New World of Work will be center to Factory of the Future

Last week at a conference, a couple of my colleagues and I had the opportunity sit and debate the changing world order that will make the “factory of the future”. The three of us are involved in the major opportunities we see in the market and it provides us the real opportunity to engage with companies with transformation plans, and engage with thought leaders. We decided to approach the discussion of the future factory by approaching it from different industries, as well as markets.

Sure enough we ended up aligned on the core to the “factory of the future” will around what two companies labeled “New World of work”. I have mentioned this many times in this blog around “smart operational work”.

We were able group companies who looked at the future thru "new technologies" and how they could apply them, (I seem to visited a number of this type in the last month) vs those companies that we believe will be the leaders with the successful approach of “how they must operation, work” in the new world.

We defined the new world means the next 5 to 10 years with characteristics of:

•       Brand loyalty at customer reducing, so “Brand Promise” is key
•        Agility to satisfy is key
•        Shrinking mid tier market as the larger companies continue to consolidate to address the supply of new products and service markets. (especially in consumer products).
•        Dynamic workforce where workers rotate locations/ roles, experience in a role will be less than 2 years.
•        Supply chains with limited inventory requires transparent/ agile manufacturing across the sites.
•        “Constant Change” in assets, process, people, products is the natural state in the 2020.

The diagram below is an interesting on Agility:

The Sense of time shortening causing the decisions, lifetimes of products and lines and roles getting for ever shorter. The ability to rapidly introduce, change in not just product but also delivery, and supply is key in order to satisfy.

The fact that each of us engaging different industries such as oil and gas / process, to consumer manufacturing saw the core catalyst the leading companies have identified as the transformation in the way their company must react, capture and execute work. Shifting from isolated plants, and people to teams of plants and people that work as an aligned operational team to achieve a goal.

The “New world of Work” is fundamental built on :

• New ways of working with dynamic workers that share, collaborate and are connected but assume experience from the system, they trust the system
• New Processes around agility, new product  introduction that leverage the skills and approach of the “digital Native” collaborative worker, combined with new technologies to enable new processes and operational awareness. The ability to see situations early, continue to learn, and act fast to changing conditions is key.
• New technologies provide the opportunity to deliver these new ways of working, with new processes. The likes of leveraging the data, through “big data” to use the past to determine the future in a natural manner. The industrial internet of things (industry 4.0) will enable smart devices providing new levels of embedded autonomy in machines and processes, shifting workers to “exception based” management, but with greater responsibility.

The diagram below shows this shift, which will require different tools and approaches.

So as you look at your plans, are you stepping back and looking at the way you will work, then understanding the profile of operational team, how they will developing the processes to satisfy this work and required agility, and then looking at what technology you can leverage to accelerate the success in a sustainable and evolutionary way. This last comment is key as the natural state of the new world is one of “change” and the systems and culture must be able “master” naturally.

Operational Continuity Foundation is Rapid / Early Decisions by Systems and People.

I was involved in an interview last week for an article in a magazine, like so many of these we had an expectation of the subject the editor wanted but as started it was clear that subject and expectations where different. Basically the editor wanted to understand about “big data” being applied in a particular industry, again it was someone with a technology concept the market is throwing about vs really understanding the business / operational challenge the industry is facing.

It did not take long for us to evolve the conversation into the number the main things companies must harness:

• Operational Continuity: Maintaining their producing plants at the maximum output, with greatest efficiency, and best product margin
• Agility: to supply the market with the correct product at the right quality, and right price and the right time in an every dynamic market
• Asset Management/ Utilization: This is both fixed, mobile capital assets (non breathing assets, such as plants, trucks, ships) and the human assets (breathing assets). We find that as globalization increases the buying and selling of capital assets increasingly happen, introducing of challenge of  how do incorporate existing systems, automation, and practices into your overall value chain to provide the above “Operational Continuity” and “Agility”. Same when the asset is sold how you dis engage it cleanly especially with IP in the products and process. Combine this with the dynamic Human Asset landscape where human assets are moving regularly between plants and locations. Causing on a site not to have the required experience to make decisions, but people are in a role of having to make the decisions. YES the asset world for both capital assets and human assets is shifting form traditional stability in both classes for the last 20 years to one of both dynamic.

This comes back to conversation I started last week around “Achieving Consistent and Right Results in an Agile World” and the need for systems that have both:

• Embedded knowledgeand experience: key in this system is have a culture and system that naturally enables knowledge to captured and arranged, managed to be current and while native consumption of this knowledge is simple.
• Augmented Collaboration of Experience: That in this dynamic world the need for a community of human assets of different experience in role and locations to contribute naturally to a decision in real time, augmenting the embedded knowledge. 

