Why is the (Level 2-3) platform key to the future state?

I seem to end up in many discussions between IT/OT, the convergence that is required in order to achieve today’s agility. It is really is the transition of existing operational / business systems from “open Loop” to “Closed Loop”. For many of us from the control world this is just extending the “closed loop” control approaches to the supervisory/ operational architectures, but with longer periods.

Imagining the possible – if we didn’t have the burden of IT legacy

For years organization, IT infra structure/ architecture have caused silos, and boundaries to be set up between departments and different levels in an organization. The IT/ OT convergence of has been driving to integrate or break these down, but too often it is gluing the existing structure and with this comes a lot of the limitations of the original structure.

Many IT systems have institutionalized the “pyramid and boxes” design…along with its fundamental design flaws that are at the root cause of our integration challenges. The different streams have different time, different context, different language. This drives the glue to how to map these different context/ time slices etc.

Imagine if we took a different approach of “integrated digital streams” aligned centered on the product/ service for the customer/ market. Imagine if you could have a system as shown below:

From static silos of data (low-res snapshots) to integrated digital streams (high-res movies), where the streams of data are aligned , captured for one goal of competitive delivery. 

This requires a different thinking to the traditional IT, and too often when engaging customers they are struggling with gaining this operational agility, often hamstrung by the traditional organization/ and It structures. 

The diagram above provides a vision of if we were freed to think of solutions outside today's boundaries.

Operational Continuity Foundation is Rapid / Early Decisions by Systems and People.

I was involved in an interview last week for an article in a magazine, like so many of these we had an expectation of the subject the editor wanted but as started it was clear that subject and expectations where different. Basically the editor wanted to understand about “big data” being applied in a particular industry, again it was someone with a technology concept the market is throwing about vs really understanding the business / operational challenge the industry is facing.

It did not take long for us to evolve the conversation into the number the main things companies must harness:

• Operational Continuity: Maintaining their producing plants at the maximum output, with greatest efficiency, and best product margin
• Agility: to supply the market with the correct product at the right quality, and right price and the right time in an every dynamic market
• Asset Management/ Utilization: This is both fixed, mobile capital assets (non breathing assets, such as plants, trucks, ships) and the human assets (breathing assets). We find that as globalization increases the buying and selling of capital assets increasingly happen, introducing of challenge of  how do incorporate existing systems, automation, and practices into your overall value chain to provide the above “Operational Continuity” and “Agility”. Same when the asset is sold how you dis engage it cleanly especially with IP in the products and process. Combine this with the dynamic Human Asset landscape where human assets are moving regularly between plants and locations. Causing on a site not to have the required experience to make decisions, but people are in a role of having to make the decisions. YES the asset world for both capital assets and human assets is shifting form traditional stability in both classes for the last 20 years to one of both dynamic.

This comes back to conversation I started last week around “Achieving Consistent and Right Results in an Agile World” and the need for systems that have both:

• Embedded knowledge and experience: key in this system is have a culture and system that naturally enables knowledge to captured and arranged, managed to be current and while native consumption of this knowledge is simple.
• Augmented Collaboration of Experience: That in this dynamic world the need for a community of human assets of different experience in role and locations to contribute naturally to a decision in real time, augmenting the embedded knowledge. 

This calls for a system that enables people and systems, all of different levels of capability, and experience to work in coordinated way to reach a decision and act. The above diagram is a simple one of the core items of Action orientated Augmentation system.

