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.

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.

“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.

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. 

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.