This calls for a system that enables people and systems, all of different levels of capability, and experience to work in coordinated way to reach a decision and act. The above diagram is a simple one of the core items of Action orientated Augmentation system.

Unconditional to success is:

• Detect the situation requiring attention as early as possible, pin pointing the location and cause as best as we can. The traditional alarm, “as is” is too late. This does not apply just to process situations but also operational/ supply chain situations that effect “Operational Continuity”.
• Understanding:This means the right person, or people, or system is notified with the required context of the situation. To often transitional systems are application based, so you alarm to control room, or SCADA system. There needs to shift to notify to people and roles, with acknowledgement of acceptance so that correct people are investigating and acting. Yes this will mean systems require unique logons, and shift to named users as people will be connected more, across applications and devices, and accountability in a team situation is fundamental so tasks do not get dropped. But core to understanding is the ability not to be just notified but to investigate, from the provided context the situation based on the workers experience, to collaborate fast with peers, and contribute an opinion.
• Decide: Based on the incoming opinions from systems, and people, and raid decision can be determined based upon experience, knowledge, and technology. The decision could be made by a system or person based upon the inputs.
• Actions: The appropriate actions and process to resolution can then taken across people (one or many) and across systems.

All the way along the system will rapidly manage the process of detect, understand, decide and act, and then track the success and increase the embedded knowledge. 

This is not a question of a new technology like "big data" it is about having a framework that works across your operational landscape to empower people, and systems to leverage existing knowledge and experience to evolve the Operational Success of the company.

Achieving Consistent and Right Results in an Agile World

As Sunday draws to a close, I sit out looking over to pacific the waves crash, and birds fly, it is my time of reflection.

Last week I talked about some of the observations from the last month on the road. But this week I debated with a number of thought leaders and we all aligned on the challenge of a dynamic workforce, and dynamic operational/ business environment, means that chance of “Lights out Manufacturing “ are slim.

One company I was engaged with last week their thought pattern was still about replacing the personal on the plant, going to total automation. While I agree with automation, it is required for consistently and velocity of production. But I struggle with agility.

Two days latter I was at another company and they were all about empowerment of people, they wanted to automate process, and operations to free up people to add complimentary agility and “out of the box” thinking.  As one C level said to me, our market is changing as fast as we ever seen, and

Stepping back and looking at both these companies the second company was more automated than the first and the second was investing in automation more than the first. But their attitude was to gain consistently and free up people from repeatable tasks, and increase the responsibility of people, and empower people to make decisions fast.  

The diagram below really depicts what I started to introduce last week, and what this second company believed in.

That they needed to design their systems and people to play “natively in the dynamic world”, and they have realized that “embedded Intelligence and knowledge” will be key and must grow proportionally with increasing data. They also realized that with agility comes the changing operational environment and situations which will require “augmented intelligence” with the human brain can work out. The key thinkers in the industry are not looking to dependency on 1 to 2 people, they are leveraging the concept of “crowd sourcing” thru a active community of people. As we look at the operational/ automation world of the future the key pillars will be:

•     Ability to capture knowledge and intelligence into the system to automate process, and operations. Key is this is not just traditional automation in PLCs/ DCS etc, it is capturing repeatable knowledge and decisions. So the system must bread a culture of contribution and use natively.
•    Ability to have a community of workers who can share collaborated “naturally” with ease, no matter the location of the users and state. Foundational to this is  the ability trust the information, the measures so a common understanding of the situation, and basis for decision can be made.

Leading to natural decisions, and action paradigm across the team as seen below. I will expand on this more next week.

2016 the turning point in the Operational Work Transformation!!

Will this statement stand true to the operational execution world we live in, probably only time will tell, but based on the trends I outlined at the end of 2015, and looking forward I believe 2016 provides the opportunity.

By the way, welcome to 2016 may it be an exciting and productive year!

The holiday break it provides a time to reflect and discuss, and in one conversation my last blog was raised and really “how much transformation was happening?” Initially, I thought it was a comment against the trend we are seeing with the “Operational Transformation”, but this was a friend working in a major food manufacturing company. His comment was actually the momentum of change is well underway, and happening at increasing pace.

