Can Sustainable Manufacturing Operations Management Exist without Master Data Management? NO,

Again last week the discussion of operational integration raged in few project discussions with customers, without really understanding the arguments and I needed to pull out a log from mid last year on Operational Data Management. Data Model Alignment will be key in a viable interoperability architecture for level 3 applications with out “rip and replace approach” in making Manufacturing Operations Management sustainable and effective.    

Synching between systems, people look at data warehouses , they do manual binding, but these are just not practical in a sustainable and every changing world. There are many systems usually upwards of 20 + systems which come from different vendors and even if they do come from the same vendor they implemented by different cultures in the plants. The thought pattern on “just asset naming” is different between these groups. So the concept of Master Data Management (MDM) for Industry is a hidden one, but we believe is a key one for the future of sustainable solutions that are federating multiple systems together, so expect to see investments and products to trying to address this. In this blog I want to have a discussion on why MDM what it is, and Gerhard has done a good job, and I will expand on it.

 

Operational Work Mgmt Key to the Success of Operational Teams

This week I had two companies discuss with me Operational Efficiency across teams, trying to understand what is required. The methods they are using today are in efficient and disjointed the desire is a more efficient use of human assets and reduction in errors. The discussions revealed two common characteristics:

• Companies who have operational teams: Maintaining the traditional “swim lanes” of their departments, with the only common interaction a day in the “morning” meeting. A percentage of the morning meeting  lost in aligning / updating the data on tasks and action status due an inconsistent approach to managing, recording work across the organization.
• Significant work behavior and prioritization are “ad hoc/ fire fighting” at the operational/ plant level vs a planned coordinated and efficient work execution with the most suited skills executed the appropriate tasks.  

Work as we may not know it “Comments on the Future of Work and Employment “

Last week I was in California a number of people commented on my blog in January on 2020, and landscape, and I had to explain points. Is it the    future I believe it is becoming real in many parts of the world today especially the likes of China and South Africa where educated Gen X and Baby Boomers are in shortage, so Gen Y is stepping up into more prominent roles in the workforce. On the way across on the plane I was reviewing Morris Miselowski’s blogs, his specialty is future –vision since 1981. He had a good blog which would expand on many of these workforce

This is an extract from this Morris Miselowski’s Future of Work and Employment

“The good news is that there will be employment way into the future, there has to be. Things will always need to be done, built, sold, fixed, transported and accounted for and always will.

The other wonderful, or perhaps disconcerting news, depending on whether you’re a half full or half empty kind of person, is that we’re not going to need furriers, blacksmiths or elevator operators much anymore.

Now I know that’s kind of obvious, but these professions were great honorable and inspiring jobs in their day, using cutting edge technology and machinery to fulfill a society’s dreams and demands.

Tomorrow’s employment space, made up of a dwindling baby boomer cohort and increasing X,Y,Z and A generations will have 6 careers and 14 jobs. They will work towards the completion of tasks and project, not time allocation; in industries we cannot yet name, nor fathom, using skills that today are unimaginable.

By 2025, 60% of us will be working digitally and remotely, not tethered to a fixed workspace, but rather in a time and place that best suits the work and the people involved.

Some of us will work as intraprenuers, inspiring our host company’s internally. Others will work as solopreneurs shaping their own destiny and pioneering new paths forward.

Many of us will be working collaboratively co-creating locally, nationally and globally in virtual tribes, connected by a trillion digital things that bestow on us constant contact with, insight to and manipulation of, our physical and digital worlds.

Global unemployment will remain high as over the next three decades we add two billion people to our planet.

Despite this it will remain difficult for employers to find talented employees, as we move through a tectonic shift of inventing and reskilling ourselves to reshape and repurpose existing businesses and professions, as well as forging new horizon industries, practices, business paradigms, ethics and professions.

Education and training will remain a constant to grease this transformation of knowledge, the internet will continue to help to spread this information, but with the overwhelming mountains of data we’re drowning in, businesses and individuals will soon value “wisdom” more highly than gold and oil and professions and industry’s will rise to mine these riches.

Our most prized vocational possession will be our ability to span the duality of working simultaneously in a physical and digital world.

Tomorrow’s work landscape will also see the increasing use of robots, virtualization, telecommuting and 3D printing further blurring the intersection of human and machine and igniting the question of whether human or machine is best-fit for the task at hand and does it matter?

Standing still is no longer a viable option.

Every job, every profession, every human activity is currently being redefined. Those that are destined to succeed are now standing firm-footed on the precipice of change eagerly scanning their horizon searching for tomorrow’s possibilities and necessities.”

Food for thought as we look at the “Industrial Operations “ evolution that is happening, the debate that it could be a revolution, as the time span is much shorted than the traditional transitions in the industrial market.

Operational Advantage will accelerate “Managed Services” Cloud adoption in the Industrial Sector!!!!

For the last couple of weeks, I seem to have ended up in a whirlpool of activity and interest around the cloud in the industrial landscape, not just from within Invensys, but also in the customer community. A world away from a year ago when it was hard to strike up a conversation of any reality around cloud in the industrial landscape. So I called a few people in the field and people who had approached us, or our partners and in a discovery mode as to what is driving them and why now?