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.

Empowering a New Generation of Front Line Workers.

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

The diagram below illustrates the changing workforce:  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managing Variation is Corner Stone of Operational Growth but Requirements Platforms

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

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

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

The goal of business is to make a profit.”

                                                             - Continuous Improvement Leader

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

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

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

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

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

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