There were 4 areas that he felt his business and associated industry where trying grapple with to stay ahead:

1/ Agility of effective, valued productsand brands to the market (which he stated was regional, eg specific tastes of similar products changed by region and so your go to markets, packaging, etc. His example was around cheese how the tastes in say Mexico for cheese are totally different to Australia, and then Italy. This leads the increased importance of regional new products vs global new products, and effective speed and cost of innovation, execution and introduction.. So the challenge of “new product Innovation” and then “New Product Introduction” and delivering it to the market at the correct margin to be competitive in timely manner is a whole focus. His comment was this is the core competitive advantage that his company identifies, and must keep driving while dealing with the other transformations happening.    

2/ Operational Workforce transformation: He agrees with me that too much focus has been on the “aging workforce issue” and that most of HR and Operational teams have missed the bigger transformation, and that is the one of new generation work methods and transformation in workspace that goes with it. He felt like his company woke up to this mid way thru last year when they could not just not fill positions, but are having significant challenges in retaining talent, not within the company but in roles. He felt like initially people thought that would just get a transition to a new workforce yes younger of different experience. But they had not realized that way in which people will work, think, interact, and gain satisfaction will also change.

3/ “Planet Awareness, Image”: this one was an interesting discussion, as he raised it as a real strategy for evolving the brand of the company to been seen as proactive to the environment, to attract further “feeling satisfaction” of customers. He also stated that government regulation, and increasing costs of disposing of waste, and energy costs also are now seen a significant bottom line costs, and must be managed more efficiently. But during this discussion, it was also clear that the perception of being “proactive to the environment” in use of energy, carbon footprint, environment etc was also a key strategy for attractive talent to work in the company.

4/ Transparency across the total product value chain, “end to end”. This strategy was about tractability and making sure they happy with brand all the way to customer, but also about cost as they were “outsourcing” increasing amounts of the value chain. But this did not mean they lost responsibility for product while in “outsourced manufacturing partners” execution. The transparency across the supply chain enables increased flexibility and lower costs through inventory reduction.

These 4 strategies are combined with the current strategies to increase plant performance utilization and lower cost of materials through waste /loss reduction.

When you sit back and look at these strategies a constant set of pillars came up in the Operational Solution approach:

·       Everyone having access to information and knowledge no matter their state or location, this means internet becomes a part of the solution backbone.

·       Cyber Security is very much top of mind, both in strategy to secure,  manage, to contain cost and risk.

·       Data validation/ and contextualization, if transparency and faster decisions are required how do you gain consistent information across different sites. \

·       Delivering a new “operational Workspace/ experience” that has embedded knowledge that does not get stale, and enables imitative learning for a dynamic and collaborative workforce.

As the night conversation went on it was clear that the 4 strategies was really about changing the way in which the company manages and executes operational work, no matter how big or small. But becoming in control of not just the planned product work, but the day to day, minute to minute work at the different levels of the operational loop.

Based on the trends of 2015, this long conversation, I wonder if we will see 2015 as the year people recognized that needed to rethink how they handling “Operational Work”. With 2016 becoming the year where momentum continues to grow on projects turning to programs, that span plants, and value chain and an increasing amount of companies put teams, strategies and programs in place to evolve their operations to transform the way handle “operational Work”!

You might ask what about “big data” and the “internet of things” but these are technologies that will be part of the enabling system for a  new operational solution.

Manufacturing Industry Leads Cloud Adoption

It was good to see a blog by Gary Mintchell revealing that the industry sector is leading the adoption of Cloud, yet so often I hear the words that “it will not happen in our company or industry for years!”.

Gary writes a great set of blogs always worth having a link to it.

http://t.co/LIPLIc6SgV

Some Quotes from this blog:

“global study that indicates cloud is moving into a second wave of adoption, with companies no longer focusing just on efficiency and reduced costs, but rather looking to cloud as a platform to fuel innovation, growth and disruption.

The study finds that 53 percent of companies expect cloud to drive increased revenue over the next two years. Unfortunately, this will be challenging for many companies as only 1 percent of organizations have optimized cloud strategies in place while 32 percent have no cloud strategy at all.”

So often I have sales and people saying that cloud is driven by a change in cost model, but also in all my interviews with customers and strategic thinkers it has been a platform for addressing the “changing speed of change and flexibility needed today” that is driving it. The world is changing faster and faster, and the ability to deliver the RIGHTS:

• Right Product
• Right Price
• Right Cost
• Right Time
• Right Location

Is key and this means rolling increased new numbers of products across a distribution of value assets (plants) that will produce smaller lots (production runs), at less cost.

