A Culture of Empowerment: Problem Solving at Source

 As we observe the world around us change, and more and more the focus shifts to a “new way to operationally work”, we see leading thought companies start introducing innovations in their culture.

One of these we now seen in two leading manufacturing companies who are shifting to the “New World of Work” and introducing not just technology but key cultural changes. One of these is the “Empowerment Culture” one of the strategies these companies is shifting the problem solving to the source.

This overcomes the delays in decisions through having decisions go up the tree by increasing the skill of the workers closer to action, and empowering them to be able to make decisions. This means skill development, embedding knowledge and experience in the system to help facilitate the correct timely decision.

The diagram below shows the structure

This allows the different levels, roles, and time horizons to focus on their problem solving optimizing the overall operational agility.

The “edge” worker on the front line is performing situational problem solving relative to production and asset at the NOW.

The plant supervisor have a wider time horizon of hours, and is looking at the plan, and adjusting thru “Systemic” thinking.

While management is then left with the bigger picture of strategic thinking, and problem solving, setting the overall direction.

Now if all decisions came to management they would be ‘firefighting” not free to think strategically and often the decisions would be delayed effecting production, efficiency and safety.

How Real are we Treating the State of Connectivity in Your Operations relative to Success of the Business?

Control over your business across different sites, the supply chain, and targeted markets is key to survival. Control ensures that you are delivering the correct “Rights” in order to maintain the “shelf space” therefore access to the customers and market position and potential growth.

But as time moves forward the requirement for control over a wider value chain, and tighter control is key, and becoming critical. This directly relates to the “connectivity” within your business especially over the “value chain” including supply chain, manufacturing/ production, and then distribution. With increased regulations set by government, or the public/ market, brand integrity is core as brand loyalty has gone.

Consistency in decisions, consistency in actions, real-time awareness drives the operational world towards “self aware” production, and “self Aware” products that enable the timely awareness and action.

Connectivity means real-time alignment between People at all levels, with focus, and the value chain assets relative to their current production/ operation. The diagram below shows how the world is changing how control is becoming key, yet if connectivity and that means not data but “knowledge” and "Wisdom" is key.

Will you let opportunities pass, due to un-awareness, or the inability to be agile even if you do have the data, can you act on it with the current operational systems or operational culture?

In mining, oil and Gas we seeing strategies with the “integrated operational centers” to take a paradigm shift in the operational connectivity between the key functions like planning, experts and operational control over multiple assets by putting them in a common room. No longer is it a call, or meeting, in real-time people can cross the room and talk, review each others situation, call small adhoc decision meetings. The returns have been significant, when you then combine this with “trusted data” and total transparency in real-time in context across the Value Chain decisions can be made.

Take that one step further with a “self aware” system, that knows what it is meant to be doing, at what efficiency and safety level, and can see into immediate operational future through embedded simulation, that the system can draw awareness to critical decisions that can be acted on. If the system knows the collaboration it requires to move to a resolution and maintain operational continuity then it can interact with other systems, key people in real time with the correct context of their contribution.

Can we not deliver this, can we competitive without connectivity?

Multiplying Value of Expert Community interacting with the Multiple Operational Team

Last week I talked about harnessing the experienced community for knowledge management, the concept enablement to contribute through "crowd source". This week I would like to expand the concept with the virtual expert team and how critical enabling this community of knowledge and experience to be empowered to work in real time with the plant, operational staff, enabling real-time decisions.

In January we introduced the operational landscape in 2020, where projected tenures in roles or locations to be below 2.4 years, (I believe will be less than this in many areas). The other notable observation was that 1 in 3 of the workforce will be in project work vs. careers, temporarily engaged to supply expertise and skill to a project, or situation. Giving rise to a "vacuum" knowledge effect when they leave, often causing an uncertainty, lack of confidence in making decisions.

Introducing the challenges of enabling decisions, with lack of experience.

Companies talk about their experts either in the company or in partners, who are stretched and how they keep "taking the expert to the problem" and the need to transition to "taking the problem to expert".

During the last two weeks I have been engaged with a couple of large distributed projects, in environments where there is 20% turn over of expertise from trade’s people, operational, maintenance, process experts and staff. The growth in companies investigating or implementing "operational centers" is indicative of the challenge as the experts can be located in a central location, and interact with multiple sites. In theory, this works, in practice the challenge is the expert could be on site, could be traveling, and often in order to retain the expert he must be able to contribute in a location of their choice.

Companies are also looking to multiply the value from these experts requiring they are not restricted to only contributing to their local plant, or teams. As companies look to align and manage the end to end value chain these experts could be in  operations, planning, maintenance, engineering, process, IT, control quality, etc., become critical assets.

The concept of significantly reducing the "time to performance/ expertise" is key built on a number of foundational approaches, all possible today:

1/ Knowledge systems that enable natural contribution with knowledge management to gather value and maintain the value leveraging technologies that harness "crowd sourcing", of the expert community.

2/Embedding of operational processes shifting to "intelligent work" with context information for declines and recommended actions all associated in the work item. Gathering these operational best practices from the experts, at all levels in the company and embedding into the operational system for consistent behavior to situations.

3/ Virtual expert communities that can be notified in real-time, access status and information in consistent and trusted context. Viewing the same information as the plant operational staff, but being able to apply their own analysis, experience and expertise to share with the plant operational workers for decisions. Key is the expert is working from where ever he is, on what ever device, and can collaborate, share and contribute. The expert could be in a company or a supply, but is part of the "virtual trusted expert" community seeing only the information they need, to be easily accessible to the plant user, and no effort to access.

So as a situation develops, a plant worker can focus on that situation, and see all the real virtual experts for that situation who are on line and their skill. They can chat, they can share, by dragging and dropping, and they can talk, all in a couple of key strikes or gestures. This collaboration must be natural, combined with core trust of the expert, and system that the advice from the expert is relevant to the current situation. Also, the ability to call on the knowledge system for like situations and draw information easily.

Now the experts are contributing to multiple sites, and situations without traveling and contributing to knowledge capture at the same time. This whole concept is paradigm shift in knowledge and expertise, but is the foundation for companies to be able accommodate this transitional operational landscape.