Is the Transition to Gen Y so Significant in the Industrial Environment?

This question was put to me by a magazine editor in Czech Republic this week, he was from Gen Y (born after 1980), and he was commenting after one of my presentations.  This is not the first time I have asked “do you genuinely think the transition to Gen Y will be that significant?” It is truly valid challenge, so I decided I needed answer why I believe it is a significant milestone or transition in the operational approach or culture in the Industrial Market.

As he asked the question he was texting and recording the interview on a Samsung PDA, and he had prepared his questions well, by researching me on Linkedln, and reading this blog. To him this was a natural way of doing research, yet an interviewer the week before from Gen X (early) had not done this research, he just had heard my presentation and asked questions based off this.

Yes, many of us from the  Bayboomer, Gen X generations have transitioned to living by our PDA, always “connected” and using email and text for communication, we do our research off Youtubes and forums, but while we transitioned it is not natural. We certainly do not share as well, yes some of us have Facebook accounts, but many do not. I asked a group of 120 people in the Gen X and Babyboomer generations how many had Facebook accounts it was less than 20%, but the small segment who were Gen Y had 100% with FaceBook accounts and all had contributed at least 1 you tube to public domain.

Gen Y has grown up in an environment where the internet is just a natural part of life, most would not remember a time without internet, and the same applied to mobiles that are used for more than voice. SMS texting comes before having an email account, where to Gen X we had email before Text, and tend to use email as the primary text communication vs SMS. The way Gen Y naturally searches on Google and filters the information and rapidly transverse the information to a desired result. They expect to use a map on PDA and see the closest banks, restaurants and other information. Wiki Pedia is a natural source of knowledge, and it is natural to contribute with comments, and material to Youtube and pedia style environments. The most significant transition of generation from Early Gen X and Babyboomer is the shorter time in a role and location, the willingness to transition their career more often. Remembering by 2020 the expectation is the average tenure in a role will be 2.4 years or fewer, people are expected to have at least 4 careers and over 20 jobs in these careers.

These are contributors to the transition, but given that many of the industrial supervisory and operational interfaces/ experiences created over the last 15 years, have been defined to control the process of a unit or equipment. Many are in isolation (islands of control) with limited inter application integration as the design was not done in a holistic view as the project had a deliverable goal and timeline. The navigation, and operations/ actions of the user interface had a fixed button navigation, and assumed a certain level of experience, and on how to use interface and control the process, this experience often came from training on the interface by the developer to the users.

Combining the holistic end to end operational control which requires multiple workers to run the system, often the operational stations are now transitional, so the workers will transition from one workstation to another executing the actions, the experience needs to be consistent to help smooth transition as they do their daily role, plus the ability to access the states elsewhere in the plant, based upon a notification they would have received maybe on a screen or mobile, and they require more detail than available on mobile, so they will drill in using a remote workstation. Now as the worker is executing his day, he is faced with a situation that is new to him, or requires some process experience, and he is unsure of the decision to take as he has only been in this plant 3 months. The operational interface requires for the user to collaborate with a remote expert on that process, sharing the situation, some screens and states, plus a live conversation, this should be natural in order to make a decision and take a correct action as soon as possible.

So when I talk about the significant evolution we going through in operational culture and approach, I am referring to the ability to maintain operational continuity while absorbing this constantly dynamic / rotating operational workforce with now limited experience in a role and location.

The growth in operational programs that are looking re-engineering their supervisory (HMI) systems, and operational interfaces to provide:

• Consistency of operational experience across workstations and devices
• Natural Collaboration with others of more experience or in the operational team.
• Multi workstation and mobile devices on a common system that interact
• The natural learning, and knowledge management and access
• Consistency in operational actions across workstations, devices and processes
• The shift to exception based operational control, using the ASM (abnormal Situation Management concepts) for faster recognition and action on the situation.

Is confirmation that it is not a technology upgrade only it is an operational culture approach that is driving the expectation significant increase operational agility?

Is your supervisory/ plant operational system ready to absorb a dynamic workforce, while maintain operational continuity in the agile world of increased new product introduction, and competitive pressures.

I would be interested in people’s comments.

The Change Landscape of business Intelligence, EMI and Analytics driven by Information Driven Companies

All through this week in Europe I have spoken with customers looking for decisions in the NOW, and more people empowered to make these decisions. This does mean the traditional worker is evolving to knowledge worker, and this is across the different roles in the operational plant. But following on from last week’s blog the drive for realtime decisions is driving up the requirement for more advanced analytics to enable that decision, especially as the experience and time in the role of the decision maker reducers.