Understanding NOW what the state of Inventory, Work in Progress, and equipment to get to market is key.

Also we seeing the “walls of a plant” expand, beyond the manufacturing plant to now treat the whole manufacturing, and distribution supply chain as part of manufacturing. So the traditional MES (manufacturing Execution System ) is expanding, to offer the ability model the plant to store as operations, where product must be tracked to compliance, and work items distributed to workers and assets in that distribution chain.

“In the study IDC identifies five levels of cloud maturity: ad hoc, opportunistic, repeatable, managed and optimized. The study found that organizations elevating cloud maturity from the ad hoc, the lowest level to optimized, the highest, results dramatic business benefits, including:

•        revenue growth of 10.4 percent
•         reduction of IT costs by 77 percent
•         shrinking time to provision IT services and applications by 99 percent
•         boosting IT department’s ability to meet SLAs by 72 percent
•         doubling IT department’s ability to invest in new projects to drive innovation.”

Cloud Adoption by Industry

By industry, manufacturing has the largest percentage of companies in one of the top three adoption categories at 33 percent, followed by IT (30 percent), finance (29 percent), and healthcare (28 percent). The lowest adoption levels by industry were found to be government/education and professional services (at 22 percent each) and retail/wholesale (at 20 percent). By industry, professional services, technology, and transportation, communications, and utilities expected the greatest impact on key performance indicators (KPIs) across the board.”

The above learnings and results do not surprise me, based upon my own engagements in the field, and observing the increased realization that speed of change is important, and tradition large projects are going out the door. Replaced by rapid projects leveraging existing expertise in the industry and adding through own operational process value to differentiate.  

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?

Can we achieve the last mile of operational Excellence without IOT?

This question was posed to me last week, and it is a good one. The critical items is to understand what is operational excellence is trying to achieve to realized that it is journey and moving goal of effectiveness pushed by the market and technology. Like when you are riding a wave, you staying in front, and leveraging the wave to excel, otherwise it swallows you up.

Operational excellence is about:

• Agility to deliver products/ services to Customer/ market at the correct price, time and location
• The ability to rapidly introduce new innovation value to lead the market and open new markets
• The ability to enable sustainable innovation and value through effectively leveraging people, and technology.

The diagram below illustrates this, and I am sure some people will have different angles, but it is about leading the competitive edge.

But can you achieve this with the traditional approaches? I believe you can get to 60/ 70 % of the way with traditional approaches and current technologies, but that last mile needs a paradigm shift in “actionable decisions”. Agility requires timely decisions across a team, and consistency and timely actions associated with the decision across teams, roles etc.

A core concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is teams of things (devices, and people) interacting in an orchestrated manner to achieve an operational timely result. With devices being more “self-aware”, empowered to take actions, interacting with workers or other devices to move “work “to the next step.

This foundation of IoT and the orchestration of devices /people, timely knowledge, provides that much needed paradigm shift to enable that last mile on the above operational excellence journey. The constant discovery of new capabilities, and knowledge through big data techniques, the ever increasing lake of embedded knowledge lends it as the basis for companies to go on this Operational excellence journey, but with this is the required cultural evolution to continuous improvement and knowledge/ wisdom.

                                       Source ARC

The above IOT maturity model matches to Operational Excellence journey, especially on the stages of “smart, and autonomous” linking to the Operational Excellence stages of “Driving Business and Driving the Market”). Foundational to Operational Excellence is timely knowledge and procedures being delivered so actionable decisions can be taken in a consistent manner across plants, assets and people. The IoT principles provides the opportunity to deliver this knowledge, while abstracting the variability in plant, assets and experience levels of people.

To me the desire and programs being enabled at companies to take them down the operational excellence journey provides the cultural evolution needed combined with IoT to succeed and make IoT effective not just from technology but most of all business side

Multi-dimensional impact of a changing Industrial Operational Workspace vs. the Transforming Workforce!

Multi-dimensional impact of a changing Industrial Operational Work space vs. the Transforming Workforce!

This blog has discussed a lot about the changing workforce, but let’s step back and look at the real change that of the industrial work space. The way in which we operate the business, from:

• business strategy to operational execution real-time alignment
• to serving customers
• new product introduction
• to operating across multiple plants and regions
• to collaboration manufacturing
• to speed and agility of manufacturing

Are all changing, at increasing speed, forcing increased volume, quicker, accountability and consistent “actionable decisions”.

