Are the days numbered for the Servers on the plant vs a remote data center or cloud?

This was a question asked to me this week by an engineer at the New Zealand User Conference, and I stepped back surprised at the question from the remote south island of New Zealand, but pleased. The question was asked with full reality especially around the utility industry such as water etc why would people put in servers today and have all that sustaining hassles, versus just renting space and capability at a managed data center. The point is extremely valid as the networks become more robust, the acceptance of virtualization as the norm to deploy applications, why have the hassle with local servers.

Accountability Theme Growing in the Industrial Sector!

As the adoption of Flexible Integerated Operational Teams grow, the need to share/pass the execution of work items between team members becomes a requirement. Along with this is the growing theme of "accountability" in the industrial sector at all levels. The challenge with today's social media even email is you copy everyone, so they are all aware, but even this is changing as you need to address the owner of the next action in the "to" address, making it very clear and “accountable”.

Now apply this to operational teams, where the system generates an alarm the owner is the operator on duty, with the responsibility to acknowledge but how does he take action add this to work item list, that will be followed up and resolved:

·         By right clicking he generates a work item, the system prompts which person this is going to or group e.g.| maintenance, process etc, and the work flow will inform that person or group who "accepts ownership" and now they start executing. Already through that work items life time we have had two owners.

·         Now part way through this work item, the shift changes, and the work item appears on the shift handover report, and the new person on the next shift takes ownership of the total outstanding work items, so we have a third owner.

·         Now having completed 3 sub actions in that work item, the current owner, needs have a production department validate the test, so again the work item is reassigned to "production" and ownership stays with the maintenance team, until a particular person in "production" accepts. There is a clear passing and ownership, and accountability of work item.

·         So as, actions and records are captured the full trail to the work item resolution, including time to execute the work item and the action step times are logged and understood.

 

Is this new the answer is "no" plants must have a process for this today, usually paper and knowledge, but as the teams become more dynamic, the paper procedures need to come embedded in the system for consistent execution. Regulation from the market and governments require responsibility to be taken, and when actions are being executed remotely, and workers have more responsibility and work items, the chance of dropping (bot following up and resolving) work items grows.

The leading companies want their strategic targets effecting the targets/ KPIs of all the roles at different levels to be aligned so that as tuning of the strategy happens all people workers accept the change and start executing to that evolved strategy. This is different to a KPI system it is about aligning actions and targets downwards with transformation to local context.

Also leading companies are looking at the operational "day in the life" of their workers and finding two major items:

1/ increasing inconsistency in operational procedure execution from plant to plant, shift to shift, as the workforce transitions and people tenure in a role or location reduces.

2/ that only Approx 35% of work items executed by people on the plant floor are planned at the beginning of a day, the rest are ad hoc from "fire drill" plant actions.

 

Both of these factors have a dramatic effect on:

·         safety

·         regularity compliance

·         efficiency and costs, due to variation in procedure execution time and response action.

·         agility to react to changes in the market.

 

By embedding procedures companies can realize many Operational Goals in controlling their operations such as:

·         Alignment of strategy to all roles activities and targets as they can linked and transformed

·         Consistency in operational procedure execution, combined with the ability tune procedures as they can now monitor how long steps in work items take and improve them.

·          Awareness of outstanding work items, clear ownership providing the ability to increase the planned work in a workers day, so increased efficiency, less chance of safety incidents.

 

In the next week, I will introduce the concepts of operational work management, as a new trend to enable the above.

As plants transform to flexible Integrated Operational teams accountability, ownership, and awareness of outstanding work will become foundational.

Bring the Problem to the Expert vs Expert to the Problem!!!!! Virtual Expert Communities are required!

 “The 2020 workplace will need to be adept at uniting a physically – present tribe of employees with a tribe of offsite, and often transient, staff. The latter will be specifically chosen for their ability to add value to the task or project, regardless of where they are on the globe.” Mike Miselowski Futurist

This is the concept of flexible operational teams, and the ability unify into a collaborative and sharing environment the people on plants with those outside the plant, and even outside the company or country, who provide expertise. As I continued my travels last week, I engaged with two clients in different industries one in Oil and the other in mining who have remote sites, and the need to bring expertise from elsewhere in their organization to the remote site. These sites are extremely remote, and will involve a day or so travel to get there, and age on the site is reducing and so with it the experience. Both companies talked about getting expertise to site, decisions support centers or often collaborative walls or environments.

Another company in oil and gas last year summed up the problem when he described his team of 35 experts doing 1300+ flights in a year that it was “taking the expert to the problem” and it causing the loss of the expert team as they looked for alternative jobs than living away from family. Also, the response to the problem was delayed, and in many cases the problem did not justify the cost in travel or wasted expert’s time in travel. So his comment,  we need change to a situation where we “take the problem to expert”.

