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.