Help Operators move from “Coping” to beyond “Optimizing”

This is a great blog from Stan DeVries, really opening some of the challenge thinking.

"A recent meeting with a customer discussed the best practices for centralized control rooms and integrated operations centers.  They summarized 4 levels of operator performance:

•         Coping
•          Aligning
•          Optimizing
•          Stretching

While the focus of the meeting was on optimizing, the customer pointed out that we must enable the newer operators who begin by “coping”.  It is worthwhile to consider the differences between these 4 levels:

•         Coping requires high concentration on operations activity and events, where the operator has little flexibility to adapt to teamwork with other operators.  The operator has been qualified to work in a centralized control room or integrated operations center, but they have difficulty to maintain pace.
•   Aligning requires moderate concentration, where the operator can safely and reliably adapt to most of the teamwork activity, but reaching team targets is still difficult, such as value chain efficiency or throughput.
•   Optimizing requires a different type of concentration, where the operator has learned how to cope and how to align, but now the operator focuses on achieving the team targets, and the targets change periodically – in some industries (e.g. power generation and natural gas liquids processing) the targets change every 15 minutes.
•   Stretching is achieved by “error free” operators who have learned how to beat the optimization targets.

The key question is how can operators achieve and sustain best performance?  A quick answer is more training, but too often the training paradigm isn’t adequate.  Best practices have shown that the effective method is treating the targets like a game, and applying newer visualization to support it.  Before we look at any example of a “game” or possible visualization, we need to consider the innovation in the training approach:

•          Training becomes holistic – the students learn about how to perform in team settings
•          Training moves beyond the classroom – classroom training is essential, but structured on-         the-job training becomes very important
•          Operator performance becomes less “private” – team performance is visible and shared.

So what can the new training experience feel like?  Consider an example which has been published in regional industry conferences, where the initial focus was optimizing energy across multiple sites and all operating shifts:

The dark blue diamonds is hourly efficiency performance over a wide range of throughput, across all sites and all shifts.  The magenta squares are the result of one month of teamwork, and the yellow triangles are the results after two months.  Please observe a few key characteristics of this experience:

• Very dynamic operating conditions
• “Blind” presentation – operator names are not shown
• Graphical context – instead of bar or gauge displays, operators see how their performance compares with others.

The operator is given other detailed displays both during training and for normal operation, but the exercise is focused on teamwork.  Consider the significant improvement in the above displays."

Happy Marty McFly Day : How much did come true or past?

This post by Morris Miselowski sparked fun and interest:
http://businessfuturist.com/time-travel-comes-true-this-wednesday-backtothefuturepart2-various-radio-stations/

"In 23 minutes and 8 seconds, I need you to look out your window and see if you can spot Back to the Future 2's DeLorean flying car with Marty McFly on board as it lands from its journey from 1989 to the future - today Wednesday 21st October 2015.

What will he find, what will have changed and what will he think of the changes he sees?

Despite the fact we don’t quite yet have hoverboards and DeLorean flying cars, fuelled with rubbish turned into nuclear fission there are lots of things that are predicted in the 1985 film that have come about.

Here’s the stuff that’s come true:

• Flat screen TV’s
• Video conferencing
• Fingerprint biometrics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Voice activated and responsive technology
• Hydroponics
• Brain controlled / wireless video games
• Handheld tablets
• Wearable technology
• Holographic displays
• Visual Displays
• Drones
• Bionic Implants

and here’s some that’s almost come true:

• Hover boards – although there are some versions of boards that might be called hover boards
• Self-lacing shoes – although Nike took out a patent on this tech and is suspected to release a version for next week’s anniversary
• Turning garbage into fuel – we can do and have done it for 30 years, but not with cold fusion
• Pepsi Perfect -although Pepsi is said to be releasing a limited edition for next week
• Automated fuelling is being trialled now by Tesla and others
• Stationery exercise bike at cafes – but we are very sports and health conscience
• Flying cars – we have them but just can’t use them
• Fax machines @ all phone booths – this if of course past tech, but it did infer an internet of sorts would be in existence
• Rejuvenation masks

No surprise, I love this movie. It’s a seminal Hollywood moment that changed my career and life and nostalgically I’ve travelled the last  30 years alongside Marty McFly and the DeLorean into the future.

