A Culture of Empowerment: Problem Solving at Source

As we observe the world around us change, and more and more the focus shifts to a “new way to operationally work”, we see leading thought companies start introducing innovations in their culture.

One of these we now seen in two leading manufacturing companies who are shifting to the “New World of Work” and introducing not just technology but key cultural changes. One of these is the “Empowerment Culture” one of the strategies these companies is shifting the problem solving to the source.

This overcomes the delays in decisions through having decisions go up the tree by increasing the skill of the workers closer to action, and empowering them to be able to make decisions. This means skill development, embedding knowledge and experience in the system to help facilitate the correct timely decision.

The diagram below shows the structure 

This allows the different levels, roles, and time horizons to focus on their problem solving optimizing the overall operational agility.

The “edge” worker on the front line is performing situational problem solving relative to production and asset at the NOW.

The plant supervisor have a wider time horizon of hours, and is looking at the plan, and adjusting thru “Systemic” thinking.

While management is then left with the bigger picture of strategic thinking, and problem solving, setting the overall direction.

Now if all decisions came to management they would be ‘firefighting” not free to think strategically and often the decisions would be delayed effecting production, efficiency and safety.

User Experience Convergence between Personal/ and Industrial is Accelerating

Every day you walk around plants and operational centers and you see a growing acceptance of “bring my own device” and use of these personal devices in the day to day industrial life. This is just natural, and good, but it is not just the devices that come into play it is the expectation of the similar user experience, and applications.

The next generation workforce has grown up as digital aware, and with the expectation to always be connected and able to access information and people. Sharing is a natural act, and texting, the "now " situation is expected. But as the personal world becomes totally wearable and in the "Now", when you on the plant, doing your jobs, you expect the same interaction, and experience.

It is not the industrial user experience that will dominate it is the personal one coming into the industrial experience. The industrial solutions and interfaces will evolve to leverage the same:

·       Applications

·       Sharing

·       Access

·       Immediate awareness

·       Location awareness

The day in the life of a worker on a plant will not be in a control room, or human machine interface, to be more responsive the worker will adopt the wearable devices, and expect the industrial information, and interaction to mimic the personal one but in the industrial context.

The challenge comes in developing the industrial user experience in a way that interact with the existing industrial back end applications, but enabling the collaborative experience, and a user to transverse across a series of devices and experiences to execute a job. Common information, tasks and actions will be required to be performed from each of the devices in a industrially safe and reliable way.

This evolution is happening at an accelerated pace. The diagram below illustrates the convergence.

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.

Applied Knowledge/ Wisdom Foundational to Internet of Things, and "Time to Performance" of Operational Teams

For the last couple of weeks, Stan DeVeries and I have been brainstorming around articulating this core area of the operational transformation, "the ability to have a system that can absorb workforce change/ turn over". Good example of this is with one company on the 2025 vision of "all knowledge/ experience in the system", this is capturing as much of the tribal "applied knowledge" that the experience operational staff are making decisions, and taking actions on and moving it to the system. If then applied in a "activity/task" based operational experience, a younger skilled user has the ability to select a "activity" and the associated knowledge/ information, and action are presented to him. Dramatically reducing the "Time to Performance" and increasing the consistency of operations, while increasing flexibility in operational workforce management.

The results of the discussions has brought the discussion around "Federated Wisdom, applied knowledge":

The explosion of information across industrial operations and enterprises creates a new challenge – how to find the “needles” of wisdom in the enormous “haystack” of information.

One of the analogies for the value and type of information is a chain from “data”, through “information” and “knowledge”, to “wisdom”.  In the industrial manufacturing and processing context, it may be helpful to use the following definitions:

·         "data” – raw data, which varies in quality, structure, naming, type and format

·         “information” – enhanced data, which has better quality and asset structure, and may have more useable naming, types and formats

·         “knowledge” – information with useful operational context, such as proximity to targets and limits, batch records, historical and forecasted trends, alarm states, estimated useful life, efficiency etc.

·         “wisdom/Applied Knowledge” – prescriptive advice and procedures to help achieve targets such as safety, health, environment, quality, schedule, throughput, efficiency, yields, profits etc.

The cost to store and share data has dropped significantly, and a simplistic expectation is that although storage is growing by a factor of millions in only a few years, that somehow the following pattern evolves:

Although the pattern might seem to be convenient, it is actually a nightmare, because it becomes much harder to discover and translate knowledge and wisdom from another operation, especially in another location, to the local needs.  But there is a solution.

To understand the problem better, let’s consider the definition of “knowledge” – it includes context.  This context begins with local context – time, location, process or machinery configuration, raw materials, energy and products being processed or produced.  It is already valuable to have “wisdom” to achieve and sustain best performance for the community, customers and the corporation.  This local context only needs to know its immediate information, if it has enough “wisdom”.