There are two significant forces (workforce transformation to dynamic workforce, and the work space transformation) at play. That are “lining up” to drive the most significant transformation in the  business/ operational landscape required in order to be competitive, leveraging the third force available that of technology, (bandwidth, Internet of things, cloud, etc).

This post will focus on the changing Operational Work space as illustrated in diagram below depicts:

Shows that at least four dimensions in which the work space is changing, I suspect there are more around collaboration, sharing, accountability due to regulations. Just looking at this diagram we four dimensions:

• Moving from Multi Layers and vertical integration to flattened org, but a very virtual org, that spreads across the product value chain, not just within a plant. So you can have now a product organization that manages the product business as a whole, new products, delivery, competitive position, etc. across multiple plants, regions, etc. Compared with traditional vertical organization usually based on location.

• Moving from Command and Control to Flexibility and Agility org structures, rise use of matrix organizations, where  vertical local plant and horizontal product lines of business effect combine to drive the goals, and objectives of the personal on a plant. This is a clear evolution as the operational workforce becomes more empowered to make real-time decisions. Their responsibility and accountability increases forcing actionable decisions will require different interactions in the organization structure.

• Transforming from ladder growth/ evolution in an operational team, to a more rotating less structure evolution of a team with changing and evolving roles. As operational processes/ models change, so roles and activities of those roles with evolve. Virtual roles will become more common with the roles has operational responsibility over multiple plants /regions. So too the way in which an operational business can recruit and evolve its operational team will change. An operational team the new personal may come from anywhere, or even be located anywhere as the roles evolve, compared to the tradition ladder where roles have been relatively local and consistent for 20+ years. No longer will roles and role structure be consistent, roles will evolve and be agile to fit the new operational paradigms of the company.

• To correspond with the evolution of roles, and organizations so too HR must evolve from a process to “talent Science” that enables the evolving roles and required skills to map to transforming workforce of skills, locations. A lot of traditional HR methods must go out the door, and workforce evolution is the key to matching the role, and organization evolution, combining this with the Gen Y culture differences.    

I have spoken a lot in this blog about the changing workforce.

In reflection we must not get confused with significantly transforming Operational Work space, and the fact that organizations and roles will also be dynamic in the new world. It is important that we design our operational/supervisory system to be able to transcend the changes in roles. 

The leading thought and practice to address this Operational Workspace transformation, is the operational / supervisory system design must be centered on “activities” vs roles and applications as today.These activities are performed by roles that are changing based on "activities they are accountable for", and the system can be sustained  through the evolutionary management of these “activities” and the associated information, and action.  

Next week we will talk about the other leg of this change the workforce and “Empowering a New Generation of Front Line Workers”.

Is the Transition to Gen Y so Significant in the Industrial Environment?

This question was put to me by a magazine editor in Czech Republic this week, he was from Gen Y (born after 1980), and he was commenting after one of my presentations.  This is not the first time I have asked “do you genuinely think the transition to Gen Y will be that significant?” It is truly valid challenge, so I decided I needed answer why I believe it is a significant milestone or transition in the operational approach or culture in the Industrial Market.

As he asked the question he was texting and recording the interview on a Samsung PDA, and he had prepared his questions well, by researching me on Linkedln, and reading this blog. To him this was a natural way of doing research, yet an interviewer the week before from Gen X (early) had not done this research, he just had heard my presentation and asked questions based off this.

Yes, many of us from the  Bayboomer, Gen X generations have transitioned to living by our PDA, always “connected” and using email and text for communication, we do our research off Youtubes and forums, but while we transitioned it is not natural. We certainly do not share as well, yes some of us have Facebook accounts, but many do not. I asked a group of 120 people in the Gen X and Babyboomer generations how many had Facebook accounts it was less than 20%, but the small segment who were Gen Y had 100% with FaceBook accounts and all had contributed at least 1 you tube to public domain.

Gen Y has grown up in an environment where the internet is just a natural part of life, most would not remember a time without internet, and the same applied to mobiles that are used for more than voice. SMS texting comes before having an email account, where to Gen X we had email before Text, and tend to use email as the primary text communication vs SMS. The way Gen Y naturally searches on Google and filters the information and rapidly transverse the information to a desired result. They expect to use a map on PDA and see the closest banks, restaurants and other information. Wiki Pedia is a natural source of knowledge, and it is natural to contribute with comments, and material to Youtube and pedia style environments. The most significant transition of generation from Early Gen X and Babyboomer is the shorter time in a role and location, the willingness to transition their career more often. Remembering by 2020 the expectation is the average tenure in a role will be 2.4 years or fewer, people are expected to have at least 4 careers and over 20 jobs in these careers.