Unconditional to success is:

• Detect the situation requiring attention as early as possible, pin pointing the location and cause as best as we can. The traditional alarm, “as is” is too late. This does not apply just to process situations but also operational/ supply chain situations that effect “Operational Continuity”.
• Understanding: This means the right person, or people, or system is notified with the required context of the situation. To often transitional systems are application based, so you alarm to control room, or SCADA system. There needs to shift to notify to people and roles, with acknowledgement of acceptance so that correct people are investigating and acting. Yes this will mean systems require unique logons, and shift to named users as people will be connected more, across applications and devices, and accountability in a team situation is fundamental so tasks do not get dropped. But core to understanding is the ability not to be just notified but to investigate, from the provided context the situation based on the workers experience, to collaborate fast with peers, and contribute an opinion.
• Decide: Based on the incoming opinions from systems, and people, and raid decision can be determined based upon experience, knowledge, and technology. The decision could be made by a system or person based upon the inputs.
• Actions: The appropriate actions and process to resolution can then taken across people (one or many) and across systems.

All the way along the system will rapidly manage the process of detect, understand, decide and act, and then track the success and increase the embedded knowledge. 

This is not a question of a new technology like "big data" it is about having a framework that works across your operational landscape to empower people, and systems to leverage existing knowledge and experience to evolve the Operational Success of the company.

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?

Can we achieve the last mile of operational Excellence without IOT?

This question was posed to me last week, and it is a good one. The critical items is to understand what is operational excellence is trying to achieve to realized that it is journey and moving goal of effectiveness pushed by the market and technology. Like when you are riding a wave, you staying in front, and leveraging the wave to excel, otherwise it swallows you up.

Operational excellence is about:

• Agility to deliver products/ services to Customer/ market at the correct price, time and location
• The ability to rapidly introduce new innovation value to lead the market and open new markets
• The ability to enable sustainable innovation and value through effectively leveraging people, and technology.

The diagram below illustrates this, and I am sure some people will have different angles, but it is about leading the competitive edge.

But can you achieve this with the traditional approaches? I believe you can get to 60/ 70 % of the way with traditional approaches and current technologies, but that last mile needs a paradigm shift in “actionable decisions”. Agility requires timely decisions across a team, and consistency and timely actions associated with the decision across teams, roles etc.

A core concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is teams of things (devices, and people) interacting in an orchestrated manner to achieve an operational timely result. With devices being more “self-aware”, empowered to take actions, interacting with workers or other devices to move “work “to the next step.

This foundation of IoT and the orchestration of devices /people, timely knowledge, provides that much needed paradigm shift to enable that last mile on the above operational excellence journey. The constant discovery of new capabilities, and knowledge through big data techniques, the ever increasing lake of embedded knowledge lends it as the basis for companies to go on this Operational excellence journey, but with this is the required cultural evolution to continuous improvement and knowledge/ wisdom.

                                       Source ARC

The above IOT maturity model matches to Operational Excellence journey, especially on the stages of “smart, and autonomous” linking to the Operational Excellence stages of “Driving Business and Driving the Market”). Foundational to Operational Excellence is timely knowledge and procedures being delivered so actionable decisions can be taken in a consistent manner across plants, assets and people. The IoT principles provides the opportunity to deliver this knowledge, while abstracting the variability in plant, assets and experience levels of people.

To me the desire and programs being enabled at companies to take them down the operational excellence journey provides the cultural evolution needed combined with IoT to succeed and make IoT effective not just from technology but most of all business side

Operations Innovation & Transformation – Transformation from Plants to an Aligned Multi Plant Value Chain

Examples in refining with multiple refineries aligning from individual plants, to "mine to Port" in mining where assets / plants that traditionally ran in isolation are now being transformed into a an agile value chain to reduce the production runs, increase the agility to chain products proceed across the sites to satisfy the market. The move to integrated operational centers (IOC)s is just one step, where planning and operations come into same environment to increase communication. 

The 4 quadrants described in the article “Operations Innovation & Transformation – the 4 Types” positions the upper left quadrant as a strategy for using a “value chain” of physical assets in a new way.

In this quadrant, a group of similar industrial operations (2 or more) adapt their performance objectives, business processes and accompanying hiring and information strategies to optimize the “value chain”.  The move is to unifying the industrial enterprise over multiple sites (in groups or as a whole), with a more holistic view in terms of operating strategy and performance management.

