Operational Practices, the associated activities, then impact on Roles provides the path towards Operational Excellence Design

Again the last 2 weeks in the USA speaking with customers the question of how they move forward towards 2020 where do we start. Too often I see people start from the easy place that of technologies and products, vs really understanding where they want to be in 2020/25. How will their run their plants, and operational practices across sites and supply chain at all levels is key. Once you know the operational processes you can determine the operational activities and effect on the roles in the company at that time, this will lead to the required solutions.

Companies have invested and executed on the tradition alignment in a plant across process systems, and business systems such as SAP, leveraging such guidelines as ISA 95. With the drive towards more and more agility and rapid deployment of products to markets, these alignments are key, but the other area of critical concern is the operational workplace. With the rapid agility, comes more alignment, and more complexity, combined with key / rapid decisions to be made, the operational team, and operational workspace will be critical. Combine this with the facts that over 10000 experienced baby boomers are retiring each week, and this rate is expected to continue for seventeen years, and that by 2020 the 42 workforce is expected to made up 42+%  

So where do you start when planning to design a 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.

A New Approach is Required to Enable It/OT, with Information Driven Systems!

Two weeks ago I wrote about IT/OT convergence, and some thoughts, while the convergence has been happening for years. It seems only lately that we running into the significant step of changing the organization from tradition structures to a modern / new generation Operational IT approach. But the interest in that blog post was significant, with many hits, and many direct emails on ideas, comments.

The fact that 4 significant companies I have visited lately that we find that the head of the traditional IT team, and strategy is someone from Operations, with limited traditional IT experience, but huge amount of Operational and Business experience. The strategies are now not about the technology they lead by an business/ operational value, and how do deliver solutions fast, and efficiently, with technology and systems that are sustainable, and evolutionary.

In the information driven space this is giving rise to a different approach:

OT/IT Convergence “What does it mean in the Industrial World?”

The convergence of Operational Technology and Information Technology is nothing new, it has been front and center certainly since early 2000. Where the Y2K challenge brought awareness in many organizations, how much server, IT like capabilities reside in the industrial automation/ operational landscape. But in the last 3 months I must have been pulled into 10+ workshops, sessions with companies where OT/IT convergence has been the leading point of the discussion. Determining how they are developing strategies to adopt, leverage the opportunity.

The diagram below shows a high level approach to how to “bridge” the different objectives of the two cultures of IT/OT. The success is not one taking over the other but the merger to achieve the combined value and objective. 

It is important to note that it is not a trend it is an opportunity due to evolution of technologies from IT/and OT that synergies and alignments are possible to provide opportunities too:

• ·         Increase operational and business alignment in real time
• ·         To alignment business across multiple plants and value chain
• ·         To accommodate the empowerment of knowledge workers through a combination of connected and mobile devices.
• ·         To leverage IT and Operational efficiency through common services, capability
• ·         To address growing demand of Operational Management, that has out grown the tradition OT capabilities and methods. Only a step change by leveraging capabilities in IT, with existing OT/automation capabilities will the requirements be satisfied.

The companies I have seen successful have also understood that a new culture is required and have formed a “Product IT” team composed of IT and Automation/operational people. This brings the critical understanding and cross learning so the above “bridging” strategies are a combined experience strategy.

Companies that determine where they want to be understand the critical nature of multiple platforms at different levels of the architecture, but “loosely coupled, but tight alignment” between them is key. Platforms are key to a sustainable architecture that allows agility over different plants and different work forces and processes.  

I will continue this discussion in the coming weeks as this topic is becoming fundamental to success of traversing the “operational transformation”.