How Real are we Treating the State of Connectivity in Your Operations relative to Success of the Business?

Control over your business across different sites, the supply chain, and targeted markets is key to survival. Control ensures that you are delivering the correct “Rights” in order to maintain the “shelf space” therefore access to the customers and market position and potential growth.

But as time moves forward the requirement for control over a wider value chain, and tighter control is key, and becoming critical. This directly relates to the “connectivity” within your business especially over the “value chain” including supply chain, manufacturing/ production, and then distribution. With increased regulations set by government, or the public/ market, brand integrity is core as brand loyalty has gone.

Consistency in decisions, consistency in actions, real-time awareness drives the operational world towards “self aware” production, and “self Aware” products that enable the timely awareness and action.

Connectivity means real-time alignment between People at all levels, with focus, and the value chain assets relative to their current production/ operation. The diagram below shows how the world is changing how control is becoming key, yet if connectivity and that means not data but “knowledge” and "Wisdom" is key.

Will you let opportunities pass, due to un-awareness, or the inability to be agile even if you do have the data, can you act on it with the current operational systems or operational culture?

In mining, oil and Gas we seeing strategies with the “integrated operational centers” to take a paradigm shift in the operational connectivity between the key functions like planning, experts and operational control over multiple assets by putting them in a common room. No longer is it a call, or meeting, in real-time people can cross the room and talk, review each others situation, call small adhoc decision meetings. The returns have been significant, when you then combine this with “trusted data” and total transparency in real-time in context across the Value Chain decisions can be made.

Take that one step further with a “self aware” system, that knows what it is meant to be doing, at what efficiency and safety level, and can see into immediate operational future through embedded simulation, that the system can draw awareness to critical decisions that can be acted on. If the system knows the collaboration it requires to move to a resolution and maintain operational continuity then it can interact with other systems, key people in real time with the correct context of their contribution.

Can we not deliver this, can we competitive without connectivity?

Operations Innovation & Transformation – Transformation from Plants to an Aligned Multi Plant Value Chain

Examples in refining with multiple refineries aligning from individual plants, to "mine to Port" in mining where assets / plants that traditionally ran in isolation are now being transformed into a an agile value chain to reduce the production runs, increase the agility to chain products proceed across the sites to satisfy the market. The move to integrated operational centers (IOC)s is just one step, where planning and operations come into same environment to increase communication. 

The 4 quadrants described in the article “Operations Innovation & Transformation – the 4 Types” positions the upper left quadrant as a strategy for using a “value chain” of physical assets in a new way.

In this quadrant, a group of similar industrial operations (2 or more) adapt their performance objectives, business processes and accompanying hiring and information strategies to optimize the “value chain”.  The move is to unifying the industrial enterprise over multiple sites (in groups or as a whole), with a more holistic view in terms of operating strategy and performance management.

This innovation can be limited by the dynamic and range flexibility of some of the operations, but several corporations have achieved success with this.  One example is seasonal competitiveness, where the “chain” collaborates to achieve maximum throughput during the high demand season and maximum efficiency during the low demand season (efficiency and throughput interact differently across different groups of industries).  Another example is short-term business continuity, where the “chain” collaborates to exploit a supply or demand opportunity, or they collaborate to minimize the business impact of a supply chain problem, such as a major customer unplanned outage.  They all adapt their operations to meet a shared performance objective, such as yield or efficiency.

A key method used to sustain this strategy is operations-level feed-forward and feedback, with workflow for collaboration.  This doesn’t violate or compete with established business processes for planning, scheduling or other elements of supply chain management – in fact these strategies and business processes must work closely together.

This is a significant step beyond scorecards, dashboards or rigid workflows.  The following 2 examples show how real-time performance measures (different from traditional KPI’s) and proactive procedural automation sustain this differentiation:

·         A “value chain” of related industrial operations (one of the operations provides fuel and raw material to another) have some dynamic and range flexibility to “pace” together.  When a downstream site must slow down, the upstream site adapts its throughput of the entire site or the affected products during the duration of the slowdown.  As soon as the slowdown has ended, both sites resume their scheduled throughput and yield targets.

• Coordinators (different industries have different names for this function) use workflows to negotiate short-term upcoming changes in demand and the operating shift and the coordinators use the same visual demand, using a “tram line” display.  Information to the right of the center dashed line is forecast and planned.

The benefits include significant reductions in energy (excess energy is required to restore the high pressures and temperatures) and reductions in rework or waste.  Conventional equipment protection strategies aren’t adaptive and they are designed to handle the most extreme conditions, which is focused on safe interruption of operations.  Value-chain management focuses on safe continuity – both are valuable and necessary.

•       A “value chain” of related industrial operations (one of the operations provides fuel and raw material to another) have some dynamic and range flexibility to optimize the processing and use of fuels and raw materials in the downstream operations, such as the following example in petrochemicals and specialty chemicals.