Regulation Drives Companies to “Paperless” system, but they Need to Integrated

Regulation is a growing principle required in solutions. The growing demand is coming from increased government regulations on industry around environmental impact, or trace-ability, really driving “Accountability” for actions and being able to determine history fast. Not all the drive is coming from government regulation requirements, in many industries it is being driven by the consumer as a value differentiator for the products.

So we are seeing investments in serialization systems in Life Science and Food and Bev, which extend the existing packaging lines, and are integrated to MES and ERP systems.

But the area that is interesting to me is not this section it is the implementation of “paperless strategies” removing the “clipboard” and replacing it with some forms based software. I have reviewed 3 of these systems, that are driving consistency in capturing of information. Within built rules that drive the user to capture the required points, take the required actions in order to satisfy the particular regulation or combination of regulations required for shipping that product.

While the shift to “paperless” has been a goal for a long while and people have headed down this when implementing a MES (Manufacturing Execution System), this is logical as the drive to paper less in integrated to operational events and practices. Providing an end to end trace-ability, and view into the manufacturing history of the solution.  

What concerns me what I started to see in Oil and Gas, Mining, F & B is these isolated event/ forms capturing systems that are put in isolated from the production/ operations system. Yes they may have some events and points integrated but the procedures are not an extension of the operational system. The captured data is in isolation of from operational/ production data, it should be captured along with the production records of what materials were consumed, who was operating the machine, and what product was going thru the system.

We seeing in the integrated solutions, the tradition operational/ mes system, being extended with a Business Process Modeling system, introducing workflows that can be configured to be triggered from the real time operational systems at Scada/ DCS or at the operational levels. Driving the capture, check, validation of process data boundary violation, or required capture to align with “inspection requirements “ from the ERP. The workflows natively interact between the systems, just extending the process operational processes but provide forms to drive intuitive actions, and capture. 

The most important part is that these are extendable and customization so that your companies capabilities, uniqueness can be captured as “best practices”. Most of all these are not separate systems they native extensions of the MES/ Supervisory automation, Quality applications driving the results and information back into the consistent repository.

So as you look going paperless, avoid doing it in isolation of the other systems, it must be extension, so that the operational process and practices from execution, to quality process, and process management, and extended with regulation requirement in a native way both from an operational experience process as well as data / information integration.

Accountability Theme Growing in the Industrial Sector!

As the adoption of Flexible Integerated Operational Teams grow, the need to share/pass the execution of work items between team members becomes a requirement. Along with this is the growing theme of "accountability" in the industrial sector at all levels. The challenge with today's social media even email is you copy everyone, so they are all aware, but even this is changing as you need to address the owner of the next action in the "to" address, making it very clear and “accountable”.

Now apply this to operational teams, where the system generates an alarm the owner is the operator on duty, with the responsibility to acknowledge but how does he take action add this to work item list, that will be followed up and resolved:

·         By right clicking he generates a work item, the system prompts which person this is going to or group e.g.| maintenance, process etc, and the work flow will inform that person or group who "accepts ownership" and now they start executing. Already through that work items life time we have had two owners.

·         Now part way through this work item, the shift changes, and the work item appears on the shift handover report, and the new person on the next shift takes ownership of the total outstanding work items, so we have a third owner.

·         Now having completed 3 sub actions in that work item, the current owner, needs have a production department validate the test, so again the work item is reassigned to "production" and ownership stays with the maintenance team, until a particular person in "production" accepts. There is a clear passing and ownership, and accountability of work item.

·         So as, actions and records are captured the full trail to the work item resolution, including time to execute the work item and the action step times are logged and understood.

 

Is this new the answer is "no" plants must have a process for this today, usually paper and knowledge, but as the teams become more dynamic, the paper procedures need to come embedded in the system for consistent execution. Regulation from the market and governments require responsibility to be taken, and when actions are being executed remotely, and workers have more responsibility and work items, the chance of dropping (bot following up and resolving) work items grows.

The leading companies want their strategic targets effecting the targets/ KPIs of all the roles at different levels to be aligned so that as tuning of the strategy happens all people workers accept the change and start executing to that evolved strategy. This is different to a KPI system it is about aligning actions and targets downwards with transformation to local context.

Also leading companies are looking at the operational "day in the life" of their workers and finding two major items:

1/ increasing inconsistency in operational procedure execution from plant to plant, shift to shift, as the workforce transitions and people tenure in a role or location reduces.

2/ that only Approx 35% of work items executed by people on the plant floor are planned at the beginning of a day, the rest are ad hoc from "fire drill" plant actions.

 

Both of these factors have a dramatic effect on:

·         safety

·         regularity compliance

·         efficiency and costs, due to variation in procedure execution time and response action.

·         agility to react to changes in the market.

 

By embedding procedures companies can realize many Operational Goals in controlling their operations such as:

·         Alignment of strategy to all roles activities and targets as they can linked and transformed

·         Consistency in operational procedure execution, combined with the ability tune procedures as they can now monitor how long steps in work items take and improve them.

·          Awareness of outstanding work items, clear ownership providing the ability to increase the planned work in a workers day, so increased efficiency, less chance of safety incidents.

 

In the next week, I will introduce the concepts of operational work management, as a new trend to enable the above.

As plants transform to flexible Integrated Operational teams accountability, ownership, and awareness of outstanding work will become foundational.