Focus on "Roles being more effective" provides a potential path forward towards 2020!!

Last week I was engaged with a number major customers, in different industries, all looking at the future, and determining the next approach, and talking technologies and how to apply them. The companies have invested and executed on the tradition alignment in a plant across process systems, and also evolved their SAP business system. What concerned me was the throwing of technologies around like cloud, wireless, and mobile, and looking for how, instead of stepping back and looking at what are they trying to achieve, and then applying technologies to that plan.

It is important to note that, in both cases, their automation layer is mature and well established and that their business side is also well thought through and well on the way to being established on the second generation business system.

Again the opportunity of significant improvement and gain in operational efficiency is at the operational layer across multiple facilities. Again the role of people and enabling decisions in real-time are key but not just decisions but a consistency in action in the operational control loop.

The question of where to start came up, and through the discussion the opportunity of stepping back and taking a look at the roles that an operational plant will require from the roles in 2020 to execute. These roles could be on site or off site, through the concept of the “flexible operational team”. Define the role, the day in the life of that role taking into account location, what decisions and actions that role is responsible for and who and what he will interact with through the day. Yes, switch into a “Facebook” thinking of friends, but friends maybe people, (other experts) Assets, Processes, even products. Once this map of a decisions and responsibilities during the day is defined, this drives what information, systems and people this role must interact with in a day. It will also determine what operational procedures (Operational Activities) the role will potentially engage.

This role map is key as now you have a starting point, as to driving consistency in a dynamically changing workforce. Combining these role map, composed of “operational activities” associated with the role, where the activity has the required notification, information, actions, community of expertise etc. and architectural landscape so these “operational activities” can compliment existing systems.

The architectural landscape should define the layers on top of existing systems, in a neutral way, where these operational activities (model driven approach) will reside, these could be local or remote hosting but will require clear governance and require models to defined in an environment that enables constant evolution of the practices but process experts locally and centrally as a “crowd development”, with governance control.

This focus on a role or set of key roles allows the company to focus on how the operational plant will run in 2020 and the key decisions that required, and start applying these now in an architecture that lives with the current systems, but starts to drive consistency and faster decisions across that same role over multiple plants. Notice I have not talked technologies, my assumption on mobile and cloud that the architecture is set up so these activities will be able to execute independently of the device, so the adoption of what devices are used on a plant are relative to plant and support they get, key is the devices no matter if desktop or mobile or web should be suited to efficiency of the role execution.

The clear opportunity is the linking of smart/ intelligent assets to people, and optimized process, and this is the essence of distributed industrial systems of the future on which “Internet of things’ / “Industrial internet” and the “third Industrial Revolution” are based. Key not getting overwhelmed with technology (it is here) it is the “job” or operational improvement that is the opportunity, and how to achieve this. A good starting point is understanding and achieving consistency in the key roles in the future vs the dynamically evolving workforce.