This drive for information and decisions, is causing significant other transformations in intelligence segment, and these are captured in a recent ARC table:

Some of the fundamental concepts it points out:

• The shift in time focus from Past to Future: in the industrial world I would put that as truly an expansion from the past and current to now past, current and future.
• From a performance to a predictive view that enables that decision
• Move from Batch data to realtime, this is key as we move from reports to dashboards that are dynamic with small trend tails showing now and immediate past easy to understand from a glance.
• Move from IT intensive creation to Self service: this is even more apparent in the industrial space as operations want to be self empowered without the complexity and delay in engaging either engineering or IT.
• Users move from a few Gurus to a collective team of people what I referred to as the flexible operational team (many blogs on this) where experience is shared to achieve realtime decisions. Virtual experts in an active community either from within a company across sites, and subcontractors/ suppliers can now be in the realtime decision with the on plant person.
• Deployment will shift from “on Premise” to a “Managed set of on demand services” this while only just starting in the industrial space makes logical and even more sense in the industrial space. Because the information and these virtual communities will live outside of plants and across the world. Companies are talking of Asset Facebook concepts to where a community of peers and experts across plants working on similar equipment and processes can interact share and make informed decisions together. The concept of a hosted set of services for an Information environment will be foundational for this to work.
• Another comment is the automated actions, I see this more in the industrial space as the shift from just supplying information to having embedded operational procedures to guide users through consistent actions.

Yes,  the traditional EMI (Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence) system will transform dramatically, and it will need to work well with the I tools which are also transforming, as well as provide “preconfigured experiences” to enable users to answer known decisions and enable “self Service” for rapid adoption.   

 

Decisions in the NOW, increases the desire for analytics as a key component of an Information Driven Enterprise

Again on a flight to Europe this week, I struck up a discussion with a fellow traveler who is out the oil and Gas industry while sitting in Abu Dhabi on a layover. It was around the transformation of decisions support from reports, to dashboards, and now for a need for more real time decision support.  This discussion aligns with the Information Driven concepts and the transformation from reports to predictive and decision dashboards.

Information Driven Companies are looking for more than what has happened they driving to understand what will happen?
It is crucial to note Excel, BI and EMI tools provide extremely solid basis for analysis in the past and now, and in a focused area, but as decisions become more predictive the way to sure up the prediction is to start looking across significantly bigger data to see common patterns. EMI provides dashboards and alerts based upon basic rules and KPIs this is still required.

Source ARC

The above diagram shows the evolution of Enterprise Intelligence and Business Intelligence from the understanding of today to a more predictive requirement, this is from ARC. When I talk with customers, I use the Operational Excellence Journey diagram below to describe the evolution to real time, agile decisions. It is vital that companies accept that achieving operational excellence is a journey not a one off project as it evolves as the company learns and tunes.

As you move to right the analysis and analytics start looking for patterns, and relationships across data sources, and linking causes to a set of conditions. BI and EMI remain indispensable tools of information driven companies, but they do have limitations. For example, BI involves the IT and runs in batches of set time breaks while information driven companies are requiring broad access to analytical information and they need it continuously in real time. Finally to be able to adapt quickly to market place changes, information driven companies need to look forward, predicting what will happen next. Traditionally BI/ EMI systems have not incorporated predictive analytics tools to apply pattern matching rule and algorithms to historical data.

These requirements combine with the new technologies that are now coming common place and transforming the capabilities of large data analysis. Four overarching trends are transforming the industry: e.g.| Data, predictive analytics, self-service/ embedded analytics and cloud based analytics. Advance techniques such as data mining, predictive analytics, statistical analysis, data visualization, text analytics/ natural language processing can all be applied with e.g.| Data to discover new patterns and relationships opening new understanding and potentially operational advantage.. This significant trend, reinforced by the fact that modern predictive analytics tools do not necessarily require advanced skills, and thus overcome many of restrictions of traditional predictive tools. Many of us are evolving technologies and tools, that will analytics and simulation module as part of a supervisory/ operational experience (similar to alarming). Enabling small forward-looking models to run off existing  systems and history to allow a forward look based on the situation today. Combine this with users now getting information for decisions via advanced analytics tools on top of traditional data sources that they can use themselves(self-service) and immediate value. Next week I will expand on some of key transformations in the Intelligence BI worlds that apply in operations.
 

Sorry for the delay on the Road Expect Tomorrow : Analytics why it is critical to Information Driven success

“Managed Services” in the Cloud provides an acceleration Opportunity for Small Industrial/ Manufacturing Business

Last two weeks again a significant amount of my time has been in discussions and strategy around the “hosted managed services” and the real opportunity vs speculation. The discussion continues to grow more people participating with a clear outcome of the discussion on the significant new opportunity these managed services deliver to Small Business, Small sites.   The discussion is happening in larger companies, they are accessing how to use the services, and off premise capability.

