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.

Business Control Loop Concept Critical for Continued Process Improvement.

Nearly all customers/ end users I am talking with across multiple industries have a “lean/ performance program” looking at business processes and supply chain. Many have adopted techniques such as Lean/ Six Sigma, and many have a dedicated team investigating and driving performance thinking across the different aspects of the business.

The diagram below came from ARC on a survey they did, but it is the best depiction I have seen how the leading customers gain an advantage by embedding processes vs just training and manual implementation. The leading companies are looking take this embedded process, to the operational space, and again this becomes critical in the “rotating” worker world.

In the last 5 years we have seen significant increase in so called MES applications been applied, this could be in Batch, MES, Quality, KPIs, but really what is happening is that a “Business Control Loop” is being implemented. Based on a business process the operational execution procedure best practice is implemented in a workflow/ process. This is then rolled out across multiple sites/ or like processes. This does now restrict the freedom on how to execute this process, but in turn you gain the consistency in execution, and ability to understand execution and where to improve by reducing variation. This naturally solves to issues:

·         The ability to gain consistent execution over different sites/ cultures

·         The consistency of execution across shifts/ operational teams, but most of all as we go into the transition of staff through rotating roles (discussed in early blogs “The Perfect storm in Industrial Operations= People Excellence Feb 2012”). As one customer stated we have design to assume limited experience, through embedded procedures you immediately solve this by an worker being able to understand a situation, and the associated activity and be provided with recommended procedures to work them through this.

These procedures can and should have built in help and self-training even built in certification if needed so there is a record that the worker has gone through the online training, and now the procedure will guide him through.

The leading companies are now building this capture of best practices into “embedded processes” as they learn them, even dedicating the more senior members of the team to document their experience in procedures that can be then embedded. In many ways traditional MES products with their routes and operations enforce this process in the product execution, but we now finding this happening in process and utilities.

This is why we saw the need to build in ArchestrA Workflow as a natural extension to the ArchestrA application model, not an add-on, not a BPM (Business Process tool) but as an operational process extension to the real-time supervisory and control system. Just a simple thing as an alarm can now have workflow monitoring it, based on other conditions and alarm could be generated but due to the other conditions in the plant a workflow may automatically escalate the situation and notify potentially others. What we have done is taken knowledge and built a situational aware capability, which aligned with the best practices the company wants to implement. We are seeing the same approach on NPI (new product introduction) where one of the biggest challengers is to enter the correct set-up data across multiple operational systems. The room for error is huge and lost time in revalidating and fault finding not counting lost production time and waste. Implementing procedures and alignment of data models is a big step in the correct direction. The whole focus on "Operational Safety" that naturally embeds best practices into day to day operations to avoid safety sistuations, is another example.

So when you looking at designing operational/ supervisory systems, you need to think of it not as a project but a journey. Yes the initial project gets you to a certain value and point, but the culture should be a continuous one of looking to capture best practices and embed them (so this must be a natural act not an exception), so the new value and improvements are gained for all as you learn. This requires a change in both the products vendors supply and the way in which endusers and engineering houses go about implimenting operational execution programs, but there is no choice if they are stay compeditive.

“Federation“ what does it mean in context of Industrial Automation/ Operations Mgmt System?

One of the 3 fundamental principles of the Enterprise Control is to unify a plants or multi plants assets and systems, through “Federation” vs “rip and Replace”, while I use the term often I also get blank looks. So let me explain how I see it!.

Federation is the unifying/ aligning of existing systems/ plants, assets into unified system, leveraging the existing systems/ models that exist, so “loosely coupling but aligning”. This goes beyond just data, but configuration models, alarms, events, data etc, you should be able to have a unified, comparable information model across many sites made up of different systems without changing the existing systems.

