Multi-site standards have to be economically viable, but Operational Value of standards is the driver vs IT requirement

While flexibility allows us to deal with the plant floor reality, it also comes at a cost and thus requires governance. This is typically where the IT and Engineering perspectives tend to clash:

1. Standardization (what Corporate IT desires): How to deploy “out-of-the-box” or packaged solutions that reduce risk and time-to-value in implementation across the plant sites? Increasingly Operational value is driving standards and platforms.
2. Flexibility (what Engineering desires): How to support the various customizations to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of the process within a plant site?

But with the growing demand for agility and ability to absorb new production plans, new product introduction with minimal impact to day to day operations. Combine this the ability to “accommodate variability” in automation systems often from different vendors across multiple plants, or equipment, as well variety in team skills, and experience. The implementation of platforms combined with standards provide the necessary abstraction to “accommodate” this variation. So move to standards is growing driven more from the operational continuity drive than IT (which drove it based upon cost of implementation and sustainability).

To solve the above two seemingly opposable expectations, large enterprise users of a platform use a Center of Excellence approach to centrally manage the template library while helping orchestrate each of the plant’s technology roadmap in a way that is aligned to their Continuous Improvement journey.

The illustration below maps (at a high-level) the governance process of how templates are created, maintained, and modified to support the rollout across a multi-plant standardization effort.

Many of the most successful companies driving standards, are now seeing the rewards and return through agility to absorb new plants into their organization, yet leverage the existing unique automation, plant floor systems.

But so many of them comment to that they learnt the hard way the need for governance, yet site collaboration to make the standards effective and adoption successful. Too many state building standards from the corporate center out seems logical, but in reality so much knowledge is in the field and the need for capturing that experience back into standards is key. Plus the shift with standards away from a project DNA to more of “product” life-cycle DNA is key.

The important learning is that standards are part of a program, they part of learning, but return is significant now not just IT point of view but from an “Operational side” and this is where the significant economical returns are seen through operational consistency, and agility. Understand that standards is a program, clear understand the required governance to succeed long term, and investment up front with the field so the standards will be adopted. Combine this with clear kpis to understand the reason why your implementation a platform and standards so the value can be measured for the long term, as this is a long term initiative that must enable sustainable innovation.