This innovation can be limited by the dynamic and range flexibility of some of the operations, but several corporations have achieved success with this.  One example is seasonal competitiveness, where the “chain” collaborates to achieve maximum throughput during the high demand season and maximum efficiency during the low demand season (efficiency and throughput interact differently across different groups of industries).  Another example is short-term business continuity, where the “chain” collaborates to exploit a supply or demand opportunity, or they collaborate to minimize the business impact of a supply chain problem, such as a major customer unplanned outage.  They all adapt their operations to meet a shared performance objective, such as yield or efficiency.

A key method used to sustain this strategy is operations-level feed-forward and feedback, with workflow for collaboration.  This doesn’t violate or compete with established business processes for planning, scheduling or other elements of supply chain management – in fact these strategies and business processes must work closely together.

This is a significant step beyond scorecards, dashboards or rigid workflows.  The following 2 examples show how real-time performance measures (different from traditional KPI’s) and proactive procedural automation sustain this differentiation:

·         A “value chain” of related industrial operations (one of the operations provides fuel and raw material to another) have some dynamic and range flexibility to “pace” together.  When a downstream site must slow down, the upstream site adapts its throughput of the entire site or the affected products during the duration of the slowdown.  As soon as the slowdown has ended, both sites resume their scheduled throughput and yield targets.

• Coordinators (different industries have different names for this function) use workflows to negotiate short-term upcoming changes in demand and the operating shift and the coordinators use the same visual demand, using a “tram line” display.  Information to the right of the center dashed line is forecast and planned.

The benefits include significant reductions in energy (excess energy is required to restore the high pressures and temperatures) and reductions in rework or waste.  Conventional equipment protection strategies aren’t adaptive and they are designed to handle the most extreme conditions, which is focused on safe interruption of operations.  Value-chain management focuses on safe continuity – both are valuable and necessary.

•       A “value chain” of related industrial operations (one of the operations provides fuel and raw material to another) have some dynamic and range flexibility to optimize the processing and use of fuels and raw materials in the downstream operations, such as the following example in petrochemicals and specialty chemicals.

Activities Behavior Starts to become Reality
As I flex back from South Africa last week I was listening to an interview on innovation, and there was interview with Microsoft Manager for Australia, and she talked about the change in culture they have implemented in the Australian offices. Switching to Activity based officers meaning that no one has a permanent seat or desk, you go in a morning and select a desk based upon the activity you are doing that day. As you may be on the road, you may be do activities that do not need you in the office, you maybe at other offices. She talked about it as a significant change in culture but it allows agility and focus to adapt your day and role based upon activities not a role.
This is the same I see in my own life and how I have discussed realtive to the Flexible Operational Team in the industrial space, these can only be achieved when people and the culture support an Activity Based thinking and Approach. In South Africa last week, I continued to see the evolution towards this thinking in mining, and food and beverage as I spoke with customers, many do not realise they on this path, yet their actions and ideas are heading in this direction.

This is no different in my life every day, I talk about my work life being in my back pack, with my lap top, IPad, mobile cell, and mobile  wireless hotspot. Based upon the activities I have that day, meetings, calls, site visits, PowerPoint presentation preparations, technology knowledge catch up, interviews,  strategy brainstorming, these are distinct activities require different modes of thinking, I choose the best environment and location for doing these.

This is very different to the way I worked 10 to 15 years ago in an office and defined role, today my activities and role change daily based on the situation and achieving our business goals and the contribution I can make each day to that, certainly my agility, and effective working time and delivery has increased.

This is the same for the industrial world and the changing approach I am seeing in the industrial place, where companies are going to the Flexible Operational Team, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, can only be truly achieved when people are working against activities vs roles. Key to evolution is that there will be a management of activities, both planned and reactionary, which will be acted upon by the best person, or team in order to respond as fast as possible. This does not mean that people are assigned to a certain interface/ roles,  they should be able to go to best location in the plant in order to execute that activity. This is why the whole operational control is evolving to a an aligned set of systems, that allow people to access, understand and take action in the most effective place possible.