I was talking with a system integration house last week about the topic of last week’s blog, and how the traditional approach is the data centric model, he talked about having to spend a significant amount of time redoing the PLC / control systems which are the data sources, in order to make sure the data being put into the historian is in context, of the same calibration etc. While this approach is effective, it is costly and risky to exiting control systems. The concept of System Platform as a pre normalizing data model, with the added advantage of template management to enable standards management without risk to existing systems seams very logical. This is a classic case of “Federation” of existing control system models into a unified system without changing/ risking the existing system. By layering on this layer using the template model to built “intelligent objects, with not just structure but context validation, KPIs and exception based driven events.

I was also speaking to one end-user discussing the evolution of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) a big drive to S95/ B2MML. He made the comment that in the early 2000’s the focus was on Business System to Level3 systems, the amount time and effort we spent discussing how to come up with standards etc. But he stated that we were only addressing 10% of the integration challenge in a modern plant by talking to business system. In a modern agile plant it is all about decisions in the NOW, changing and adapting the operations and this means alignment of the many different systems that make up “day in the life” of operations execution on an industrial plant.

Sitting back I went to a couple of other customers that I had worked closely in the “inter-operability workshops” and they confirmed this shift, also the fact that they had hoped that they could put a single MES system that be master across operations, but had come to the conclusion there will always be many systems adding unique aspects of value to plant execution.

This diagram depicts how with the drive for agility comes the necessity for the different systems in a plant to be interacting, and this explodes as you move to making multiple plants become an agile execution chain. Each of these systems has a unique data model, for assets, materials, people etc. These many systems will have come from different companies and certainly standardization will rare if you have acquired production facilities.

In today’s market this is going from transactions in days/ hours to real-time, which cannot be done through the operational people, it must be done automatically by the systems. An example of this “federation” could be multiple Assets being aligned, eg you have different System Platform galaxies for different process units, now these different system Platform galaxies need to work together, yet we do not want merge into one galaxy as it becomes unmanageable. So we will leave each galaxy to run on their own, but through federation, there is unification of events, data passing, alarms, even object standards.

A significant investment is constantly happening to simplify the tasks to “federate” and maintain effective “federation” of our systems/ products, and with others, so that customers can evolve their existing systems forward with new value vs replacing with new systems.

This is a set of thoughts on a lot of concepts, but generally we need to align existing systems into a unified solution to enable co-ordination of the many assets as one.

How Pre Context/ Pre Normalizing vs Traditional Post Context DATA/ INFORMATION is critical to Operational Empowerment

Over the last couple weeks I have ranted on about what is happening that makes this Operational Empowerment Revolution not a nice to have but a necessary in today’s changing/ rotating workforce.  Then I sit in a room and listen to people about “just put a historian in and capture the data we will use it latter to tune the plant”. Yet in the next breadth the comment and vision of operational execution/ excellence with procedures and MES like execution is discussed. I feel cold in the seat, as the vision is correct, the passion is there, but the immediate execution will put them down a path to constrain their ability to go to vision. 

So it was time to pipe up, and get up on the white board and enjoy myself in concepts and opportunity. The data centric model is not bad it works but it brings up shortfalls in ability to evolve to more proactive. I believe as the market moves more and more into all decisions in the NOW, traditional approaches to information systems will be good for analysis, tuning, and post actions, but that is not NOW.

As the worker no matter their role evolves every day to an increasingly Knowledge worker, performing actions and responsibilities beyond their traditional roles, the expectation is a more adaptive business. In the example above the CIO was describing a modern operational Now vision, yet applying a tradition post action solution. We have always heard the next step beyond intelligence and information is action, and this is so true, but the step beyond that is pre-emptive information/ condition and action in the NOW time frame.

The requirements for a information system today is seen in the diagram the key points are:

·   You capture the data as close to source as possible for data integrity

·   You validate (more that just bad data) but is the reading actually valid for the state of the process.

·    The data is then put in context in a “Living agent/ object etc” that can bring in validate, but also do calculation/ kpis etc and generate events. The data is effectively transformed into information that can be stored and triggered into immediate action, but initiating an alarm, or workflow.