These are contributors to the transition, but given that many of the industrial supervisory and operational interfaces/ experiences created over the last 15 years, have been defined to control the process of a unit or equipment. Many are in isolation (islands of control) with limited inter application integration as the design was not done in a holistic view as the project had a deliverable goal and timeline. The navigation, and operations/ actions of the user interface had a fixed button navigation, and assumed a certain level of experience, and on how to use interface and control the process, this experience often came from training on the interface by the developer to the users.

Combining the holistic end to end operational control which requires multiple workers to run the system, often the operational stations are now transitional, so the workers will transition from one workstation to another executing the actions, the experience needs to be consistent to help smooth transition as they do their daily role, plus the ability to access the states elsewhere in the plant, based upon a notification they would have received maybe on a screen or mobile, and they require more detail than available on mobile, so they will drill in using a remote workstation. Now as the worker is executing his day, he is faced with a situation that is new to him, or requires some process experience, and he is unsure of the decision to take as he has only been in this plant 3 months. The operational interface requires for the user to collaborate with a remote expert on that process, sharing the situation, some screens and states, plus a live conversation, this should be natural in order to make a decision and take a correct action as soon as possible.

So when I talk about the significant evolution we going through in operational culture and approach, I am referring to the ability to maintain operational continuity while absorbing this constantly dynamic / rotating operational workforce with now limited experience in a role and location.

The growth in operational programs that are looking re-engineering their supervisory (HMI) systems, and operational interfaces to provide:

• Consistency of operational experience across workstations and devices
• Natural Collaboration with others of more experience or in the operational team.
• Multi workstation and mobile devices on a common system that interact
• The natural learning, and knowledge management and access
• Consistency in operational actions across workstations, devices and processes
• The shift to exception based operational control, using the ASM (abnormal Situation Management concepts) for faster recognition and action on the situation.

Is confirmation that it is not a technology upgrade only it is an operational culture approach that is driving the expectation significant increase operational agility?

Is your supervisory/ plant operational system ready to absorb a dynamic workforce, while maintain operational continuity in the agile world of increased new product introduction, and competitive pressures.

I would be interested in people’s comments.

“Managed Services” in the Cloud provides an acceleration Opportunity for Small Industrial/ Manufacturing Business

Last two weeks again a significant amount of my time has been in discussions and strategy around the “hosted managed services” and the real opportunity vs speculation. The discussion continues to grow more people participating with a clear outcome of the discussion on the significant new opportunity these managed services deliver to Small Business, Small sites.   The discussion is happening in larger companies, they are accessing how to use the services, and off premise capability.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms, or customized databases.

The Small Business companies are just jumping on the new opportunities the cloud based managed services offer, bringing significant new capabilities quickly to their business that would traditionally be out of their reach due to cost and expertise. Initially in the back office applications such as CRM, ERP and MS Office capability, providing an experience of what advantage, and understanding of the security risk vs. Reward. Now they looking at the new services coming on line for the operational execution management increasing real-time control of inventory, and production order tracking and execution.

Adopting  “Managed Services” built in experience of product and domain experts, with many practices and capabilities, but they do not require a tender/ RFP, they are ready, yes there is a compromise in some customization, but that sacrifice is low compared to advantage to adopting the capability in its predefined format. Providing a platform for faster decisions and agility to serve the markets, expand with small loosely coupled faculties that can capture new market by reacting faster to market changes. The discussion of smaller facilities strategically situated for markets, but this network of value assets (sites) now can execute in an aligned manner, through a common set of “operational managed Services” hosted in the cloud.

A clear understanding of inventory across the sites, the status of orders, the status of the plant, from one central operational system, interacting from each site. For many of these small sites the operational execution is a highly manual (forms) driven process, so the ability to have a set of handheld devices, and desktop devices connected to the cloud enabling proven operational process execution is not a substantial step.

The value in return is significant, delivering them and efficiency in operational execution consistency, control and awareness only previously achievable with significant project investment, and expertise. We will see an explosion in the amount of these “Managed Services” for the industrial / manufacturing sector come to market, key will be how well developed and architected the services are. They have a 90% reproducibility across sites, to provide the speed to up and running. Early adopters needs make sure they confirm:

·         That the solution is built on standard, proven industrial products.

