The Re Think on the Role and Use of the Experts in Industrial Operations/ Automation!

For a while now I have spoken about the trends in the operational workforce, and people have been talking about the aging workforce (expect major impact over the next 7 years), but the talk has only been in one dimension.

Over the last week as we did analysis across a couple of industries an “aligning of the planets” into a major market disruptive event has become clear not just from the “aging” workforce retiring , but from two additional dimensions.

The diagram below tries to show the 3 converging dimensions that became clear where speaking with 2 customers and then listening to a few others.

Looking at this diagram you have 3 clear dimensions, driving different aspects of the new strategies we seeing in “Smart Facilities/ Plants” etc., but they all effect each other, and will cause a significant shift in how we handle experts.

Experts can be in the Operational Process, Production, IT, Automation, Asset etc.

1/ Reducing Expertise Capacity (Aging workforce): Nothing new here except the impact of GFC (global financial crisis) has pushed out the retirement of many people. But as predicted in Europe that in 2030 there will be an 8.3 million deficit in people entering the workforce vs retiring or leaving. Other charts show the next 7 to 10 years will see the acceleration of retirements in industry.

Two big feedbacks in this area:

•         People are predicting that the workforce of 2020 will have 30% of experience of the current workforce, does not mean they less qualified, but their first hand experience in a role or location will be down. That tacit knowledge vs the explicit knowledge you can learn from text books.
•          Two companies just talked about even the shortage of people hiring into positions even from Gen Y.

One comment from the mining field “I've been told by engineers on more than one mine site that they just don't run the existing equipment as well as they used to in the early 1990s. Particularly the big plant and equipment. This seems to be more an issue of availability of expertise and training!”    

2/ New Digitally Native/ Dynamic workforce: This I have talked about at length, but it is still an eye opener for many people that the above “ageing workforce” retiring is not just about the loss of experience (which significant), but the transition. The new workforce is not the same as the old, and the interfaces, procedures, approaches will not work, or keep the experts.

•         They are digitally native they expect to collaborate, share, and in the NOW
•          They will evolve in roles, careers, and locations many times to the point that they will not stay in a role/ location for longer than 2 years. We already seeing this in some parts the world.  
•          There ability to use tools to execute exceeds to two pervouse generations, but their tolerance and ability to solve, investigate work determining execution is reduced. The system should provide the information and action.

3/ Personnel Efficiency Reduction: This was brought to me 2 weeks ago and I was surprised as I know in my own work that I do far more than I did 10 years ago, and effect all parts of the globe so my reach is more effective.

But in Solomon Benchmarking for refining, which is really the Refining industry benchmarks by which companies in that industry judge their performance. Indicated from 1994 to 2012 the Personal Cost Index is dropping. PCI (Personal Cost Index) is equal to “Personal Cost/ Equipment/ Asset Capacity to Produce “. Over the last 18 years the trend has been that Asset/ Plant capacity increase has not kept pace with the increase in Human Overhead cost. Example in 2010 = 23.5 2012= 25.7. Driving strategies to use fewer experts across wider influence over the total industrial supply chain, increasing the effective output.

Is this surprising initially probably yes, but when I went back and looked again, in my role I have increased my efficiency and output, by leveraging new technologies built into the latest office, communication, and task execution tools.

But has that same dramatic increase in tools capability to empower operators and experts to increase their effectiveness happened in the industrial world, ASM (Abnormal Situational Management Consortium) and others indicate that we have not increased the empowerment of industrial worker. We have done integration, we have looked asset performance, process performance, but in most cases until recently we have not changed the personal experience significantly to performance tasks.

With the true application of the ASM concepts, going to Integrated Operational Centers, going to exception based awareness, vs monitoring. Truly not just making the equipment smart, but leveraging the smart “self aware” equipment to empower a new level of operational efficiency and increased output relative to the amount of experts and operational staff.

Also during the same period the both the “mechanical and operational availability” in refining has dropped.

This is all food for thought, but in so many of conversations I am having today with leading thought leaders in industrial companies, the need for innovative ways to effectively use their workers and experience across their industrial supply chain is “top of mind.”

A foundational pillar in an Effective Operational Excellence Strategy, is the strategy around using experts differently, leading companies towards the “Virtual Expert Teams” that collaborate on trusted information with the local teams. Indications are that the operational work-space of 2020/ 25 will have a significant 40% less operational experts across a companies industrial supply chain, with the systems housing the required knowledge to be agile.

Multiplying Value of Expert Community interacting with the Multiple Operational Team

Last week I talked about harnessing the experienced community for knowledge management, the concept enablement to contribute through "crowd source". This week I would like to expand the concept with the virtual expert team and how critical enabling this community of knowledge and experience to be empowered to work in real time with the plant, operational staff, enabling real-time decisions.

In January we introduced the operational landscape in 2020, where projected tenures in roles or locations to be below 2.4 years, (I believe will be less than this in many areas). The other notable observation was that 1 in 3 of the workforce will be in project work vs. careers, temporarily engaged to supply expertise and skill to a project, or situation. Giving rise to a "vacuum" knowledge effect when they leave, often causing an uncertainty, lack of confidence in making decisions.

Introducing the challenges of enabling decisions, with lack of experience.

Companies talk about their experts either in the company or in partners, who are stretched and how they keep "taking the expert to the problem" and the need to transition to "taking the problem to expert".

During the last two weeks I have been engaged with a couple of large distributed projects, in environments where there is 20% turn over of expertise from trade’s people, operational, maintenance, process experts and staff. The growth in companies investigating or implementing "operational centers" is indicative of the challenge as the experts can be located in a central location, and interact with multiple sites. In theory, this works, in practice the challenge is the expert could be on site, could be traveling, and often in order to retain the expert he must be able to contribute in a location of their choice.

Companies are also looking to multiply the value from these experts requiring they are not restricted to only contributing to their local plant, or teams. As companies look to align and manage the end to end value chain these experts could be in  operations, planning, maintenance, engineering, process, IT, control quality, etc., become critical assets.

The concept of significantly reducing the "time to performance/ expertise" is key built on a number of foundational approaches, all possible today:

1/ Knowledge systems that enable natural contribution with knowledge management to gather value and maintain the value leveraging technologies that harness "crowd sourcing", of the expert community.

2/Embedding of operational processes shifting to "intelligent work" with context information for declines and recommended actions all associated in the work item. Gathering these operational best practices from the experts, at all levels in the company and embedding into the operational system for consistent behavior to situations.

3/ Virtual expert communities that can be notified in real-time, access status and information in consistent and trusted context. Viewing the same information as the plant operational staff, but being able to apply their own analysis, experience and expertise to share with the plant operational workers for decisions. Key is the expert is working from where ever he is, on what ever device, and can collaborate, share and contribute. The expert could be in a company or a supply, but is part of the "virtual trusted expert" community seeing only the information they need, to be easily accessible to the plant user, and no effort to access.

So as a situation develops, a plant worker can focus on that situation, and see all the real virtual experts for that situation who are on line and their skill. They can chat, they can share, by dragging and dropping, and they can talk, all in a couple of key strikes or gestures. This collaboration must be natural, combined with core trust of the expert, and system that the advice from the expert is relevant to the current situation. Also, the ability to call on the knowledge system for like situations and draw information easily.

Now the experts are contributing to multiple sites, and situations without traveling and contributing to knowledge capture at the same time. This whole concept is paradigm shift in knowledge and expertise, but is the foundation for companies to be able accommodate this transitional operational landscape.

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.