Now let’s consider what happens when a single site, a fleet of similar sites, or an enterprise have numerous similar operations.  How can local “wisdom” be enhanced by using “wisdom” from the other operations, especially when all of these operations are sufficiently different?

The reason that solving this problem is important is for operations transformation, such as operating physical assets as one (in a chain or as peers), and by supporting the multiple operations with a flexible team of remote experts.

One approach to solving this problem is to take advantage of a technique used in distributed databases, where a technique called “federated information” is used, especially in industrial operations management architectures.  This technique does not change the local information’s naming or structure, but provides multiple translations, both across the database for multiple similar structures, and for multiple contexts such as what financial, technical support, scheduling, quality and other functions require.  This technique is an alternative to the fragility and complexity of attempting to force a uniform and encompassing naming and structure that attempts to satisfy all applications and users.

The same approach can be applied for “wisdom”.  Currently, hobbyists and enthusiasts around the world share “wisdom”, for restoring cars, making furniture, playing a musical instrument, gardening etc.  Anyone with no experience at all can ask for “where do I get started?”, and most respondents will provide kind advice; in the same forum, experts can share wisdom that is valuable and understandable by them at their level of experience.  This “wisdom” is extremely decentralized, and the experts are providing the translation.

In the industrial operations environment, federating “wisdom” is partially automated by expanding the local context.  This expansion includes information about adjacent operations, information about the chain or peers if these operations are being managed as one, and then “knowledge” is expanded by applying the context of group targets and performance.

Some enterprises have hundreds or as much as tens of thousands of similar operations, supported by dozens or fewer experts.  Discovery of wisdom is greatly enhanced by maintaining an architecture which enhances local context without modifying or attempting to force burdensome structures on local operations.

Expect this discussion to continue as expand on the systems, and approaches to make this real, while enable sustainable operational innovation. This will be core to Industrial Internet of Things as we align smart devices, operational practices and humans into a dynamic but coordinated operational force.

Is 2015 going to be the year of Wearables in industry? What is your strategy towards wearable devices across your “industrial operational team”?

I started writing this blog post 2 weeks ago, as I was seeing the potential for a huge increase in the empowerment of the mobile worker in industry, not just in the plant, but in all roles in the “flexible operational team” freeing the worker up from been tied to a computer.

I started ask “could 2015 be the real year where we see the explosion in industry of wearable devices to empower actionable decisions of all workers?”  All this became supported in a number events, publications in this two week period.

Last week I was delivering a session on the “re Imaging” of our world, and one of guys in audience had a watch with industrial alerts and alarms on it.

His workflow was:

·         that he received an alert/notification of event needing his attention, (he had set up his own alerts “my alerts” in our Smart Glance application)   

·         He was then able to take out his tablet, or smart phone and investigate the more detail on the event with the increased real estate experience a tablet or smart phone provides

Why does this appeal? Is that I am notified, but I can have the tablet in my backpack and based on the type of notification I am able to make a decision to investigate Now or defer to a better time, combine this with information on the tablet I can take an action.

Gartner then released this:

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2867917

The top one was:

“Computing Everywhere

As mobile devices continue to proliferate, Gartner predicts an increased emphasis on serving the needs of the mobile user in diverse contexts and environments, as opposed to focusing on devices alone.

"Phones and wearable devices are now part of an expanded computing environment that includes such things as consumer electronics and connected screens in the workplace and public space," said David Cearley, vice president & Gartner Fellow. "Increasingly, it's the overall environment that will need to adapt to the requirements of the mobile user. This will continue to raise significant management challenges for IT organizations as they lose control of user endpoint devices. It will also require increased attention to user experience design."

The diagram below came out with commercial market on different wearable devices that we would expect to have and interact with. Again this points to different expectations, but even with the acceptance (takeup ) of devices like "fitbit" and now smart watches, we can only expect empowerment of our other sensors.

Adding to this in the last couple of weeks I was reviewing research about enabling the mobile person in the manufacturing/ industrial space. :

The concept of eye piece that can support HMI or reduce screens. In our case screen built in Wonderware InTouch can be seen in this eye piece through streaming HTML5, and actions taken. Yes is it practical that is depending on how you define the experience, certainly just taking a traditional HMI screen to an eye experience the size of postage stamp does not work. But again notifications, awareness of certain controls, and alarms, safety in that area is key. Due to magnification of eye and proximity you can see a significant amount of information

Contextualized Industrial Companion reality on the Tablet then provides nearly a full control, awareness experience, with location, and direction of vision awareness. So as a worker finds himself in a location or situation that they have to make a decision, take and action , on a situation, devices, process that was not planned. They can see the current situation, access information, access people/experts, share all in the cause of “making an actionable decision in the NOW” without having to go back to office or location.

