Focusing on Operational Activities and new Roles provides a Path to the Future Operational Workspace.

As we enter the new year, the challenge of how and where we start designing the new operational solutions for 2020 and beyond will come up.
I have expanded on a blog I did in November with a white paper, on the facets especially around the Operational Workspace.
I hope this provides some food for thought as we enter the new year.

Companies have invested and executed on the traditional alignment in a plant across process systems, and business systems (such as SAP), leveraging such guidelines such as ISA-95. With the drive towards more and more agility and rapid deployment of products to markets, the alignment of multiple plants, and their operational/automation systems with the business strategy/ applications is a key area. The other key area of critical concern is the operational workplace. With rapid agility, comes the requirement for more alignment, and more complexity, combined with key / rapid decisions to be made in real-time, and as a result the new operational team collaboration, and operational workspace will be critical. Combine this with the facts that over 10,000 experienced baby boomers are retiring each week, (this rate is expected to continue for seventeen years), and that by 2020, 42%+ of the workforce is expected to made up of Gen Y.

So where do you start when planning to design an industrial operational system today?

Some people throw technologies around like Cloud, wireless, and mobile, and begin looking for how to apply them, instead of stepping back and looking at “how they will be Operating, based upon the business, market and both capital and human assets”. This requires developing a plan and landscape to satisfy this future operational state, and then apply the best technologies available to achieve the result in the most timely, cost effective and operationally effective manner.

The future “operational state” of the business needs to take into account:

• The production and delivery requirements of products and services, and how to satisfy the consumer demand, this will probably lead to an “enterprise Industrial/ Manufacturing Landscape” with a holistic view and operational execution across multiple plants strategically located for satisfying delivery.
• The “operational workspace” of the future and how the workforce, including all roles at corporate, in the plants, delivery and supply will execute their required activities in the most effective manner.
• The overall supply chain of raw materials, to delivery, the cost, the environmental impact, and how to minimize energy costs.

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

So the question of where do I start designing a system for 2020 a beyond, leads to all three of the above aspects of requirements, but of the three aspects of consideration above, the “operational state” is the one that least understood and probably the biggest impact. The opportunity of significant improvement and gain is in the “Operational Workspace” at the operational layer across multiple facilities. Based around the “activities” a role executes decisions in real-time with consistent actions across a range of workers in that role in different plants.

In defining the future “Operational Workspace” of an industrial landscape there are two key activities that need to defined:

• Define the “Operational Activities”: across the value supply chain, looking at each step of manufacturing and delivery. As these activities are captured look to determine a common set of “activities” that can be applied across the sites. It is important to have a defined set of work/ operational processes from which people execute, and then look to embed these processes in a sustainable manner so that they can evolve over time. The diagrams below show the importance of a framework for operational process and how these contribute to the site operational activities, based on what Toyota has applied.

Embedding these operational procedures is important so that consistency across sites, teams, and the dynamic workforce is achieved and sustained. The diagram below from ARC shows the impact of companies building standards and the difference in the long term if they are not embedded to become part of “Operational Workspace”.

• Define the roles in the new operational workspace: how they will work. 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 “activities” that role is responsible for, and who and what he/she 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 “activities” and responsibilities during the day is defined, this drives what information, systems and people this role must interact with in a day. By understanding how a role will work in his/her day e.g. if he/she will be located at a plant or roaming, the way that the role will engage with the operational workspace will become clear as well as the role of such technologies of mobile, cellular networks vs. wireless infrastructure, etc. For a particular activity, the role may be notified using one device, but actually executing the role may need to go to a different device based on the requirement for the activity’s execution. When looking at the role, also understand the expected experience in executing the activity, or the site awareness, potential age (e.g. Gen Y- are they experts providing support), etc. as this effects the design of the most effective operational environment.

This role map is key as now you have a starting point, as to driving consistency in a dynamically changing workforce. These role maps are then combined, 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 complement 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.

Initially focusing on a role or set of key roles allows the company to gain an approach on how the operational plant will run in 2020 and the key decisions / activities 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 that the discussion is independent of technologies; my assumption on mobile and Cloud that the architecture is set up so that these activities will be able to execute independently of the device, so that the adoption of what devices are used on a plant are relative to the plant and the support that they get. The key is the devices, no matter if desktop or mobile or web, should be suited to efficiency of the role execution.

This approach defines the “Operational Workspace” with roles and activities in a defined framework applied across the industrial landscape of the required value chain for delivering products in a timely manner to desired markets. Optimizing these processes and procedures lowers the cost of materials, wastage, and energy, and maximize the utilization of available capacity.