Achieving Operational Effectivness through Planned Operational Work vs Adhoc Work

As one customer said “We have teams and programs on captial asset performance for years, this will continue, but the real opportunity for gains is with increased efficiency across the operational team!”

 

The emergence of “Operational Performance Teams” to work along side the well established “Capital Asset Performance Teams”, with the focus on improving the operational effectiveness of the plants. In today's challenge is how do evolve the workers operational practises into a sustainable model. Moving to planned work vs ad-hoc work in a day and week takes a change in culture but delivers significant results in reliability, improved safety. The key to increased agility is through effective, real Operational Teams, having to collaborate and execute work in a timely manner, with the freedom to pass work items between team members for effective execution.

 

To achieve operational effectiveness the discussion between companies is not just information awareness, it is also looking at implementing operational work item systems that are not just logging and generating end of shift log reports. The discussion has shifted to a “journey of operational alignment and culture” as seen the below. Today many companies find they do not actually know what work items workers are doing in a day, many state that they ad-hoc and fire fighting, which is decidedly in efficient in time and cost, plus directly increases the safety risk. Companies have quoted figures of 35% of a typical plant workers day is planned rest is “unplanned”. The diagram above is intriguing depiction of a possible journey in a workers operational work management, key will be changing the culture of work management on the plant and dynamic workers.

The ISA 95 working group has also released a work management structure for operational systems as seen below:

The key are seven items that are required for Operational Effectiveness:

 

This is decidedly different to traditional electronic log systems, and the key is the fact that this is not a logging and task management, it is also capturing, and planning and assigned embedded operational procedures. The ability to pass work items between different operational team workers. On the plant we do often have a good work management in the Asset Management system, this is extremely effective for asset management, but the Operational Work management is for all items in the industrial landscape, and day. It is also targets improvement by performance monitoring of operational procedure execution and seeing how to improve these procedures. This can only happen if the actions taken are consistent, and this depends on “embedded operational procedures/ workflows”. Combining this with planning and realtime shift dispatching of work items, and constant realtime execution, transferring of work items made up tasks between team members with clear ownership so “accountability” which is key.

Invensys is continuing to evolve it is offering in the space to satisfy the every growing requirement of managing operation work items and therefore the efficiency of the human assets. Working with leading companies as they evolve on this journey of operational effectiveness, expect to see a lot more discussion on this area. My question is how can companies run a team without Operational work items management, that is why electronic log books ave grown in the last few years, but this is only a step in the correct direction.