational/ or site experience by embedding operational procedures/ actions into the system providing a guidance and consistency of operational decision and action. This starts to generalize the workforce experience enabling significant operational workforce flexibility between sites, and hiring, addressing the challenges of workforce / skill shortage.
3. Eliminating unnecessary variety: Anything other than the above two scenarios would be eligible for standardization.

It is NOT about “rip and replace with standards it is about “mastering and accommodating” these variations while enabling operational excellence growth and continuity by applying operational standards across this variability. Key is “platform strategies” that abstract the variability and can absorb variability while provide a platform for services that enable standards to be built on. Providing the architecture for “sustainable innovation” through managed standards that can evolve over time. Standards can be operational models in supervisory for alignment of context and structure, as well as operational actions to guide users through tasks in a consistent way. Also, configuration of control strategies should be over multiple vendors, where common control standards for process can be deployed over multiple controllers but managed in structured way.

Does this mean one platform? NO, not for the industrial landscape different layers of the industrial operations landscape have different roles. Providing different services and different ability to absorb a variety, but the common services between these platforms must enable them to “tightly aligned but loosely coupled”.

As we have pointed out the key to success in this dynamic but changing world is the ability to “Master Necessary Variety” in your business, while “Accommodating Unavoidable Variation”. Providing a structure to acquire new “brownfield plants” accommodate their existing automation and process. But apply the new companies’ differentiation through applying their operational procedures across these acquired plants.

This is not a new concept, but I seem to explain it a lot now days!!!!

Convergence on Wisdom (applied Knowledge), and Industrial Analytics / Operation Intelligence grow in importance!!!

It seems like a while I have been talking about Operational Intelligence/ Industrial Analystics, and then the movment to Wisdom (Applied Knowledge) all as separate threads but I was asked the question last week:

 “how do they relate?” .

They are different, but all related to empowerment of operational workforce to make faster decisions, and take actions. As I pointed out last week one of the big drivers to platforms is to manage varience. We talk Supervisory, MES, Information, Simulation platforms, but as we pointed out must a “People Platform” that covers:

·         Collaboration between people

·         Supports the hosting of “Activities” with their embedded information/ knowledge and their associated actions.

·         Transformation of Information to Situation ally aware for the particular user interested/ interacting.

·         Management of Operational Work between team members

·         Notifications

·         Plus more

This will abstract the turnover of the workforce, abstracting the different skill levels, and experience levels, with embedded “Applied Knowledge (Wisdom),  so the experience is now in the system. A key concept for the this upcoming Operational Transformation.

Industrial Analytics provides the shift from the past through the present and into the future based on high fidelity models(from experience). Providing a new dimension to the workers tools, and thru the decision they are about to make. Combining the “Future”    providing answers to “what will happen!!!” with the recommended actions to take.

Providing the answer to “What should I do Next?” with experience, fore thought, and understanding. Operation Intelligence also aligns with this by providing a screens, presentation of the situation or “ know Questions” with context and awareness.

Operational Intelligence providing the worker an understanding of “Now” , where he is, and what the future holds, simple and clear. Increasingly I am being asked for this type of “Operational window” and view; it is not analysis it practical information around my current situation and immediate future. No configuration just a simple view of task or question provides the view and clear awareness, providing an answer.

Are these different experiences, No, they are all functional value expansions on each other, and should seen as building blocks in the road to providing and Operational Execution knowledge platform, with built in experience. Providing a foundation for absorbing turnover, transition in the workforce while maintaining operational consistency and efficiency.   

Achieving Operational Effectivness through Planned Operational Work vs Adhoc Work

As one customer said “We have teams and programs on captial asset performance for years, this will continue, but the real opportunity for gains is with increased efficiency across the operational team!”

 

The emergence of “Operational Performance Teams” to work along side the well established “Capital Asset Performance Teams”, with the focus on improving the operational effectiveness of the plants. In today's challenge is how do evolve the workers operational practises into a sustainable model. Moving to planned work vs ad-hoc work in a day and week takes a change in culture but delivers significant results in reliability, improved safety. The key to increased agility is through effective, real Operational Teams, having to collaborate and execute work in a timely manner, with the freedom to pass work items between team members for effective execution.

 

To achieve operational effectiveness the discussion between companies is not just information awareness, it is also looking at implementing operational work item systems that are not just logging and generating end of shift log reports. The discussion has shifted to a “journey of operational alignment and culture” as seen the below. Today many companies find they do not actually know what work items workers are doing in a day, many state that they ad-hoc and fire fighting, which is decidedly in efficient in time and cost, plus directly increases the safety risk. Companies have quoted figures of 35% of a typical plant workers day is planned rest is “unplanned”. The diagram above is intriguing depiction of a possible journey in a workers operational work management, key will be changing the culture of work management on the plant and dynamic workers.

The ISA 95 working group has also released a work management structure for operational systems as seen below:

The key are seven items that are required for Operational Effectiveness:

 

This is decidedly different to traditional electronic log systems, and the key is the fact that this is not a logging and task management, it is also capturing, and planning and assigned embedded operational procedures. The ability to pass work items between different operational team workers. On the plant we do often have a good work management in the Asset Management system, this is extremely effective for asset management, but the Operational Work management is for all items in the industrial landscape, and day. It is also targets improvement by performance monitoring of operational procedure execution and seeing how to improve these procedures. This can only happen if the actions taken are consistent, and this depends on “embedded operational procedures/ workflows”. Combining this with planning and realtime shift dispatching of work items, and constant realtime execution, transferring of work items made up tasks between team members with clear ownership so “accountability” which is key.

Invensys is continuing to evolve it is offering in the space to satisfy the every growing requirement of managing operation work items and therefore the efficiency of the human assets. Working with leading companies as they evolve on this journey of operational effectiveness, expect to see a lot more discussion on this area. My question is how can companies run a team without Operational work items management, that is why electronic log books ave grown in the last few years, but this is only a step in the correct direction.