·         That the solution is tested and is 90% reusable across sites so the domain is managed as a product not an application, so will scale, and evolve across 100s of customers.

Key Operational Challengers of the next 10 years: New Product Introduction, Agility to Change, and Operational Effectiveness with a transforming workforce.

Sitting at dinner with three end users who own strategy, we had a stimulating discussion on the key design parameters or drivers for operational/ automation systems over the next 10 years. Key was the high level operational drivers not the technical hurdles that they are facing as these are just constraints that designs and new practices must absorb. One End users from Water utilities industry, food manufacturing, other from mining. The surprising part was that within 15 minutes we had narrowed the drivers to three key items:

Agility to adjust to market conditions and change:

The clear common requirement was the end to end operational alignment, understanding across the value chain. This holistic operational control, was a significant change in all three industries the sites had run with independence, in all cases the expectation was that site / regional uniqueness will be maintained but now alignment and traceability of action, product across the total value chain, e.g.| multiple assets/sites. A fascinating discussion here was both water and food talked that they expect this end to end to include outsourced assets that make up the chain, and effect the quality of the product or service that their brand is delivering. This is why it is the ability to federate assets and systems while still allowing site uniqueness is key. The inclusion of non company assets in the value chain and requiring operational traceability, accountability and agility to change are just around the corner.

 

The operational workforce transformation operational role retention / rotation: The impact of the operational culture, approach with gen Y and more holistic operations. These  have covered extensively in the blogs, but is the area both of my dinner companions spent over 50% of dinner time. The key areas are

·       The knowledge transfer from the retiring generation and how is the captured.

·      The highest critical concern is the fact they are already seeing people in roles for much less time, and this is across the operational roles. So the issue is how to embedded and design the experiences to enable to become effective dramatically faster, e.g.| 20% of the time today. Our conversation went away from industrial operational systems, to commercial systems, such as Facebook, banks, mobile phone applications. The key here is these applications are being delivered to market without having to train the users, they have intuitive experience that leads users through the steps. Agreement that this is a paradigm shift in operational design, from today's approach where user interface is thought of well after the control, and we have engineers who are not human in factor people, designing the systems. All attendees said we need to continue this discussion, as this is not just control rooms, but reports, and information etc. 

New Product Introduction: The life time of products and services is dramatically reducing, and the companies stated that seem to have ever change and introduction of new products and services. The move is to individual products and services for each consumer. How do we introduce, absorb these new products and services to the operational systems that will deliver them in a timely manner without significant error.

This could be considered agility, but both wanted this pointed out separately as it is a real dynamic that effecting them, vs the infrastructure and assets that are also changing and must absorb agility of change. An intriguing point here was that they commented that operational system and automation system absorb new product introductions without change, but all commented on the challenge of new assets with existing systems requiring federation into the system, and how do introduce new products procedures to operational staff. So the discussion for new product introduction was not just for systems, but also for people to execute, how can they take the new product from the PLM system, and deliver the control, and instructions, across many sites with different systems, and different cultures.  

Are these three points new no, but the fact that 3 decidedly different thought leaders from three different industries rapidly agreed on these as operational drivers, combining this with the fact that each point effects the others. The eventual take away was they were being asked to deliver one operational ecosystem to run the end to end product production over multiple assets with operational consistency. While 3 dynamics constantly change, the value assets / plants are added and taken away, new products and services are added at an ever increasing rate, while the operational workforce is becoming dynamic with a culture of evolution of the role and job, and people will not be in a role longer than 2 years.

What and exciting time we live in!!!

Time for Information Driven Manufacturing!

Information Driven Manufacturing concept is starting gain traction in the thought leaders. Information Driven Manufacturing is a manufacturing strategy that combines the concepts of collaboration and value network manufacturing, building on the newer technologies to achieve and sustain a agile competitive multi plant business. A key concept to this strategy is that explicitly recognizes that avoiding change, while comfortable, may represent a bigger risk for the organization that the risk associated with introducing new solutions where appropriate.  There is a different culture not taking technology for the sake of it, but an attitude that understands the need for alignment of people, value asset network (multi-plants) and business and operational processes, to reduce cost, but most of all provide a flexible manufacturing base that can adjust with market providing the necessary agility to absorb market change, acquisitions, and new products rapidly and in a cost effective manner.

 

 

Source ARC Feb 2013

Information Driven manufacturers take a holistic view of manufacturing and the production plant’s role within the extended value network. They apply information technology broadly  to improve or replace business process. With the maturity of internet, workflow, databases, and other technologies there is a host of possibilities that can be applied in a program to improve the dynamic nature of the whole manufacturing from people to assets, and processes, to enable consistency of execution and therefore the opportunity to be dynamic to absorb, evolve to change.