It’s also one of the movie’s that sparked our curiosity about what’s next and is the source of the two questions I get asked most often – where’s my hoverboard and where’s my flying car?

It also shows how wildly our life changes in such a short period of time.

In 1985 it would have been impossible to believe that the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union would collapse. South Africa apartheid would end. A terrorist attack would fell the World Trade Centre. That 4 billion and growing smart phones would inhabit the world. That snail mail would have given way to digital mail. That the word Google would be used so readily in everyday conversation. That sharing our most intimate thoughts and actions online in social media would be so ordinary. That cures and treatments for many diseases including AIDS would have been found and that China would be on target to become an economic superpower."


While the industrial sector does not move as fast, it has transformed since 1985 from the first generation PLCs, and now you see operational interaction, decisions faster, and across the globe manufacturing value chains.
Time is getting shorter with product runs, and decisions.

Span of Awareness, Scope of Operation (Responsibility)!!!!

These are terms and concepts that will become a normal wording when defining the new paradigms in Operational Experience of the “Distributed Multi Point Operational Landscapes”.

Two weeks I posted “The Changing Landscape of Supervisory System from HMI, CCR to “Distributed Multi Point Operational Landscapes”, and there was a significant interest, and questions (on email as normal), so I thought I continue to answer some of the topics.  For the last couple of weeks I have been involved in a number of projects that these concepts are having to sorted and defined, in order to complete the design.

So let’s clarify what we mean:

Span of Awareness:

Span of Awareness is relative to what a user / worker is exposed to, this means through the device (control room, mobile phone, tablet, remote station etc) and notification systems he is logged on too, now that the systems are becoming “self-aware”.  Traditionally the worker has only been aware of the equipment and process states that his UI could show but today this is changing to a worker/ member of the “operational team” being notified when the situation of the process is in an abnormal state, and the worker could contribute to resolution.

The concept of “always being connected” now applies to the industrial landscape, and with virtual operational team members being key to modern actionable decision chain.

Scope of Operation (Responsibility):

Scope of responsibility relates to what a work is assign, what “activities” that fall under the workers responsibility at this time. Based upon location, what the worker logs onto, or passed what activities (tasks) to perform, the system must be aware, and provide the worker with first up awareness, and then responsibility. Key is workers, responsibility and activities can vary from day to day, the system must handle this. Scope of Responsibility is very important when managing alarms, as the initial response needs to assigned to the correct user, this maybe not a station.

This is a new dynamic in the distributed supervisory solutions, where the no longer can you design responsibility of control to a station, as what is a station? A responsible user could be on a mobile devices, logon to a fixed station in the system, and drill into a situation and take an action, but that station could not at the location, or temporarily manned.

Operational Windows Enable are a basis for Operational Management Experience (IOC)

I have talked about the drive by many companies to reduce “Operational Variation” across plants, teams, and industries. This is core to the journey to "operation excellence" gaining consistency, awareness and early detection of situations. When you look at the table below on the levels of human operational automation, the drive of the integrated operational experience is trying to reach level 5 "Worker management by exception", a big part of this is awareness of current operational process status relative to optimum.   

There are many ways that operational control will be implemented, as pointed out it could be through actions and processes becoming embedded and certainly this will be the big driver in the road to “Operational Innovation”.

But another way is through displaying key operational indicators to a knowledge worker, where  these indicators are mapped within boundary conditions. These boundaries are set up based on the time and relevance to the role and activity/ task the knowledge worker is performing. This sort of “operating Window” enables the knowledge worker the context, and recommendations, knowledge to enable operational decisions in a timely and ever consistent way. This same operational window can be used over multiple sites/ and teams for that role and activity providing consistency control.

The figure below is an example of an operational window.

Where on the left you can see the operational running trend, but you can see the changing boundary conditions of operation based upon product etc., The green shows the area where optimum control, safety, and production performance is. The right hand side you have reasons, and number instances of deviations for periods out of operational control.

Placing this sort of operational window where the operational boundaries come from the business strategy but in context of the role and activity no matter where in the plant operational team, but the feedback and running side is real-time from the plant. This window is place adjacent to  current control/ HMI screens the operator is using, or the maintenance or process screens the users are working, and you start the transformation to a knowledge worker.