The Smart Plant Culture, What is it?

The concepts of an agile / smart plant, facility are not just in the assets, equipment, and systems, the key to the modern world is the efficiency in the work, and how people and expertise is used across the given tribes of people working and contributing to the business success. This article by Stan captures what is core to that culture.

 The Smart Plant is characterized by its behavior, which is a combination of technology enablers and the culture of the organization.  If the people don’t effectively use the technology, then the plant won’t behave in a “smart” way.

One of the most effective analyses of culture and culture change comes from Roger Connors and Tom Smith, who have written a book called Change the Culture, Change the Game.  They assert that actions and results only change when beliefs and experiences are changed.  When management attempt to change the results without changing beliefs and experiences, the organization doesn’t produce lasting change, and the amount of “disengagement” and rebellion increases.  These authors have also analyzed a key aspect of culture that they call “accountability”.  In this analysis, they recommend shifting an organization’s behaviors from what they call the “blame game” to a behavior of openness, ownership, teamwork and collective actions to solve the problems.

Dr. Stephen Covey has embraced these and he has written a book called Principle-Centered Leadership, which recommends a combination of changing the goals and measures, combined with a different approach to managing performance.

In the above diagram, the most important goals are called Wildly Important, and these are made clear and prominent.  The second step is to shift from the traditional “lagging” measures to “leading” measures, so that organizations can continually prevent problems and take full advantage of opportunities.  The third step is a “compelling” scoreboard, which requires all workers to have information with sufficient frequency and detail that affects their jobs.  This often requires hourly information focused on manufacturing or processing “cells” or “units”.  And the fourth step is a supervisor “cadence” or regular review and adjustment of targets.  In many industrial facilities, this might occur daily.

The Smart Plant culture reaches across organization silos, reaches across locations and reaches across time to share ownership of challenges and solve problems together.  The “blame game” is minimized and new employees are oriented into the shared beliefs and experience of problem-solving and sharing information, both good news and bad news.  Training shifts from isolated prevention of blame to team training which share performance.

Article authored by Stan DeVries Snr SOlution Architect at Schneider - Electric