 I was in South Africa at the annual conference there, as usual I saw a lot of innovation, and thought leadership, building on what I have seen in Western Australia in the last 6 months. The big discussion was around effectively using the human asset, through "time to Experience shortening" knowledge access, and actions, and collberation.

 But you see this continued evolution from:

Applications        to        Roles        to         Activities

Activities require a change in thinking:

·         How align information and actions from different systems to enable a co-ordinated and assignable activity.

·         How the UI changes to activities with the information, ability drill and understand and then the associated actions, which may require multiple people and certain procedure.

·         Plus a culture that allows roles and people to be flexible to take on different activities in a must more agile process.

I will expect to see this activity thinking and approach accelerating over the next year but as I have said this means aligned systems, access, and contextualization in order to make it fully effective.  

The User Interface is Evolving from User Interface Application to Role centric and now Activity centric!!

As discussed two weeks ago this is NOW not the case, a “day in the life” of a role in the plant, (e.g. process engineer, maintenance engineer, operator) today is transient in state. Today the knowledge worker in order to execute the activity they are responsible are often required to move  out from one state, say the control room, to a local operator station, then maybe mobile. Same can happen for other roles where they are still responsible for an activity or supporting the activity when they leave the plant, so may need mobile awareness, and interaction through the web.

This has shifted people to think that we should be designing the User Interface not based on App User Interface applications but based on role.

But in the last year there has been a shift beyond this to “Activity” based, this is significant move. Meaning that operational activities with their intelligence/ information and actions need to designed so that can execute on all User Interfaces (desktop and roaming devices). The change is that due to a workers location, and plant situation the worker may have to take on new activities which are typically outside of their defined role. Matching the growing demand for agility in operational roles.

But as discussed last week the requirement for natural training and certification becomes more critical, as a worker may take on an activity due to location, and they have not performed this activity for a while so the worker must be able access an online instruction, and sign off any required training before executing the activity. When I talk about this concept people say "this is not real, what about liability?" valid question. There are many activities that can performed in a timely manner that will reduce risk to safety , environment and therefore operational continuity. Yes it is key for the worker to be able to go through an online training and certification, the system will record all actions or audit.The worker may select a “best operational practice” and the system will guide the worker through the steps, with instructions to successfully execute the activity.

So I encourage to start thinking of Operational interfaces as an interface to execute Operational activities, and what would be the “day in life” of those who would typically responsible for it.

As we move forward with evolving the User Interfaces from Invensys, expect to see more and more collaboration services which start to deliver this activity based operational interaction. But today everything I have talked about here is possible with the current tools. 

Next week I will expand on a real situation of this evolution in an Upstream Scenario...

Traditional User Interfaces have been thought of as applications, e.g. InTouch, Suite Voyager, etc., we have seen people and vendors start moving to Role based, but today the Thought Leaders are going to Activity Based, What does this mean?

Traditionally we in product development / marketing no matter what company I have worked for, we have thought about functionality relative to User Interface products, e.g.  InTouch, Information Server, Fox View etc., this was correct for the time as roles in a plant tended to be dedicated to one type of user interface and we satisfied this market by delivering a particular user interface product.

The Perfect Storm in Industrial Operations = People Excellence

The most significant disruption in operational strategy thinking is happening in this post GFC (global financial crisis) era, in determining an operational execution environment enabling timely contributions by the operational team to plant execution. The focus is on currently on operational processes, but quickly this will drive a new operational experience to go with a new operational execution plan. Traditional user interfaces will not “cut” it both in products, or the way they have been implemented. Let me expand on my thoughts on this operational experience, which I refer to as “People Excellence” driving a new paradigm of operational empowerment for all roles in plant operations.