Operational Innovation !! Technology is here but Culture Needs to Evolve!

Through the travels of the last 2 months talking with many of the leading companies in mining and other industries the concept of “Operational Innovation” is a hidden objective. Why is it hidden because it is not natural for innovation to driven from all parts of the business, companies have a habit of centralizing it. Actually we can all contribute to innovational improvement to the way to take on, execute our “jobs to be done” during the day.

There is always ways to improve, but the key item I see being missed is the “culture not just innovates, and try”, but capture this and embed it. Innovation is about lifting constraints of risk to enabling trying to change items with improvements, yes this means making “failure” as a success measure. When I say failure people look at me twice in the industrial space. But I am talking constructive failure e.g. freeing people up with an environment where they can try new ideas on improving their job, and this experiment/ trial is done in a safe none intrusive environment into the plants operations. But the user is able to allocate time, and feels empowered to come up with ideas, and try them. Once the improvement is validated and tested, the ability capture this and embed it for consistency across plants and teams. Diagnram below comes from ARC comparing the effects of embedding processes vs manual implimentation this takes a significant leap even further ahead if you build in operational innovation culture and systems into your industrail operations. 

Activities Behavior Starts to become Reality
As I flex back from South Africa last week I was listening to an interview on innovation, and there was interview with Microsoft Manager for Australia, and she talked about the change in culture they have implemented in the Australian offices. Switching to Activity based officers meaning that no one has a permanent seat or desk, you go in a morning and select a desk based upon the activity you are doing that day. As you may be on the road, you may be do activities that do not need you in the office, you maybe at other offices. She talked about it as a significant change in culture but it allows agility and focus to adapt your day and role based upon activities not a role.
This is the same I see in my own life and how I have discussed realtive to the Flexible Operational Team in the industrial space, these can only be achieved when people and the culture support an Activity Based thinking and Approach. In South Africa last week, I continued to see the evolution towards this thinking in mining, and food and beverage as I spoke with customers, many do not realise they on this path, yet their actions and ideas are heading in this direction.

This is no different in my life every day, I talk about my work life being in my back pack, with my lap top, IPad, mobile cell, and mobile  wireless hotspot. Based upon the activities I have that day, meetings, calls, site visits, PowerPoint presentation preparations, technology knowledge catch up, interviews,  strategy brainstorming, these are distinct activities require different modes of thinking, I choose the best environment and location for doing these.

This is very different to the way I worked 10 to 15 years ago in an office and defined role, today my activities and role change daily based on the situation and achieving our business goals and the contribution I can make each day to that, certainly my agility, and effective working time and delivery has increased.

This is the same for the industrial world and the changing approach I am seeing in the industrial place, where companies are going to the Flexible Operational Team, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, can only be truly achieved when people are working against activities vs roles. Key to evolution is that there will be a management of activities, both planned and reactionary, which will be acted upon by the best person, or team in order to respond as fast as possible. This does not mean that people are assigned to a certain interface/ roles,  they should be able to go to best location in the plant in order to execute that activity. This is why the whole operational control is evolving to a an aligned set of systems, that allow people to access, understand and take action in the most effective place possible.

 I was in South Africa at the annual conference there, as usual I saw a lot of innovation, and thought leadership, building on what I have seen in Western Australia in the last 6 months. The big discussion was around effectively using the human asset, through "time to Experience shortening" knowledge access, and actions, and collberation.

 But you see this continued evolution from:

Applications        to        Roles        to         Activities

Activities require a change in thinking:

·         How align information and actions from different systems to enable a co-ordinated and assignable activity.

·         How the UI changes to activities with the information, ability drill and understand and then the associated actions, which may require multiple people and certain procedure.

·         Plus a culture that allows roles and people to be flexible to take on different activities in a must more agile process.

I will expect to see this activity thinking and approach accelerating over the next year but as I have said this means aligned systems, access, and contextualization in order to make it fully effective.  

Why Exception based Operational Systems are the Only Practical Way?

As you unify your operations the more and more you roll up data, the more you drown in data and events etc. It becomes very quickly impractical to digest this information at the rate it is coming, and then it gets ignored or situations missed.

This calls for different thinking and taking the users away from MONITORING to now been naturally made aware of a situation through presentation, of the condition.

Concepts like the Advanced Process Graphics are  changing the thinking in the way data is presented so time to awareness to situations is dramatically reduced.  This I will discuss in the future.

But the big point of this discussion is move to Exception Based thinking meaning that the system notifies the correct people of a condition. This reduces the data needing to be consumed by a operator, and reduces the data that needs to be sent over networks. The issue with post analysis like through historian it is not real-time, and means you has gathered all the data not the critical data.

Virtual “Situation Room” for Industry

We are not talking about just large Operational Centers but as pointed out over the last couple of weeks these are coming into play more and more especially in Mining, Upstream, and refining, but realistically it is just a part of the new “Virtual Situation Room” that enables the “Flexible Operational Team ”.

The key aspects of a “Virtual Situation Room”:

·         Operational Activities are Transformational across the "day in the life" of the worker, who does not need to be tied to a particular location to execution that activity

·         Collaboration and Interaction is Natural across the Operational Team

·         Awareness and context is native so situational awareness and decisions can be made dramatically faster, workers are not monitoring systems, they brought aware of growing situations.

·         Team work is natural, learning is natural across the team

·         Embedded operational practices enable Operational Innovation as a part of the operational culture.

·         Alignment of the different levels of loops in the industrial landscape are aligned

·         Unification/ alignment through federation is core across plant systems, and multi plant

Standards What do they mean?, What does it take?

As we evolve the Enterprise Control capability around multi-site and system, (yes distributed system), I have been out talking to people. A common topic is standards, the more architectures try to unify/ standardize process, operations etc., the more standards apply, but they have been round for years in control blocks. But why is it such a struggle at the supervisory level, and MES? Basically it appears to be:

·         Defining what is a standard? and Why make it a standard?

·         Governance and investment to make a standard but the much big investment to maintain and evolve the standard, it must be justified.

·         But at the core is this mis understanding that standards are like “applications”, when that are closer to “products”.