Initially people think of the roaming worker on a plant, remote site, but the key changes are:

·         IT is allowing “bring your devices” on plants in the IT infrastructure and increasingly users are expecting to use the same or similar devices they have in their private life as in working life. The concept is simple why do need two different experiences. If I can be connected and empowered in my private life increasing efficiency why not in my working life with same experience but now for working decisions/actions.

·      

        Actionable Decisions are key in a timely manner, causing working outside the standard working hours, and always connected. Perfect example was when a end user came back to be realizing their internal connection was changing. They had asked for concurrent licenses for information clients, expecting a certain amount license to shared by those on duty. What they are now finding is that workers are not logging off, they stay connected maybe only with a smart phone but still connected. So now they rapidly approaching a point where they need the same number of licenses as users / workers and concept of concurrency does not apply.   

So the shift is from roles to “activities”, where the information can be delivered across different devices. With different applications with different information in context for the “activity/ decision” needing to be taken. The leading companies are all trying to empower the total operational team, all roles and all “activities” and this means unharnessing people from the computer console.   

So where are you on approach to introducing/ accepting these new end point devices in your industrial operational experience? Certainly from our stables, we will continue to increase enabling information and actions in all situations for the worker. Expect the adoption on wearables devices as the primary way the operational empowerment, notification and awareness to workers shifts in 2015/16. 

Industrial Internet of Things: What does it mean to me?

I must have sat through 3 to four presentations of IoT in the last 2 weeks from different vendors, different industries. Combine this active strategic discussions within our development teams, you see many angles and thought approaches.

ARC’s definition:

“The industrial internet of things is a collection of technologies that can come together in a targeted  solution to improve business performance and machine availability”.

The key is the transition to information driven system has begun and it is about alignment of devices, process and people, to be effective in real-time agile production. Extending across the plant, and the whole value supply chain, providing transparency in end to end operations.

All are valid, but the question was asked on a site visit last week " what does it mean to us?". So I stood up and went to white board and drew three circles and intersected them, to represent the opportunity.

As you can see below in the diagram below:

The three circles were

1/ The Capital Assets, these a non-living devices, such as instruments, machines, motors, conveyors, tanks, PLCs, DCS, RTUs, switch gear, etc.

2/ The Human Assets: all the workers and roles no matter of location, if they employees, contractors, consultants, but are required for the efficient, timely operation of the production facility.

3/ The Operational, Product Processes, procedures that applied across multiple capital assets, across workers, and between chapati all assets and workers to gain consistent operations, production. Increased production consistency, increased utilization of all resources both capital and human assets, making the most effective use of resources such as materials and energy.

To many people refer to IoT are just looking at assets and smart devices, and moving to asset management, this is only a initial step, when you improve operational productivity out of the plant is when the paradigm of value is achieved. To me it is not just about smart devices, it is about combining this with proven production procedures, processes across the different assets in plant, both human and capital in order to gain must effective, efficient production.

Taking the customer a little by surprise, as they just been hearing about smart devices, but when brought relative to their plant reality sank in. Why is different to the traditional approach, is that when you think as in diagram below (from ARC) maturity of devices in the IoT as they become smarter to autonomous.

The devices, assets such as packaging machines, motors, pumps, agitators become fully aware of what is running in them, What they are meant to produce and how Their ability to achieve the desired result Their health and readiness to perform to expected capabilities. 

The machines move to been just apart of the team, enabling awareness to operational workers as early as possible of abnormal conditions that will effect production output, so " actionable decisions" can be taken. So when I walked around their plant I found the human assets all the different roles, and there were many, today they running between fixed work stations, looking uncomfortable in executing tasks, and doing paper inputs all over the place, totally in adhoc actions.

In the potential new world the human assets, are empowered with devices, from small, to tablets, to PCS, but they aware, connected, and the ability understand the situation. Combine this with the move to embed experience in the systems, so actionable steps can be taken in timely manner no matter where the worker is.

So the worker is :

• Now aware instantly of an up coming situation
• They can understand the context immediately
•  They can make a decision
•  They can take an action

All happening in real-time, no delays, and coordinated through exception based machines, processes, and embedded experience, so now assets, production and human workers are working as one.

Walking around this plant last week, the opportunity to take small steps in a coordinated operations and empower the workers to be effective, will yield significant returns. The internet of things in the industrial context is taking the operational / production co-ordination we have today to another level, extending the scope and understanding of workers, buy making capital assets and human assets apart of aligned team through embedded operational practices/ procedures.