Key Operational Challengers of the next 10 years: New Product Introduction, Agility to Change, and Operational Effectiveness with a transforming workforce.

Sitting at dinner with three end users who own strategy, we had a stimulating discussion on the key design parameters or drivers for operational/ automation systems over the next 10 years. Key was the high level operational drivers not the technical hurdles that they are facing as these are just constraints that designs and new practices must absorb. One End users from Water utilities industry, food manufacturing, other from mining. The surprising part was that within 15 minutes we had narrowed the drivers to three key items:

Agility to adjust to market conditions and change:

The clear common requirement was the end to end operational alignment, understanding across the value chain. This holistic operational control, was a significant change in all three industries the sites had run with independence, in all cases the expectation was that site / regional uniqueness will be maintained but now alignment and traceability of action, product across the total value chain, e.g.| multiple assets/sites. A fascinating discussion here was both water and food talked that they expect this end to end to include outsourced assets that make up the chain, and effect the quality of the product or service that their brand is delivering. This is why it is the ability to federate assets and systems while still allowing site uniqueness is key. The inclusion of non company assets in the value chain and requiring operational traceability, accountability and agility to change are just around the corner.

 

The operational workforce transformation operational role retention / rotation: The impact of the operational culture, approach with gen Y and more holistic operations. These  have covered extensively in the blogs, but is the area both of my dinner companions spent over 50% of dinner time. The key areas are

·       The knowledge transfer from the retiring generation and how is the captured.

·      The highest critical concern is the fact they are already seeing people in roles for much less time, and this is across the operational roles. So the issue is how to embedded and design the experiences to enable to become effective dramatically faster, e.g.| 20% of the time today. Our conversation went away from industrial operational systems, to commercial systems, such as Facebook, banks, mobile phone applications. The key here is these applications are being delivered to market without having to train the users, they have intuitive experience that leads users through the steps. Agreement that this is a paradigm shift in operational design, from today's approach where user interface is thought of well after the control, and we have engineers who are not human in factor people, designing the systems. All attendees said we need to continue this discussion, as this is not just control rooms, but reports, and information etc. 

New Product Introduction: The life time of products and services is dramatically reducing, and the companies stated that seem to have ever change and introduction of new products and services. The move is to individual products and services for each consumer. How do we introduce, absorb these new products and services to the operational systems that will deliver them in a timely manner without significant error.

This could be considered agility, but both wanted this pointed out separately as it is a real dynamic that effecting them, vs the infrastructure and assets that are also changing and must absorb agility of change. An intriguing point here was that they commented that operational system and automation system absorb new product introductions without change, but all commented on the challenge of new assets with existing systems requiring federation into the system, and how do introduce new products procedures to operational staff. So the discussion for new product introduction was not just for systems, but also for people to execute, how can they take the new product from the PLM system, and deliver the control, and instructions, across many sites with different systems, and different cultures.  

Are these three points new no, but the fact that 3 decidedly different thought leaders from three different industries rapidly agreed on these as operational drivers, combining this with the fact that each point effects the others. The eventual take away was they were being asked to deliver one operational ecosystem to run the end to end product production over multiple assets with operational consistency. While 3 dynamics constantly change, the value assets / plants are added and taken away, new products and services are added at an ever increasing rate, while the operational workforce is becoming dynamic with a culture of evolution of the role and job, and people will not be in a role longer than 2 years.

What and exciting time we live in!!!