The cornerstone of  information driven company is the empowerment of all people in their roles, to make decisions and act as an aligned team, based upon process and business information, provided in a holistic view (across assets E.g.| unified model despite the underlying sources), contextualized, visualized so that it can be analyzed easily relative to their roles. Key is making sure this information and core data are a “Trusted system” and the leading companies are now applying consistent embedded actions to go with the information decision so that consistency in action, and reduction in skill experience are needed to achieve a consistent, timely result.

The culture in an information driven manufacturing company, is understood the value and need of change/ evolution in a constructive way, but executing this change on proven technologies but not just used in their business, but looking outside their business and asking “why cannot we apply that for this____”. They have active investigations through internal, and external looking at:

 

More and more I am engaging with leading companies who are looking at open minded people to make a team who can constructively develop a value program. It is important to recognize this is more than one program, it is alignment of programs, technologies and cultural journey which leading companies are on, and potential benefits are significant in agility (market share) and long term cost, through staying 'ever green" and aligned.

 

 

Operational Advantage will accelerate “Managed Services” Cloud adoption in the Industrial Sector!!!!

For the last couple of weeks, I seem to have ended up in a whirlpool of activity and interest around the cloud in the industrial landscape, not just from within Invensys, but also in the customer community. A world away from a year ago when it was hard to strike up a conversation of any reality around cloud in the industrial landscape. So I called a few people in the field and people who had approached us, or our partners and in a discovery mode as to what is driving them and why now?

There is a lot of speculation on why and who will adopt cloud technologies, this discussion will focus on historian/ process data in a managed service which is certainly one of the initial adoption areas in the industrial landscape, but certainly just one possibilities in the industrial landscape. Looking at the initial adopters of Cloud there will different reasons based upon the size of the organizations.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms.

Speaking with one company in the water industry, they have had SCADA systems years, with the data stored and available for analysis within a small community of people with access to this SCADA system. The changing market is requiring that this data be available for a larger community of people whom most are not situated at the plant, and in some cases are not even apart of the company. They also concerned that do not know how big this community will grow, and locations, and do not want dilute their core business focus of water management in building solutions. They not looking for a “cloud” solution they looking for a “Managed Solution” owned and executed by experts focused on these information systems. The interview drew for business jobs/ objectives they want and some clear associated desired outcomes.

Speed to value solution with minimal risk was high up on the list, they did not want wait around for solutions, they believe that the functionality must already exist and why re engineer  vs evolve from existing solutions. Key in this requirement was the need not drain vital internal resources in capital, or people.

Also, high on the list was increased availability, and removal of the “never ending circle of upgrades” this is for hardware and software, the resources needed, and most of all the loss in availability. By going external experts will manage this with the correct hardware and software capacity to maintain a higher availability.

Metering of costs became a topic it was not the reduction in cost, but the metering of cost that can increase as more value or capacity used, but also the ability to understand where the capacity is being used, by what departments or customers so the charges will be allocated to them directly. Instead of going through the endless Capex cycles for doing projects especially in the semi public sector.

Lastly it was scalability, the elasticity to change capacity not bigger but also smaller, to changed geographical consumption. They explained that new community is expending, the roles are changing, locations, but they have also seen contraction and then expansion again, this is hard to deal with in a internal project. Managed services will be able to deal with this change and cost will vary accordingly.

For large customers with IT departments many of challenges and drivers are the same but on a different scale, also the cloud also presents the opportunity commoditize the traditional data centers which are costly to maintain. The adoption in these bigger industries will less aggressive as they look at Private Cloud (not a long way from the old main frames), but even here there is a significant mind shift in the last 6 months.

Certainly on the small plants, sites there should be a significant debate as to why put “a server” on site for the company to maintain, when the common infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that off loading this unknown  to a “managed service” which can absorb the variability by spreading risk and capability over multiple customers. Especially when “managed services” will provide significant agility, operational flexibility and expandability at speed. As I stated a couple of weeks ago, "Managed Services" and "cloud computing" will enable a new dimension for the industrial architecture, the next significant leap through scalability, expertise capacity and cost, lifting it from the traditional architectures. The question is how far is the future again do not think it is years, think months. Especially as company leaders shift from thinking “managed services” as possible cost saving to delivering significant operational advantage.