Multi-site standards have to be economically viable, but Operational Value of standards is the driver vs IT requirement

While flexibility allows us to deal with the plant floor reality, it also comes at a cost and thus requires governance. This is typically where the IT and Engineering perspectives tend to clash:

1. Standardization (what Corporate IT desires): How to deploy “out-of-the-box” or packaged solutions that reduce risk and time-to-value in implementation across the plant sites? Increasingly Operational value is driving standards and platforms.
2. Flexibility (what Engineering desires): How to support the various customizations to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of the process within a plant site?

But with the growing demand for agility and ability to absorb new production plans, new product introduction with minimal impact to day to day operations. Combine this the ability to “accommodate variability” in automation systems often from different vendors across multiple plants, or equipment, as well variety in team skills, and experience. The implementation of platforms combined with standards provide the necessary abstraction to “accommodate” this variation. So move to standards is growing driven more from the operational continuity drive than IT (which drove it based upon cost of implementation and sustainability).

To solve the above two seemingly opposable expectations, large enterprise users of a platform use a Center of Excellence approach to centrally manage the template library while helping orchestrate each of the plant’s technology roadmap in a way that is aligned to their Continuous Improvement journey.

The illustration below maps (at a high-level) the governance process of how templates are created, maintained, and modified to support the rollout across a multi-plant standardization effort.

Many of the most successful companies driving standards, are now seeing the rewards and return through agility to absorb new plants into their organization, yet leverage the existing unique automation, plant floor systems.

But so many of them comment to that they learnt the hard way the need for governance, yet site collaboration to make the standards effective and adoption successful. Too many state building standards from the corporate center out seems logical, but in reality so much knowledge is in the field and the need for capturing that experience back into standards is key. Plus the shift with standards away from a project DNA to more of “product” life-cycle DNA is key.

The important learning is that standards are part of a program, they part of learning, but return is significant now not just IT point of view but from an “Operational side” and this is where the significant economical returns are seen through operational consistency, and agility. Understand that standards is a program, clear understand the required governance to succeed long term, and investment up front with the field so the standards will be adopted. Combine this with clear kpis to understand the reason why your implementation a platform and standards so the value can be measured for the long term, as this is a long term initiative that must enable sustainable innovation.

Collaboration with plants and Governance is key to Standards,

There can' t be a week go past that companies do not talk to me about standards leading rapidly to discussion on standards management. Standards are the only way companies can achieve:

1/ Rapid roll out of new processes across plants

2/ Reduced risk

3/ Reduced dependency on key critical experienced resources.

4/ Consistency in operations, information across plants

Yet most companies do not really understand what a standard is and the investment, design, and approached needed so that the standard can evolve over time, and be sustained as a standard.

When you have comments like;

 "You that standards library we built? We now have 45 of them ones for each site."

Losing the whole effect of what a standard is and hamstringing the ability to evolve and react to the market in an agile way.

The culture of a standard is closer to that of “a product" than an “application" yet most companies treat them as an applications. Missing the culture and governance needed to make the standards grow and be naturally adopted.

Culture:

Too often we see it as push from the Center out, with the standards being designed in isolation of the plants, or certainly that is the perception from the plants.

The key is to have a culture where the standards and built with the first site, but with a mind that it will be rolled out across plants. So the design, architecture and approach allow for future capability to be added to it.  Providing the plant teams the ability to contribute, and feeling like they have some ownership, so they will adopt. Plus the culture that sites engineers can contribute improvements back the central governance and improvements will happen.

  

Governance:

Clear ownership of standards management, this could be or multiple people with different aspects of the standard library being managed by different people. Similar to what we do with software products, we have product managers, who gather the feedback, define the vision, and strategy, and then provide direction for improvements from version to version. The same concept Product Management for the standards, listening interacting with the sites, determining what is common and valuable to standard by version. Then making sure there is clear governance process, enforcement in place, and testing of the standard.

Architecture levels:

It is important to have the correct standards and levels, so the Hierarchy levels need to set up, with the correct number so the appropriate changes can be added at the correct level. A good example is below where there are corporate, to site, to area, then plant, each of these allow extensions to that level while sustaining consistency from the top.

Federation of Multiple Control Systems is a Key part of the Operational Transformation, It’s time for an “Industrial Enterprise Configuration Environment”

Last week this came up 3 times in a week, customers asked me are we working on a unifying configuration environment that will manage standards for control, supervisory and more over multiple different vendor controllers. We talked about the need for multiple teams, one for templates development, others for deployment and the critical need for version management. You cannot expect to have standards if you do not have strong governance and in my experience this means a tool, and environment that promotes the successful management of standards.

We talk about federation of information across data sources in an information driven manufacturing environment, but an effective operational transformation is about decisions and actions in a timely manner and consistent manner. Too often we talk at the high level and overlook the extensive work required on the plan automation control integration. Most plants are on to at least their second generation of control, in DCS, PLC and SCADA. These systems are mature and functionally immensely rich that they can expand and evolve to satisfy most processes today.

The Modern Automation/ Operational system is not an enclosed system, it will have many controllers of different sizes running different processes, hopefully the correct controller for the correct process. With the evolution of the “Internet of things” in the automation world there is a trend to smaller powerful controllers so each asset/ process has it is own control that links into the higher world. This makes sense as long as there is the ability to federate these controls from a:

·         Naming convention consistency across the controllers

·         Control Standards for a process over different controllers

·         The ability to configure different levels of a control/ process strategy across controllers but deployed to a different controller instances which in many cases will be controllers from different vendors.

·         The ability to automatically configure the integration with the supervisory platform and the controller at the same time, any changes are automatically managed and sustained.

·         Clear governance over the management of standards and versions across the supervisory and controllers

·         Version management is key the ability to manage different versions of standards in the same strategy deployed to different controllers, combined with incremental updates.

·         The End to End System Integrity at the time of deployment, this is the step most people are concerned with as the system must make sure the integrity of the different parts of control sub system are in place, so we have no dead ends on references that can cause controllers to not function. Assumed in this is the peer to peer communication and referencing between controllers of different roles, types and vendors.

Yes, the leaders in the operational transformation while implementing a Supervisory Platform with operational standards and decision support, they are complimenting their investment with an equally often more significant investment in alignment of the existing and new control systems. Their standards, their interfacing and most of all their management of integration and standards.

The new generation “Industrial Enterprise Configuration Environments” will live above the individual vendor configuration systems but enable a holistic management of strategy and standards leveraging a multi discipline team, with version governance naturally built in. When we look at the “Internet of things” this will become key, as we go to “atomic control” at the devices and machines, the thought of learning multiple tools is not practical. The only way in the industrial world will be a common configuration environment that enables standards, and deployment to different device platforms, with governance, and confidence.

Watch this space as we accelerate the innovation in this area, to bring reality.