Virtual “Situation Room” for Industry

We are not talking about just large Operational Centers but as pointed out over the last couple of weeks these are coming into play more and more especially in Mining, Upstream, and refining, but realistically it is just a part of the new “Virtual Situation Room” that enables the “Flexible Operational Team ”.

The key aspects of a “Virtual Situation Room”:

·         Operational Activities are Transformational across the "day in the life" of the worker, who does not need to be tied to a particular location to execution that activity

·         Collaboration and Interaction is Natural across the Operational Team

·         Awareness and context is native so situational awareness and decisions can be made dramatically faster, workers are not monitoring systems, they brought aware of growing situations.

·         Team work is natural, learning is natural across the team

·         Embedded operational practices enable Operational Innovation as a part of the operational culture.

·         Alignment of the different levels of loops in the industrial landscape are aligned

·         Unification/ alignment through federation is core across plant systems, and multi plant

The concept of the “Virtual Situation Room” can be seen in the diagram, but is based on unified industrial landscape which we use the Enterprise Control platform as the foundation to align the different levels of industrial operations, as well as put things in context of the workers activities in a timely manner. This enables a harmony of automatic loops at the control, operations layer and at the business layer, but with the critical human intervention and decision in a timely manner. We all heard of “Lights out Manufacturing” the concept of no or minimal people on a site and the plant can run, this has been proven to be not practical as an “agile business” requires business and operational decisions to be made based on the different vectors effecting the business today. Such as price, energy, safety, environment, and supply with minimal inventory requiring a very reactive system, the human brain is the best device for making these more complex decisions.

As you can see in the diagram you have workers in and outside the plant who work through the appropriate device to access the information, in context and understand the required actions or best practices available to make the action in a timely manner. They are able to interact, drill in, access experience, and interact, and play out into the future understands the effect of a decision.

This concept while looking new terms is the essence of the Enterprise Control, and what I have been discussing for the last 3 months, you should have realised that the empowerment of the operational workers (no matter role or situation) to make timely decisions is the key.

To achieve this we need “loosely coupled and tightly aligned” plants, applications, people, systems, assets. This will require systems like ArchestrA a “peer to peer” model and architecture, to evolve even further to an even more federating system. But it will require a broader thinking in implementations as well.

There are many aspects to explore within the alignment of plants, key is we not saying a MEGA system, we a federation of many systems into aligned operational system that is manageable and sustainable. Next couple of weeks I want start discussing MEGA vs federated, and what happened to interoperability with the enterprise, as this area too has evolved in thinking a long way in the last 4 years.

The Changing Execution of Flexible Operational Team

“What does Operational Collaboration Mean for my Modern Supervisory System?”

Last week I travelled to Western Australia, a state where there is a significant mining boom, and a challenge of how to operate it’s plants with a 3 way changing market:

·          The need to be agile to maximize production, which drives a push towards streamlining  “Value Generating Assets”.

·          The shortage of skill sets and experience

·          The changing demographic of the workforce to a younger more “digitally native” aware personal

As I spoke with people in the industry from engineering to operations, the topics I have been discussing in this blog over the last couple of months were confirmed. It does require a different thinking on how to put a system together, and not just different technologies but also an awareness in the design of the system of the constraints these new dynamics bring. This is calling for a rethink of operational practices and collaboration in real-time, to enable the “Flexible Operational Team Work” required, this goes beyond “Operational Centers” it is a new level teamwork, which will require a new thought pattern when designing the operational systems.

In the past we have run our plants and systems in a isolated or independent way with planning looking across them, but this was at best a daily evaluation/plan but if we are to really get the full agility, and performance many leading companies across the world are looking at the industrial production capacity in a more holistic manner.  This we started to talk about with the concept of “Federation” but will expand on in latter blogs.

The skill shortage and especially experience shortage continues to come to the surface when I discuss directions in companies thinking, and constraints which effect how they run, and therefore the changes needed in their operational practices. The fact that experience cannot be assumed so intuitive learning online, and access to experience in knowledge, people etc, we have covered this at length in earlier blogs.

So we are seeing a different thinking from operational execution across a plant or plants. Companies are looking at “Operational Centers” which span multiple plants assets. In refining we have seen this huge operational centers started appearing in the last 10 years, but when you look at “transport” such as airports, and railways we have seen them for a while also in the water utilities industry. If you walk into the Barcelona Airport control center it is a very large control room with huge screens in front, and then operational work stations covering every aspect of the airports operations. This is instead of many control rooms in plants or terminals. At the back of the room their “collaboration rooms” used to discuss situations with experts, where operational people can be drawn into discussions with experts, and it is only a couple of steps to get access to information, and other people. We have seen the same in Power in Eskom’s (South Africa’s ) power utility looking across their 22 power plants.

But when I really speak to teams, and customers, and people step back, the “Operational Center” is only a stepping stone to a new operational paradigm of the “Flexible Operational Team” the diagram starts to illustrate this. This shows from the Operational Center which is permanently manned but this person or persons become the “quarterback” call the plays, and aligning the people across the team into execution of activities. Utilizing the user interfaces below in the plants which traditionally were manned but now are moving to transiently manned.

Also the introduction of the plant team being “active/ roaming” so they have personal devices for notification and interaction, and the ability to go to a local UI maybe a machine or plant room, and “take on control” in a smooth safe manner, to execute the task/ activity and move then pass back control to the Operational Center and move on.

This is a dynamic/ flexible team; able to do more jobs, and respond to different situations, but to achieve this system must incorporate “exception based awareness”. Conditions in the plant must “pro-actively raise awareness” to Operational control room, it must provide operational procedure recommendations to the operational center and to the team members.  An alarm is one form, but to understand a developing condition and trigger an automatic investigation, and procedure so awareness all the way to the experts is key so as an operational person comes aware, these people are already aware and active.

An import concept in this “Flexible Operational Team” is the harnessing of the external experts, these could be local or remote and these experts have different skills and expertise, which the operational center can call on naturally, and have them actively interact with the plant or other experts. Providing expertise/ experience on hand, today this hard to pull together but as we move into this new operational paradigm the interaction and sharing must become a natural act. The different team members are naturally aware of which expertise is online, their capability, and the ability share, interact at a point of click. The foundation to this “Flexible Operational Teamwork” is the concept of a  “Real-time Virtual Situation Room” (will expand in the coming weeks) the expert is probably automatically interacting or aware of the developing situation, they are able to access, see the situation over plants, with focus, and context in what ever state they are in (roaming, desktop, web etc).

The concepts here are not new, as we co-ordinate across these teams today but they must become more active and real-time.  While technologies and product are evolving to make this more possible, infrastructure like bandwidth is allowing the experts to be anywhere, the full advantage will only be realized when people start designing this flow, and interaction naturally into their systems.

Food for thought as we evolve our systems, and the concepts of a Real-time Virtual Situation Room and Operational Innovation will become common concepts, we will discuss in the coming weeks.