Early adoption of managed services will be the small business that do not have limited IT resources, who are also having to grapple with the changing consumer of the market, who need access to industrial information traditionally only for the control rooms, or customized databases.

The Small Business companies are just jumping on the new opportunities the cloud based managed services offer, bringing significant new capabilities quickly to their business that would traditionally be out of their reach due to cost and expertise. Initially in the back office applications such as CRM, ERP and MS Office capability, providing an experience of what advantage, and understanding of the security risk vs. Reward. Now they looking at the new services coming on line for the operational execution management increasing real-time control of inventory, and production order tracking and execution.

Adopting  “Managed Services” built in experience of product and domain experts, with many practices and capabilities, but they do not require a tender/ RFP, they are ready, yes there is a compromise in some customization, but that sacrifice is low compared to advantage to adopting the capability in its predefined format. Providing a platform for faster decisions and agility to serve the markets, expand with small loosely coupled faculties that can capture new market by reacting faster to market changes. The discussion of smaller facilities strategically situated for markets, but this network of value assets (sites) now can execute in an aligned manner, through a common set of “operational managed Services” hosted in the cloud.

A clear understanding of inventory across the sites, the status of orders, the status of the plant, from one central operational system, interacting from each site. For many of these small sites the operational execution is a highly manual (forms) driven process, so the ability to have a set of handheld devices, and desktop devices connected to the cloud enabling proven operational process execution is not a substantial step.

The value in return is significant, delivering them and efficiency in operational execution consistency, control and awareness only previously achievable with significant project investment, and expertise. We will see an explosion in the amount of these “Managed Services” for the industrial / manufacturing sector come to market, key will be how well developed and architected the services are. They have a 90% reproducibility across sites, to provide the speed to up and running. Early adopters needs make sure they confirm:

·         That the solution is built on standard, proven industrial products.

·         That the solution is tested and is 90% reusable across sites so the domain is managed as a product not an application, so will scale, and evolve across 100s of customers.

Teams vs Collaboration: What are the effect on Capabilities Required from a Operational System?

As discussed on many occasions the ability to harness the operational team in a well aligned, action orientated and decision in the NOW team is key to having an agile operational business. It became aware to me that not everyone was on the same page as to what capabilities are required in the “operational/ automation system” to achieve this effective team.

One person talked about collaboration services, and I asked " what did capabilities did he include in this? " The answer was “Skype like capabilities the ability to speak, chat easily with another member”.

Certainly this is not what I had in mind, and therefore I thought it worth a discussion:

 Key with an aligned team is:

1/ Team awareness: requiring that the state, availability and easily understanding the skills of the team around me at any moment so I can filter to a set of team members whom a have a certain skill and are available, no matter their location. As a local worker feel empowered to engage with experts for advice in making timely decisions.

 

2/Natural communication: It is not hard to communicate, I do not have to look up a number, just click and either chat, email, voice etc. The ability to set up team, multi user meetings to discuss a point and I am on plant, this is quick and natural from within the application.

 

3/ The ability to share links, information with notes etc: to be able to ad hoc analysis, identify a situation of interest, add some notes and share with someone else or a team to discuss all in one to two key strokes is crucial. An example Google Documents provides this collaboration powerfully, but to add to this to snapshot of a current plant screen, trend tool and evolve. Providing views to allow fellow team members to get to the same view quickly, applying their skills in a collaboration of skills in real-time in a virtual world.

 

4/ The ability capture events and notes: so that actions and situation of an event are automatically and manually captured to allow use by other following teams. Eliminating time for searching for materials and waiting for response, the system has the information and in an easily well structured format for consumption.

 

5/ The ability to manage tasks: work items with knowledge between the teams, people and across skill sets with efficiency and drive towards resolution as fast as possible. The work item is set up automatically, or on request from a worker and associated operational practices are associated with it, with the item execution tracked until resolution. Avoiding losing items between teams.  

 

6/ Knowledge sharing and capture: so that teams are able to be fluid across sites and tasks, drawing upon existing knowledge and expertise with ease. As users solve problems or resolve work items, the capture of data and resolution methods easily for later use. Users can add knowledge and information on the fly, capturing notes, situations, photos etc easily, so it is a natural part of a days actions not and exception. The promotion of “crowd sourcing” by a user being able to search and see topics and then contribute and extend easily.

All of these are facets of “team” system capabilities, enabling and effective interaction and transition between and across teams and members within a team. The boundaries of departments and locations are removed enabling timely decisions and actions. All of the capabilities while available in different forms today, but the modern operational/ automation system will naturally accommodate these within the environments in the near future. Key is for companies and engineering houses to bring team collaboration into their design of a system, as well as culture the leading companies are seriously focusing on this area today as the next significant step in operational effectiveness.