As Sunday draws to a close, I sit out looking over to pacific
the waves crash, and birds fly, it is my time of reflection.
Last week I talked about some of the observations from the
last month on the road. But this week I debated with a number of thought
leaders and we all aligned on the challenge of a dynamic workforce, and dynamic
operational/ business environment, means that chance of “Lights out Manufacturing
“ are slim.
One company I was engaged with last week their thought
pattern was still about replacing the personal on the plant, going to total
automation. While I agree with automation, it is required for consistently and velocity
of production. But I struggle with agility.
Two days latter I was at another company and they were all
about empowerment of people, they wanted to automate process, and operations to
free up people to add complimentary agility and “out of the box” thinking. As one C level said to me, our market is
changing as fast as we ever seen, and
Stepping back and looking at both these companies the second
company was more automated than the first and the second was investing in
automation more than the first. But their attitude was to gain consistently and
free up people from repeatable tasks, and increase the responsibility of
people, and empower people to make decisions fast.
The diagram below really depicts what I started to introduce
last week, and what this second company believed in.
That they needed to design their systems and people to play “natively
in the dynamic world”, and they have realized that “embedded Intelligence and
knowledge” will be key and must grow proportionally with increasing data. They
also realized that with agility comes the changing operational environment and
situations which will require “augmented intelligence” with the human brain can
work out. The key thinkers in the industry are not looking to dependency on 1
to 2 people, they are leveraging the concept of “crowd sourcing” thru a active community
of people. As we look at the operational/ automation world of the future the
key pillars will be:
- Ability to capture knowledge and intelligence into the system to automate process, and operations. Key is this is not just traditional automation in PLCs/ DCS etc, it is capturing repeatable knowledge and decisions. So the system must bread a culture of contribution and use natively.
- Ability to have a community of workers who can share collaborated “naturally” with ease, no matter the location of the users and state. Foundational to this is the ability trust the information, the measures so a common understanding of the situation, and basis for decision can be made.
Leading to natural decisions, and action
paradigm across the team as seen below. I will expand on this more next week.
No comments:
Post a Comment