Another company in the metals industry is implementing this on a global basis a community environment across their global experts  with the:

Vision

• Break Down Communication Barriers between Continents
• Break Down Communication Barriers between Plants
• Break Down Cultural/Language Barriers and Inhibitions
• Break Down Network Barriers Between Computer Systems
• Create One Secure Global Network accessible by whole Expert Community
• Standardized system with common variables, standard calculations and standard names for data points for all the like assets / process across the companies worldwide sites.

Goal:

• Share Experiences with Live & Historical Data
• Instant online Information Exchange For Problem Solving
• Create a Powerful Knowledge Database
• Create a Community For Helping Each Other

So how do you make this a reality?

How do you take experts on the other side of the world, who have not been to a site, and enable them to contribute expertise on a subject, e.g. a particular process on an asset type, to a worker sitting on site. If the expert went to the site, or called the site he would ask a lot of questions on data, status and history to understand the situation before he can contribute.

 So the above company is trying to enable a “facebook” concept across the company pockets of expertise and sites that will actively engage the experts with the operational workers and make an active community, breaking down all the traditional boundaries that prevent this.

To do this they need to:

• Capture the historical data, current state from the existing systems.
• They need validate this data to make it trust worthy in their case 100+ rules of integrity
• They need transform the data into standard measures and states for that process/ asset so that the variables mean the same no matter which plant the expert engages. 
• The need an operational experience both at the plant, the roaming worker and the virtual expert that naturally enables collaboration in realtime as well as sharing.

All through the last couple of weeks travel, this alignment and empowerment of local people with remote is of significant concern. The tradition Control Room  systems today do not make this part time, transient engagement natural, and it is only by changing the solution to a team/ community, which is available at the local workers finger tips this can become a reality.

This is not something new, people have been trying to implimentation something to enable remote support for years, often throwing technologies such as PC Anywhere etc at it to allow access, and now with the introduction of social media increasing that. Most of it has focused on remote operations from an Operational Center on shore or in a better location. The real step change happens when an active community is developed of experts who collaborate and build knowledge while directly collaborating with the site teams as seen below.

 

Below you can see examples of the Offshore oil industry especially in the north sea what they have been doing while this is a significant step it is only a step, vs and a significant jump to a community.

Yes,  it lines up with Mike Miselowski’s comment of “The 2020 workplace will need to be adept at uniting a physically – present tribe of employees with a tribe of offsite, and often transient, staff.”

Leveraging the social media functions, but in a secure way, that understands security access level, plant control access and location of the people to enable correct engagement levels. So we should not be designing an operation HMI, control room experience , remote access focused on just the plant and process, consideration must be taken how collaboration, and sharing of information will happen in a near real time manner!!  Not just adding messaging, key is making the data and information consistent and trust worthy in near real time, as well as having inbuilt knowledge capture systems.

 

Reality of Operational Control through Information, Action and Governance.

Speaking this week with 4 executive vice presidents from different process companies, interestingly that the operational consistency and human factor dominated their concerns. Not the " ageing workforce" factor, these executives are located in South east Asia, where age of the workforce is not a significant factor, but the real challenge of the next operational generation is already becoming apparent, that of " rotating " roles.  The discussion, centered around the requirement for consistency of operation, to enable continuity in safe and optimized production environments. You may ask aren't they concerned about the process control, optimization,  YES, but they realize that it is not about controlling the process it is about optimizing production which requires stable process control, but the key is consistency of operation.

The only way to achieve consistency of operation across production sites and teams, is by embedding process standards that enable alignment of business strategy with action at all levels.

The Real Time Performance Management is more than KPIS and dashboards as so people claim it to be, including:

1/ The correct targets and feedback information for the role and worker in the time, format that reflects his focus.

2/ Alignment of these  targets with the business strategy in real time, propergated to all levels of operations to reflect the strategy

3/ Associated activities and processes that will enable consistent response and action to situations.

4/ Embedded processes in the system to enable consistency of action as workers rotate through roles

 

The rotating worker refers to the growing trend of people staying in a role or location for shorter periods. Example one company stated that they have seen the length of workers in a role or location go from 5 years in 2001, to the tenure now at 8 months. This is a drastic change in anyone's books, but on investigation the other significant change in this company was that the workers in the roles had gone from " baby boomer" to " Gen y" their percentage of late “Gen x” or “Gen y” in the operational workspace was over 40%.

While I believe this to be extreme at this stage, but the clear indicators of what we can expect as we approach 2020 is that 42% of the workforce will be Gen Y. Job tenure will average 2.4 years, but now you add locations and evolution of people within a company, the assumption of experience can not be assumed.

As the executives discussed the need is for alignment across their operations, this means sites, plants, and teams while increasing the empowerment of the worker to make decisions in the now.

 

The example above is an embedded operational process, relative a deviation from a KPI that will guide the workers through the desired process, this independent  the user and worker. So instead of just having information, now a work process is built into the system.

The consistency of the answers and focus on the human factor, and enabling users in the dynamic human market was interesting, a clear indicator that this dyanamic role will be natural paradigm in the future.