·    The storage layer is the tradition historian which could be distributed or central, and could support Tiered  but in a one name space created the layer below in the plat model, providing unique names and context.

·   Operational extensions these are a series of programs/ modules which should extend the plant model with more information, valued context.

·    Then the unifying information model that is accessed and interacted with through rich set of content and analysis clients.

This is vs the traditional Historian approach that captures data un validated and structured and does post normalization.

The pre approach seems more accommodating to evolution, value and ability to take actions in the now, it is also less risk, using a combination of System Platform with the historian built in.

It is time to rethink based upon the “job to Be Done “ today, and the context of the job, the technologies are available!

Bringing Reality to Activity based vs Role!

Upstream Gas Field example of why Activity based thinking in Operational Experience design is going to be critical for success. 

Last week I introduced the concepts of “Activity based “user interfaces vs Role Based, this is shift, and I want to this week bring reality to this concept with a story.

Here is Australia we have a number of big projects around “Unconventional Gas” like elsewhere in the world this is introducing significant operational challengers. The challenge with this type application is in traditional gas a well was drilled and would produce 20 years and it would be managed, the new unconventional gas type fields you have 1 to 6 new wells been drilled and coming on line a day, they only live 3 to 5 years , and you have 1000s of them.

To put this context a particular project traditionally would have had an operator every 5 to 10 wells, but they only have 25 to 50 wells, but in the next 2 years this company will drill 10000 wells, and they don’t plan on having 2000 operators. What they expect is an operator will be able to handle 50 to 100 wells, and eventually the “Operational Center” overlooking all the fields will handle all 10000 wells. So here we have an application which will have:

·         Roaming operational workers working out of car, but connected and able to go to a particular well or compressions center.

·         Local compressor operator stations controlling local water treatment/ or compressor plants

·         Basin or field control stations controls 1 to 5000 wells in the field

·         Operational Center can control all operations 10000 wells, 400 compressor stations etc.

The operational execution plan to run this operation requires a team of people between all these types of user interfaces that can collaborate, and execute activities. Due to the fact that the distance between wells is approx. 1 km, the distributed operational system is 1000s km / miles in area.

When designing the operational experience for this application, requires thinking to enable decisions to be made quickly, with the assigning of activities dynamically to knowledge workers based on skill and location and this requires:

·         The wells and assets to be intelligent so they report by exception, so the operational workers, operators, maintenance, or process engineers do not have to monitor the system, the system monitors itself and prompts on exception and this is not alarming it could be escalation based on a number conditions.

·         How a worker could be at say the field control center, then accept a task to be done, get in their car and drive to a site maybe 100km away, and still be in contact, still be able to see the information, and still able perform actions, and collaborate with the other members of the team.

You will see an important step here the knowledge worker from the Field office accepted a task/ activity, probably based upon information on a condition that would effect production. This activity may have been within the scope of his role, but now he is 100km out in the field and the “operational Center” notices another unsafe condition beginning to develop in a compressor station 20 km from where the field worker is. Due to the fact that he is the only personal within 100 km, and therefore a couple of hours closer to situation, the Operational Center should be able to assign a new activity/ task to the field worker. He is able to accept this, even though the task and activity is outside of his role, on immediately accepting the activity all the required training, online instruction is available to field worker from his roaming unit (car) and he is able to collaborate with the operational center and other experienced team members. The field worker is effectively acting as an agent for others to go to compressor station, while driving the 20km to the site, he able to communicate with the experts and understand the objectives and results intended and the current situation.

This is more than assigning a task/ activity it is the fact that the system is designed in activities with all the required data, information, experts, knowledge, procedures, online instructions including online certification if need. This design enables a dynamic operational strategy to be applied across devices, roles and locations.  

Interesting thought, does traditional HMI / operator station design thinking satisfy the above??

There seems to be confusion on the concept of "Federation" so standby lets discuss next issue.